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The Sword and the Lotus 01-25Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Sword and the Lotus 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Buddha said, “Appa deepo bhava.” At the same time his disciples were saying, “Buddham Sharanam Gachchhami.” Is there any sequence in it?Once a great poet was asked by a critic, “Your poetry is beautiful, but it is full of contradictions. Do you have something to say about the contradictions?” What the poet said has to be remembered. He said, “I am vast enough to have contradictions in me.”I don’t know whether the critic could understand it or not but you have to understand it. Life is vast enough, it can exist with all the contradictions in it. In fact it cannot live without contradictions. There will be no life without death, there will be no light without darkness, there will be no love without hate, and there will be no men without women. Everything has its opposite. When you look through the eyes of pure logic it seems contradictory. When you look without any logic in your eyes, you see only complementaries; all contradictions prove to be complementaries.This statement of Gautam Buddha is one of the milestones in the history of human growth: Appa deepo bhava – be a light unto yourself. Nobody before him was courageous enough to say this. They were all trying to say, “We are the light, follow us. Be surrendered to us and whatever we say never doubt it.” These people were not really for human freedom, human integrity, they destroyed all self-respect in man, they reduced him to a slave, a spiritual slave.Gautam Buddha has brought a great revolution to the world. He says, “Be a light unto yourself” – because there is no other light. You are not to surrender to somebody because every surrender is slavery, and spiritual surrender is the greatest of all because it is so subtle. The chains are so invisible that you may never become aware of it, and the imprisonment is not something outside you, it is something imposed on the very being of your interiority. You are carrying your prison wherever you go, whatever you do.People were very angry against Gautam Buddha. It is a strange story that people become accustomed to their slavery too! So much so, that anybody who wants to make them free, it seems to them that he is their enemy.During the French revolution there was a great jail in France, the biggest jail in the whole country. It was meant only for those who were sentenced for their whole life. So they entered into the jail alive, but they came out only when they were dead.Their whole lives they had to live in dark cells with heavy chains on their feet, heavy chains on their hands. Even the keys of those jails were immediately thrown into a big well inside the jail, because the doors were not going to be opened: “These people will be out of the jail only when they are dead.”The revolutionaries thought about the jail. There were five thousand people in that jail, and they thought that if they could make all of them free they would be immensely grateful, immensely joyful. But they were in for a great surprise. People had lived there for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years…there was a man who had been there for sixty years! They had become so accustomed to the darkness of the cells that their eyes were no longer capable of coming into the light of the sun, and in a way they had accepted their fate.They had forgotten that they had wives, they had children, they had parents. They had even forgotten their faces – sixty years, and no hope to see them again. And in a certain way they were comfortable in this utter indignity because they had no worry about food, no worry about clothes, they had no need to work. They had lost all human touch; they had almost become animals.And then the French revolutionaries forced the door open and pulled the prisoners out into the inner compound. The prisoners said, “We don’t want to get free – what will we do in the outside world? We have forgotten the language. We don’t even remember the names of our families, we don’t know the address, where they are – whether they are alive or dead. And now at the age of eighty…sixty years in jail! Why are you unnecessarily torturing us? Where am I going to get my bread…my food and my clothes and shelter? We are absolutely okay…we need not worry about it.” The revolutionaries were not going to listen to them.Remember one thing: you cannot make anybody forcibly free! That is an impossibility. But that’s what the revolutionaries did. They forcibly cut their chains and threw them out against their will, out of the jail. By the evening almost three fourths of the prisoners were back, saying that they wanted to get back into their cells: they didn’t have any place to sleep, and they wanted their chains!That was something absolutely unimaginable. The revolutionaries asked, “Why do you want chains? We can understand you don’t have a place…. You can stay one night, then find some place, but why do you want the chains?”They said, “Those chains have been with us for so long, they have almost become part of our bodies. We cannot sleep without them – we miss them! We feel as if we are naked.”It was a strange case but very significant.When Gautam Buddha said, “appa deepo bhava” – be a light unto yourself – he was trying to take all the slavery, spiritual and religious, from humanity.People were really angry, so angry that the moment Gautam Buddha died…They could not do anything while he was alive for two reasons: one, he was the son of a king, the heir apparent; he was going to be the emperor. Secondly, because he was royal blood, people were again in the same slave mind and mentality – as if blood is also royal and unroyal.Yes, there are differences in blood, there are types of blood, but there is no blood which is royal. You can take a few samples to the medical hospital and ask them which one is royal. There is no scientific way to find royal blood. It is all nonsense, perpetuated for centuries. Blood is blood. But he was “royal blood,” and he had become more respected because he had renounced it.People deep down have always loved it when somebody tortures himself. You have to understand the psychology of it: renunciation is nothing but torture. The man had lived in immense luxury, ultimate comfort, and he renounced it. People have always respected those who choose an uncomfortable life, those who are not forced to be poor and beggars but who have willed that they should remain as a beggar. And when a royal king becomes a beggar of his own choice, he gains respectability.You have never respected a poor man who renounces his hut and his poverty. That’s why you don’t have a single Hindu incarnation coming from a poor family. You cannot respect; you will ask, “What have you renounced? In the first place you have nothing to renounce.”The Jainas have not a single tirthankara, not a single prophet amongst their twenty-four who was not a king. And Buddha was also a king. All three religions of this country are from royal families. And they were respected more than they would have been respected as emperors.People were not happy with this idea of “becoming a light unto yourself.” Nobody wants that responsibility; everybody wants to throw the responsibility on somebody else’s shoulders – a savior, a prophet, a messiah. It feels very good – he has taken all your responsibility. Now you have nothing to do, just worship Jesus Christ, worship Rama, Krishna…as if worship is the medicine for all your diseases, as if it is a panacea.You have been worshipping for thousands of years and you are going down and down in misery. Every day more darkness, every day more anguish, and you never think that your whole idea of religion may be wrong. That’s why you are suffering. Religion is meant to help you to become blissful, but the situation is totally different. Everybody is religious: Hindu, Mohammedan, Jaina, Buddhist, Christian – everybody is religious. But why then is the world suffering so much that thousands of people have to commit suicide just out of misery?No savior has been of any help; all their promises have proved false. That’s what Gautam Buddha is saying – be a light unto yourself. Don’t throw the responsibility on anybody else. Take the responsibility, because it is by taking the responsibility on yourself you become mature. Otherwise you will always remain retarded, childish.The religions who worship a God as father indicate it immediately. Why do you call God “father”? Psychoanalysts of different schools agree on this point that people are calling God the father just to get rid of the responsibility. They want to remain childish; they don’t want to grow up.Growth means responsibility.Growth means freedom.And growth means that whatever happens to you, it is your doing. Neither is your faith against you, nor are your past life’s evil acts, karmas, against you, nor is God trying to make a fire test of your trust. All these are bogus excuses! The reality is that you have not tried to change your life, to change your vision, to change your consciousness. You have not taken the realms of your life into your own hands! The only misery is that you are not a master of your own being.That is the meaning of Gautam Buddha’s tremendously significant statement: “Be a light unto yourself.” And this statement was given on the last day of his life. His whole life he had been saying that, and this was his last statement too. That means it is the very essence of his religion.He declared to his disciples, “Now I am ready to leave my body. Do you have anything to ask?” For forty-two years he had been answering their questions and nobody was so inhuman as to ask now, when he was dying.They said, “We have nothing to ask, you have answered enough. In fact, we have not followed the things that you have said to us.”At that very moment, Ananda, Gautam Buddha’s closest disciple and also his elder cousin-brother, started crying. He could not hold back the tears.Buddha said, “Ananda, what are you doing?”Ananda said, “Don’t stop me. I am not crying for your death, I am crying for my own life! Even after living with you for forty-two years, I am just the same as when I had come to you. I have heard you but I have not listened to you. I have heard you but I have not transformed myself according to it. And now you are going, I am weeping for myself, that here was a man who was reminding me every day and still I remained deaf, stupid. Now I don’t know whether in any life I will meet another man of your quality again. And if after forty-two years you could not make me alert to take my responsibility…“Deep down I have been continuously feeling, ‘There is no worry, I am Buddha’s closest disciple; he will take care. Whatever he says, that is another matter, but his compassion will take care.’ I have befooled myself. Now what am I going to do? With you I have failed; without you how can I succeed? Now destiny is sealed. I am finished with you. Not only are you dying, but I am also dying. Perhaps I may live a few years, but those will be my posthumous years of life, meaningless, just thinking of all those beautiful moments that I passed with you, reminding myself again and again what you have been saying and that I was not listening.”Buddha said, “These are my last words for you, Ananda: appa deepo bhava, be a light unto yourself. Don’t be discouraged. Because I am dying don’t worry about how you can get out of your misery and suffering when you have failed even when you were with me. I know something more than you can understand: perhaps I am the cause of your continuing misery. My death may shock you, may shock you to your very roots. My death may come to you as a blessing in disguise. What you have not been able to achieve because I was with you, you may be able to achieve now that you cannot throw the responsibility on me.”You will be surprised that within just twenty-four hours of Buddha’s death, Ananda became enlightened – because Buddha’s death was such a tremendous shock. It shattered all his unconscious desires to depend on somebody else. Now that somebody else was no longer there, now there was no way to depend on anybody else, he could not find another Buddha…now he had to take the whole responsibility on himself.And the miracle happened within twenty-four hours. He did not eat for twenty-four hours, he did not bother to sleep for twenty-four hours – he was intent that the first thing was to become enlightened because, “Who knows about tomorrow? If I go on living I can eat tomorrow, I can sleep tomorrow. I can postpone everything for tomorrow, but not enlightenment. That will be too risky. Forty-two years I have wasted. Now I cannot waste a single minute.”He remained under the same trees where Buddha had died, sitting with closed eyes, for the first time responsible for himself. And that responsibility brings tremendous transformation, because although you had everything that you need, consciousness just needs a shock so you start waking up.You are living in your slavery very comfortably, and your religions – all religions without exception – are functioning like opium. They are helping you to remain asleep as you are because it is in their favor. All the priests of all the religions are exploiting you because you are not enlightened, because you are not conscious. They have been sucking your blood all over the earth for thousands of years for the simple reason that you are asleep. And they go on giving you ideas, concepts which keep you asleep.Buddha is an exception. But when he died India took a great revenge on him. It has never taken any revenge so great as it has on Buddha. That proves that that man had completely shattered the whole business of priesthood. He destroyed the whole fabric that the priests had created in the society. He had made everybody responsible for himself – there was no need for a mediator. And you will not be aware how India took revenge. It was far more dangerous than the Jews crucifying Jesus. Of course it was far more refined, because the Jews were not such refined people, nor was Jesus such a refined revolutionary. They could not encounter Buddha, they could not answer Buddha. What he was saying was so truthful that even those whose vested interests were being destroyed were unable to argue. Many had come to argue with him and had become his disciples.But when he died India really proved very revengeful in a very ugly way. It destroyed everything that Buddha had left as a legacy.It is a strange phenomenon that the whole of Asia became Buddhist except India, and it is not just a coincidence. Strange, the man spent his whole life in India, and Buddhism disappeared from India as if it had never happened. Even the temple of Gautam Buddha where he became enlightened, the bodhi tree… And a temple had been built in his memory by the side of the bodhi tree. Hindus cut down the bodhi tree; they could not tolerate it.The bodhi tree that exists there today is not the one under which Gautam Buddha became enlightened. But it is connected with it because Ashoka sent his daughter Sanghmitra with a branch of that bodhi tree to Ceylon as a present. And Sanghmitra changed the whole of Ceylon – the whole of Ceylon became Buddhist. They were thrilled hearing all that Buddha had said, and that branch was planted and became a big tree. But the original tree – this is just a part of it – the original tree was destroyed by the Hindus. They could not even tolerate the tree.Buddhism was in every way cut. They destroyed their scriptures, they burned living bhikkhus, they threw out those who remained alive – and that’s how it spread all over Asia. People who escaped had to go somewhere. And wherever they went, although they were not Gautam Buddhas, they had some flavor of the man, they had lived with the man. Wherever they were they were respected. They changed the whole of Asia. And the conversion is also immensely important, because this was the only conversion in the whole world which took place without any force, without any violence.It was not like the Mohammedans who came with the Koran in one hand, and in the other hand the naked sword. Their only logic was the sword. It was not spread like Christianity – they come, Bible in one hand, and bread and butter in the other. They are more commercial. The times have changed: naked swords won’t work. It is a world which understands finance and economics far better.Buddhism is the only religion which spread all over Asia without forcing anybody or bribing anybody. It simply gave the message of the man. Every Buddhist scripture begins: “I have heard Gautam Buddha saying this…” because Buddha never wrote anything. So the bhikkhus who wrote every scripture, without exception begin, “I have heard…” But just because they had been so close to Gautam Buddha they carried some vibe of the man and transformed the whole culture of Asia. But from India Buddhism simply disappeared.There is no reason why such an influential man like Gautam Buddha has not left any impact on the country where he worked for forty-two years. Even the temple in Bodhgaya where he became enlightened has a brahmin priest, because there was not a Buddhist available to become a priest in Buddha’s temple. So for centuries, generation after generation, a brahmin family has been in possession of the temple.Hindu scriptures have done a great job – more murderous than crucifying Jesus Christ. In one of the Hindu scriptures, shivapurana, there is a story I would like you to remember….The story is, God created the world, and he also created heaven and hell. He gave heaven into somebody’s charge, and he gave hell also into somebody’s charge. But for centuries nobody entered hell. And the man who was put in charge was getting bored sitting in his office, keeping his register open, but nobody ever came that way. Finally, he got so angry that he went to God and he said, “Why don’t you close this, what is the point? I am unnecessarily wasting my life; not a single person has entered there. Everybody comes into heaven and nobody comes into hell.”God promised him, “Don’t be worried, I will do something. I will be born as Gautam Buddha, and I will teach wrong things to people so they start committing sins and lose their virtuousness. Then don’t come again to me saying that it is too crowded.” And since then, hell really has been too crowded.Do you see the ugliness of the story? So Hindus on the one hand have accepted Gautam Buddha as one of their avataras, incarnations of God, and on the other hand they have cut him from the very roots saying that he is teaching everything wrong, that whoever follows him will go to hell. A very cunning mind – accepting him as the incarnation of God, and still managing not to allow him to influence people and not to allow people to be in contact with him. But it is natural, because the revolution he had brought was too big; it needed a big heart, an open heart to receive the message.Your question is that Buddha says, “Be a light unto yourself,” but still there were Buddhists in his life who were coming to him with folded hands, bowing down to him, saying, “Buddham sharanam gachchhami,” I come to the feet of the awakened one; “Sangham sharanam gachchhami,” I come to the feet of the commune of the awakened one; “Dhammam sharanam gachchhami,” I come to the feet of the ultimate truth of the awakened one. Your problem is that there seems to be a contradiction – there is none.The person who gives you such total freedom – can’t you even be grateful to him? This is nothing but gratefulness. This is just expressing your thankfulness. And when you say, “Buddham sharanam gachchhami,” remember it; it is not applicable to Gautam Buddha alone. You are not saying, “I come to the feet of Gautam the Buddha,” you are saying, “I come to the feet of the awakened one.” There have been many awakened people before Buddha, and there have been many more after him. And in the future, more and more will be coming. Buddha is not a personal name, it is a quality. Buddha’s personal name was Siddhartha. We have completely forgotten his personal name.When Siddhartha – Gautam is his family name – when Siddhartha Gautam became enlightened, Siddhartha, the unconscious, the unenlightened, died. A new man was born with a new identity, and this new man we call Gautam Buddha. We have kept Gautam and dropped Siddhartha for a simple reason, just to remind you that it is the transformation of Siddhartha. So we have kept his family name to remind you that Siddhartha has to die, only then is the buddha born. But there is a link: Siddhartha becomes the seed and every seed has to die before it sprouts and becomes a tree. It comes out of the seed, but it comes only when the seed dies into the soil and disappears.To remind you of the connection, we have kept Gautama which is a family name – his father had it, his forefathers had it. It is just to make it clear that this man also belongs to the same family of people but he has gone through a transformation. Siddhartha has died, has become a seed, and now we find a new quality.So when somebody says, “I go to the feet of the awakened one,” it simply means you are going in a deep gratefulness to the quality of awakening, the awakened one, conscious of all the people who have ever awakened and all the people who will be awakened in the future.That’s why Buddha never objected to it – it had nothing to do with him personally. It was something absolutely impersonal. They were talking about the awakening that is not his possession, his monopoly.So whenever you think to thank, thank the quality, not the man. Be grateful to his transformation, but don’t become addicted to his formal body.There is no contradiction at all. It is a simple fact. The man who gives you so much freedom – are you not going to say just a thank you to him? Will there be a contradiction?Osho,I am afraid and I have many fears. In my heart, in myself, I feel always frightened, and I often don't feel good about myself. Also I feel out of tune with nature, with existence. I need to understand in what ways these elements of fear, being out of tune with nature, and a lack of self-respect are connected? How can I jump out of this cycle?There is not a big problem. You need not jump out of anything. All your fears are nothing but conditioning. Particularly if you have been brought up by Christian parents, by Christian priests, you are bound to lose self-respect, because the whole of Christianity is based on the idea that you are born in sin. And it is very important to understand what they mean by sin.The biblical story is that God prohibited Adam and Eve to eat the fruits from two trees in his Garden of Eden. And these two trees were, first, the tree of knowledge, and second, the tree of eternal life.Now anyone who has a little bit of intelligence can understand a few points about this story which has been made up by the priesthood. The simple reason is that God cannot be such a fool. The Garden of Eden was vast; there were millions of trees. Just to point out two trees to Adam and Eve and tell them not to eat from these two trees – because one is of knowledge and another is of eternal life – is psychologically stupid. If he had not said this we would not have been here. We would have been in the Garden of Eden, still searching in those millions of trees.It is a simple psychological fact that if you say to somebody, “Don’t do it,” the thing that you are trying to prevent becomes so significant…knowledge, eternal life. Adam and Eve would have been absolute idiots if they had followed God. God wanted them just to go on eating grass, and had prohibited the real things.In the first place a father cannot prohibit his children from becoming wise. He would love them to become wiser and wiser. He would love that they attain eternal life.In the first place God is committing the sin against his own children. And if they disobeyed – and I think they did perfectly right – it is because of them that man has so much knowledge, so much science, so much technology. But they were caught before they reached the second tree. They could not eat from the second tree.The story says it was the Devil who persuaded Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. And the reason he gave seems to be more compassionate than the order of the so-called God. The reason he gave is, “You have been prohibited because God is very jealous of someone becoming knowledgeable, because then he will almost be a God himself. God is afraid that you will become like God! He is afraid that if you attain to eternal life then nothing can be done to you – you cannot be punished, you cannot be killed. Then you are absolutely a God!”The reasoning is perfectly right. The order from God was absolutely wrong. In fact he should have pointed to these two trees and said, “You go and eat them because I would love my children to be just like myself.”If the biblical story is true, then all worship of the Christian God should be stopped, because he behaved like a very jealous man. Even a jealous man will not be jealous with his own children. Even a jealous man would like his children to live forever. Even a jealous, ordinary human being would like his children to be wiser than himself. He may be jealous of others, but not of his own children.An uneducated father tries hard, works hard so that his children can go to the university. But “God the father” behaved in such an unfatherly way and in such ungodly way. There was no need for any devil to persuade, his order would have been enough to provoke a challenge in Adam and Eve: “These are the two trees you should not forget. And the sooner you eat them the better.”But they could only eat from one tree and then they were thrown out of the Garden of Eden, because they had sinned. According to Christianity, disobedience is sin. A logic without any support has been stretched so long that, although Adam and Eve committed the sin of disobedience, humanity will suffer for it forever and forever because you are born of that first couple; everybody is of the same blood.Thousands of years have passed, but still you are born in sin. Christianity makes everybody guilty! And the moment you feel guilty you lose self-respect. In place of self-respect you have self-condemnation – you feel guilty.This is the greatest damage that any religion has done to humanity: to create guilt. The guilty person starts having a very strange life. He is always afraid.That’s why you always feel fear. A guilty person is afraid in the same way. If you have been a thief then you are always afraid of everybody – that you may be caught.I used to play a game when I was a student in the university….Whenever I traveled on a train and the ticket checker came I would pretend to be very nervous. That made him directly come to me, “Because you are nervous that means you don’t have the ticket.”And when I showed him the ticket he would say, “That is strange, then why are you behaving so nervously?”I would say, “I am simply always trying experiments. I wanted to see how you would react. It is not always true that a person who is nervous…don’t get onto him immediately.”He would say, “This is the first time that I have been proved wrong; usually only ticketless people become nervous.”If you have been trained from the very beginning with the idea of sin, guilt, self-condemnation, then everything has been poisoned. You cannot love anybody, because you cannot love even yourself. And the person who cannot love himself is absolutely incapable of loving anybody else.You are so much afraid that you cannot trust anybody. Your fear won’t allow you to trust. Who knows, the other person may take advantage of your trust, may deceive you, may cheat you. But if you don’t trust anybody you won’t have any friends. In a vast world, living without a lover, living without friendship, moving around always afraid of hell because Adam and Eve did something for which you are not at all responsible…you had not suggested it to them. You don’t know at all when they existed, whether they existed, or if it is just a parable.You will start getting into this psychological paranoia, and the difficulty of many is that once you get a certain idea settled in your mind then you will find every reason to prove it right. The world is full of reasons. Once you get the idea, then you will find all the reasoning, rationalization to support it.I have heard about a madman….He had got the idea that he was dead. Madmen can get any kind of idea. His family was puzzled what to do with the man because he wouldn’t go to the shop. He would say, “I am dead. Don’t you understand? Dead people don’t go to the market, don’t run to the shops.”They tried thousands of ways: “You are not dead; you are not even sick!”But he said, “That absolutely proves that I’m dead, because only dead people never get sick. If you are alive, sometimes you get sick, but look at me – years come and go, I am never sick. That simply proves what I’m saying. You don’t understand, but I’m dead. Have you ever heard about any dead person getting sick?”The family was at a loss what to do with this man. Finally, they brought the man to a psychoanalyst and asked, “Will you help us? He has got a strange idea that he is dead.”The psychoanalyst said, “Don’t be worried, I have treated many people for all kinds of ideas. I will settle him.”He tried arguing, but he found the man really was difficult because he turned each argument in such a way that it proved him dead. Finally, getting angry at the man, he took hold of his hand and asked him, “Just tell me, if a dead man’s body is cut by a knife will it bleed or not?”He said, “I have never experimented. And how can I experiment, I am dead? While I used to be alive I have heard such a thing, but it is only hearsay. I have no personal experience of it.” The psychoanalyst pulled him to the side where there was a full-length mirror, took a knife, cut his hand, and blood came out of the hand. He showed him, “Look, this is your hand. You can look in the mirror…the blood is coming out. Can you see?”He said, “Perfectly. The blood is coming out. That means that the idea that dead men don’t bleed is wrong. They do bleed.”Once you get an idea, you go on supporting it with all kinds of personal reasons.There is no need to jump, because that means you still believe there is something surrounding you that you have to jump out of. There is nothing! It is simple conditioning. You don’t have to jump out of it, you have simply to understand that unfortunately you are born into a Christian family, that in this world the situation is that nobody is fortunately born. There is no choice available. I am trying my best to create a choice, where somebody can say with pride that he is born out of parents who have not burdened him with any conditioning. But right now there exists no such thing. Everybody is part of some conditioning.I will tell you my own experience, then it will be easier to understand. Up to the age of sixteen I had never eaten in the night, because Jainas don’t eat in the night. It is simply not done. By the evening, as the sun sets, if anything is left over it is given to the beggars. Nothing is left in the kitchen. There is no question of eating anything. You cannot even mention that you are hungry; that is sin. In the night if you are hungry you should be ashamed of yourself. So up to the age of sixteen I had never eaten anything in the night.At that time a group of the students in my class was going to a beautiful castle for a holiday and a geographical tour. There was such a beautiful old castle, and everyone was so much interested in exploring the whole of it because it had so many beautiful points they had never seen before. And nobody was in a hurry for food. I inquired once or twice, “What about preparing some food?”But they said, “Food will be prepared after the sun sets. Right now nobody is willing…there is light and we want to explore more, to go to all the gates, to go to the basement, to see everything.”Naturally, I was alone and I could not cook food, I had never done it – I cannot even prepare a cup of tea! I was hungry, but I waited. But the real trouble was that after sunset how was I going to eat? My whole conditioning of sixteen years was there, that it is better not to eat, to remain hungry – you cannot die in one day. It takes ninety days for a healthy person to die if he does not eat – ninety days he has to fast and wait.So it was only a question of one day. I could manage, but the hunger was too much. The whole day on the mountain and the mountain air – and I was feeling immensely hungry. My stomach was almost hurting, so how could I sleep? I knew that I would not die, but I would not sleep either.And then my friends started cooking food. And the very smells of their food – I had never thought that food could smell so beautiful. That day I knew that to smell food you need to be hungry. I was always overfed, so there was no question…And they were cooking very simple things. Then they all persuaded me saying, “We promise you we will not tell your family.”I said, “It is not a question of the family, it is a question of falling into hell. You will not tell my family, I will not tell my family, but the question is how I am to avoid hell – because this is what I have been told: eating in the night is a sure guarantee to fall into hell.”They argued, but more persuasive than their argument was their food and its smell.They said, “Can’t you see that ninety persons are eating it? Do you think we are all going to fall into hell? The whole world eats in the night except for three million Jainas in India. Five billion people in the world – they are all going to hell?”I said, “Your argument is correct.”And they said, “In any case, if we are going to hell, wouldn’t you like to be with us?”I said, “I would love to.”And finally, I ate the food. The food was delicious, but I was eating it against my conditioning – I immediately vomited. I could not manage to keep it in. And I thought I could sleep because I had eaten, but the whole night I was vomiting till all the food was thrown out. Only late, at four o’clock, could I go to sleep.Naturally, I was absolutely convinced that Jainism was right. I had already visited hell – the whole night vomiting. I had already been punished enough.And when I told my family, they said, “You can see for yourself, there is no need to argue with you. You suffered, and we had told you never to eat in the night.”But none of the ninety students vomited or anything. They were sleeping perfectly well – tired and full of good food. I was the only one who was suffering. And it was not the food, it was the conditioning.So you don’t have to get out of the fear, out of the self-condemnation and guilt. All that you have to understand is that these are thoughts given to you by others. They don’t belong to you, they are forced upon you. The very insight that they are forced upon you, and you will find a tremendous freedom coming out of the insight. They are gone, because they are only thoughts. There is not a real brick wall that you have to jump out of. If you try to jump out, that means you still believe in the wall.I have heard about another psychoanalyst who was treating a man, a professor….He had got this idea that strange creatures, small creatures were continuously crawling all over his body, and he was throwing them this way and that way. He could not teach, because most of the time those creatures…nobody could see those creatures.He was told by the principal, “Nobody can see those creatures.”He said, “That is one of the strangest things about them, they are invisible creatures. But I can see them.”He was brought to a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst tried to convince him, “There are no creatures, nothing; you are perfectly healthy and I don’t see anything on you.”But he was not listening, he kept throwing them away. In this way three months passed, and two times every week he had a session with the psychoanalyst.But he said, “Your sessions are not helping, the creatures are growing. They are giving birth to new children, new kids. The whole body…day and night. I cannot sleep, I cannot eat because they go on crawling in my food.”The psychoanalyst and the man had become friends in those three months. The man was also a professor of psychology, so there was a professional relationship and the psychoanalyst was not taking any money from him.Today he was trying his best to persuade the man, so he had pulled his chair by his side…and the man was throwing the creatures away. And suddenly something happened….The psychoanalyst said, “Stop it, you are throwing those strange creatures on me, and I am not even taking money from you! You can’t do that. Last night I saw those creatures. Three months with you have destroyed my mind. I know they don’t exist, but who knows? Now I have started to see them. So you sit a little farther away and throw them carefully. You are not supposed to throw them on me – otherwise no sessions anymore! Last night my wife was very angry when I started throwing them. She said, ‘You stop this business of psychoanalysis, because living with all those mad people one finally gets convinced. For three months you have been persuading somebody – and nothing, no effect. And the man is so certain of his creatures. His certainty, his authority…naturally, you start thinking deep down that perhaps he may be right, who knows?’”You don’t have to jump out of the wall, because there is no wall. You have not to jump out of these things, you have simply to understand that this is a conditioning given by your family to you, by your atmosphere, surroundings, preachers. They have made you disrespectful of yourself, self-condemnatory. Without saying so they have deprived you of loving anybody. But a person who is filled with condemnation for himself, herself, is not capable of having a loving relationship with anybody. He cannot forgive himself. How can he forgive others? He knows he is a sinner – others also are sinners. He knows he is a hypocrite, he is trying to hide everything within himself. That’s what everybody else is doing.You cannot have friends, you will feel full of fear about what is going to happen to you. Your life is running out of your hands. And all these conditionings will become more and more strong, because you will find rationalizations for them every day. Any mistake you commit, you will immediately say, “This is how I am.”To err is human. There is nothing much to it; it is not a sin to commit a mistake. Just don’t commit it again and again – that is stupid. You commit a mistake once, then learn about it that it is a mistake. In that way every mistake becomes a stepping-stone towards being more and more wise.But with your ideology every mistake will become a sin. In fact, the conditionings are so powerful that even if you can do something right you will not do it for the simple reason, how can you do it right? You are such a sinner, so self-condemned, you cannot go against your conditioning and do something right. You will do something wrong and you will feel satisfied, because your conditioning is satisfied. But that conditioning is poisonous.So just see it – that it is not your doing, it is your parents, it is your society, it is your priests who have done it. And why should you suffer for their doing? You simply should undo it in a single moment of insight – not slowly, not tomorrow – because it is possible to finish all your conditioning this very moment. And when you go out of this hall you can go without your conditioning. There is no need to be worried that somebody else may get caught with your conditioning, poor fellow. Nobody will be caught in your conditioning.Conditioning has no substance, it is just a continuous hammering of thoughts on the mind. Any thought can be made a reality, you just go on enforcing in every possible way and it becomes a reality – but you will be living in a hallucination.Adolf Hitler in his autobiography says, “If you go on telling a lie continuously, emphatically, with authority, soon it will become a truth.” And he proved it. He started saying to people that the whole misery of the German nation, its defeat in the first world war, its economical depression…all its suffering was because of the Jews. Now this is so absurd. There is no relationship between the two. It is almost as if somebody comes and says, “All your misery, all your poverty is because of bicycles.” The Jews had nothing to do with it. In fact, Jews are very productive, very intelligent people. They were the richest people in Germany. They had all the wealth, they had all the intelligence – they were the very pride of the nation.You will be surprised that although the Jews are a very small race compared to others, they get forty percent of all the Nobel Prizes. It is absolutely unbelievable. This whole century is dominated by Jewish thinking: Karl Marx was a Jew, Sigmund Freud was a Jew, Albert Einstein was a Jew. These three people have made this whole century; their impact is tremendous.At first people laughed, just the way you would laugh at bicycles…But Hitler did not bother about their laughter. He went on speaking – and he was not a speaker like me who is just talking heart to heart to you. He would beat the table and he would shout and he would do every kind of action – he was half mad! But he impressed people, because if a person speaks with such authority he must know something. And he and his followers continued to say that it was the Jews, because the Nordics, Germans, are the purest blood, the purest Aryan blood in the world, and Jews have “contaminated” it: “These Jews should be destroyed. Once we are finished with Jews, Germany will come up and rule the whole world.”Slowly, slowly people started believing him. It just takes time. And all that you believe is nothing but a lie repeated for thousands of years.How do you know that somebody is a brahmin? How do you know that somebody is a sudra? How do you know that somebody is a vaishya or somebody is a kshatriya? And the sudra cannot move upwards, and the brahmin is at the top…what makes you think that? I have seen very idiotic brahmins, and I have seen very intelligent sudras.Doctor Ambedkar was a sudra, and he wrote the constitution of India. They could not find a brahmin who was more intelligent, who knew all the constitutions of the world. He was the best man to do the job, but he was a sudra.It was just an accident that somebody found that the boy was intelligent and helped him to go to England and to study there. Here, at that time, it was not possible for a sudra to go to a school or to a university. And when Ambedkar came back, he was almost an international figure as far as law is concerned. His expertise was perfect.He was not a Gandhian; he was against Gandhi. The people who were in power were Gandhians. They were all high-class Hindus. Jawaharlal Nehru was a brahmin. Still, they chose an anti-Gandhian, a sudra, Doctor Ambedkar, to write India’s constitution.So it is simply just an idea that has been perpetuated for five thousand years that society is divided into four castes. The caste is by birth, not by action! But the whole of India believes in it, even people like the great philosopher Adi Shankara, who founded an order of sannyasins. He is the most influential man Hindus have ever produced.He was in Varanasi, and while he was taking a bath, coming up the steps, a sudra touched him.He asked him, “Who are you?”He said, “Forgive me, I am a sudra.”And Shankara, who was teaching peace and love and compassion, forgot all philosophy and all the vedanta – which was teaching that the same God is in everyone. He forgot all about that. He was very angry and told the sudra, “You will fall into the seventh hell. You have disturbed me. And don’t you know who I am? Be careful never to disturb any brahmin. Now I will have to take another bath.”The sudra said, “Wait a minute before you take the bath. I want to know one thing: is my body sudra or my soul too?”Shankara had never thought that a sudra could discuss such philosophical matters. But when he had raised the question it had to be answered. And Shankara was in a difficulty – he had never been in such a difficulty. He had encountered all the great masters and teachers and had been victorious in thousands of debates all over India, but he was defeated by a sudra on the steps near the Ganges in Varanasi. Nobody talks about it, but he thought for a moment about what to say.Bodies – everybody’s body is made of the same elements. What speciality has the brahmin’s body? The sudra was asking very significant questions. And what is the difference between the body of a sudra and a brahmin? So it must be the soul that is sudra….“So you tell me, who has touched you, my soul or my body? And if the soul is sudra then what happened about your Brahma, the absolute, who is in everybody else – all over the world, in animals, in trees, in stones. You can accept it in stones and you cannot accept it in a living human being. Who has touched you?“If my inside is also part of Brahma, part of God, part of divineness, then there is no need to have another bath. And if you think my body is untouchable, then please prove to me what speciality you have got in your body.”This was the first time Shankara had to accept that he was wrong to get angry.The sudra said, “Then simply go on your way, you cannot take another bath.”Nobody is lower, nobody is higher, but if for thousands of years…Manu has been the cause of the whole calamity. He preached these four castes, and they are still being followed. And even the sudra believes in them, it is not only the brahmin who believes in them.I have been trying to convince sudras who used to come to see me: “You can come and sit on a chair.”They would say, “No.”They would sit just by the door, outside on the steps: “We are sudras, we cannot come in.”Even they have become convinced. If the brahmin is convinced one can understand, because he is gaining superiority by the conviction. But what is the sudra gaining?In one place they were celebrating the birthday of a great saint, Raidas, who was a shoemaker, a chamar. I was just visiting there, so I said, “I will also be coming.”But they said, “No, how can you come there? Only sudras will be there.”But I insisted. The family I was staying with said, “It is creating trouble for us. If you go we have to go with you. You are our guest and we cannot let you go alone. We don’t want to go there because if somebody sees that we are mixing with sudras, our whole life will be ruined!”I said, “You don’t need to come with me. I am going there.”But you will be surprised, the sudras wouldn’t allow me to enter the area. They said, “No. We are sudras and we cannot commit this sin of bringing you down amongst ourselves. No, God will never forgive us.”I said, “This is strange.”They are so convinced. It is a lie, because in the whole world there is no caste system except in the Hindu world. So it is not something natural.Abraham Lincoln was a son of a chamar, a shoemaker, and he could become the president of America – one of the greatest presidents ever. When he gave his first address in the American parliament, just to insult him somebody stood up – a very rich man – and said, “Don’t forget that your father used to make shoes for our family.”Abraham Lincoln’s answer is worth remembering. He said, “I will never forget, and I am grateful that you reminded me because I want to declare to the whole nation, through the parliament, that my father was a perfect shoemaker, and I am not going to be that perfect a president. It is a question of perfection. I know my father and I want to ask you, do you have any complaint against my father’s shoes? Then I can come and repair them, because I have learned from my father the art of making shoes.”Lincoln was not offended. Instead, the man looked foolish. On the contrary, Abraham Lincoln was very proud that his father was a perfect shoemaker: “While he was alive there was nobody else who could compete with him. Whatever he made, he made so perfect. He used to ask us, ‘Can you find anything wrong?’ We were never able to find anything wrong with his shoes. I am afraid that I will not be that perfect a president. My father still remains higher than me, and I don’t feel that I will ever be able to surpass him.”The whole world is without a caste system, so it is simply a conditioning. You have just to see that you have been misguided, and in that very seeing, things start slipping away.You don’t have to jump out of them, they will simply flee away from you and you will feel a great freedom. Your fear will become love, your disrespect for yourself will become an immense love for yourself and for others.The last question:Osho,My love for you, my respect for you…The purpose of my very existence has changed and widened since I met you. You allowed me to accept myself and see my inner beauty.Since I met you I started daring to love, laugh, and dance again. You opened my eyes to beauty, to the poetry of life. I feel younger, almost childlike, amazed by the beauty which permeates everything – a young pagan roving with pleasure, drinking the juice, enjoying every drop of it.Is it deeply immoral?No, it is immensely moral. It is the only morality there is – to be a pagan, to squeeze every drop of juice of every moment in life; to be a child, innocent, again running after butterflies, collecting seashells on the beach, colored stones…seeing the beauty of existence which surrounds you, allowing yourself to love and be loved.Love is the beginning of religion.And love is also the end of religion.And a religious person is always young. Even when he is dying he is young. Even in his death he is full of joy, full of dance, full of song.I teach you to be pagans and I teach you to have the innocence of children. I teach you to know the wonder and the mystery of existence – not to analyze it but to enjoy it, not to make a theory out of it but to make a dance out of it.The whole existence is dancing, except men. They have become a big graveyard.I am calling you to come out of your graves.No, it is not immoral. All the religions will say it is, but all those religions are wrong. Whoever says this is immoral is just against humanity, against existence, against joy, against bliss, against everything that leads to godliness.I am all for it.

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The Sword and the Lotus 01-25Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Sword and the Lotus 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,During the last years the Indian shamans have gone more and more into public work.Can you say something about this work?It is something complex to be understood, but two points will help. One is – which is a vital point – that the East has suffered tremendously from the Western invasion of the East, creating slavery. And the East was not prepared to fight. For centuries it has been thinking of nonviolence and it has gone into its very conditioning not to fight. It is better to be a slave than to be a killer of man.It was Eastern spirituality which helped the Western powers to rule over the East for three centuries. They should not think that it was their power. They were all small nations. Their power was small. The Eastern nations were tremendously big. They had immense potential for power, but just the spiritual background was against violence and war.But everything has a reaction.Although the East became a slave to Western materialism and material forces, the West could not kill the Eastern spirit, its mysticism. There is no way to kill it. They even started to inquire into the mysteries of the East. They translated all the best mystic literature of the East into Western languages. That was the beginning of the turn of the wheel. Then Eastern spiritual teachers started going to the West, because now the West was acquainted intellectually with Eastern spirituality, and it was so clear to them that their own spirituality was far behind.As the Eastern teachers reached the Western countries they proved it absolutely – that whatever is thought to be religion in the West is very primitive and crude, and the East has something more superior to offer.What I am leading up to is that the East lost its freedom because of spirituality. Now it is gaining a new kind of empire around the world because of the same spirituality; now every seeker from every country has to come to the East. And it is perfectly good, because spirituality does not create any slavery, yet it can create an empire of influence, and that is what is happening – and it is going to happen more and more.The West will have to pay for whatever wrong it has done to the East – it has been ugly and barbarous. And it conquered people who were not at all interested in fighting. The reason they succeeded was not the power of the conqueror, the reason was simply that the people they were conquering had dropped the very idea of conquering, fighting, killing.But nature tends to a balance….The West will have to learn from the East and accept the East in a very different sense – the master. Spirituality cannot create slavery, but it can prove a certain inner superiority. So more and more Eastern teachers – Hindus, Sufis, Zen, are bound to conquer the world. They have every right…without killing anybody. And it should be welcomed because it is going to change the violent attitude of the West.So three hundred years of repressed spirituality is now expressing itself because all that materialist empire of the West has disappeared. Now the Eastern countries have freedom, and they certainly have thousands of years research, discipline and experience. In comparison to the East, the West is very childish. So the teachers who are going to the West to work may not be aware why it is happening, but I am perfectly aware it has to happen to bring the balance.Secondly, the West has enjoyed materialistic values and is now fed up with them. They have created two world wars, and they have brought the whole world to the brink of a third world war which is going to destroy all life. They are in immense need for an inner transformation.The East can fulfill their conditions, can change their attitudes, can give them some taste beyond material values. And once you have some taste beyond material values you are a totally different person.Christianity will try to prevent these people from coming to the West because now it is a question that if these people go on coming, then Christianity’s hold cannot remain for long.There is nothing in Christianity which is comparable to the Upanishads or to the teachings of Gautam Buddha. Christianity is a barren religion. It has not created anything like Zen or Sufism or Hassidism, for the simple reason that it has never allowed any rebellious spirit. It has been cutting the rebellious spirit from the roots.Religion reaches to its heights only through the rebellious people, not through the mundane, the ordinary; not through the obedient; not through those who are satisfied just to believe that they will be saved, but only by those who make an effort to save themselves. Christianity has not allowed them.It is the most out-of-date religion so there is great fear. It has nothing to offer, and the more it resists the mystic teachings coming to the West, the more it will be in trouble because the youth, the young people, are no longer interested in Christianity. It has nothing of interest. It is a sick religion. It stopped growing the day Jesus was crucified.The Eastern religions have been growing because the rebellious people may not have been liked, may not have been accepted by the orthodox, but they were not killed. And when they blossomed, even the orthodox had to accept that they were wrong.It is because of this quality that the highest peaks of Zen, Sufism and Hassidism became possible. These are the most rebellious elements in Buddhism, in Mohammedanism and in Judaism.Hinduism has no future, just as Christianity has no future. Both have lost touch with reality, both are hanging only with empty words. You cannot deceive people for long. And other circumstances are helping.For example, Tibet has been taken over by China, so all the best Tibetan lamas had to leave Tibet. Now they are all over the world…and Tibet has one of the greatest disciplines to create a new man.Hassidism is not accepted by the orthodox Jews, but it will be accepted by the new generation. My own people consist of forty percent Jews, and the reason is Hassidism. Listening to me and being with me, for the first time they recognized that Hassidism is the very cream of their religion, and whatever I am saying is purely Hassid.It is not just a coincidence that in this big world where Jews are few, forty percent of my people should consist of Jews.The Zen people are so much interested in me that there are many Zen masters in Japan – they have big monasteries, and they are teaching Zen through my books.When I was in jail I received thousands of telegrams and telephone messages and letters. Many Zen masters protested, but not a single Hindu religious leader protested. Many Sufis protested. In India, Ajmer is the headquarters of the Sufis because the grave of one of the great Sufis – Nijamuddin Chisti is there. He was of such eminence that his name has not remained just that of an individual. Chisti has become a school, a specialist school of Sufis. And the man who is the head of Nijamuddin’s dargah in Ajmer sent me a telegram – he had never seen me. He quoted a Sufi saying.I don’t know what the word baaj is in English – you will have to find it out. Baaj is one of the strongest words – he who flies the highest in the world – the saying says that. It is an ancient saying. He simply quoted the saying – that was the whole telegram. He wrote to me, “It is not the crows who are being caught and imprisoned, chained, it is the baaj who has the highest flight. It is difficult to catch him, but once he is caught then he is chained, imprisoned. So it is a blessing they have recognized that the baaj is in you.”I received letters from Hassid rabbis saying, “We are with you.” But I did not receive anything from any Christian religious leader or any Hindu religious leader, and I can see the reason why they could not. They cannot have a rapport with me; they are dead and rotten.So more Tibetans are there, more Japanese masters are there, more Hassid masters are working and becoming respectable in the new generation. It is really a reversal of the whole role.The East is spreading its wings as a spiritual empire over the whole world – and it is good news. It is not going to harm anybody, it is going to take away the chains of people, their conditionings, and make them enjoy freedom – and the time is ripe.The West has been clinging to materialist values which are very much lower than yours. They can kill, but they cannot give you a new life. They can destroy, but they cannot create.So there is a great creative upsurge in the whole world. It is coming from the East, and soon the distinction between the East and the West will be lost.Osho,The new age movement is becoming stronger in Europe. We see parallels to your prophecy of the quantum leap. What do you think about the new age movement?It is good but not good enough. It is good because anything replacing the old and the rotten is good, but I also say it is not good enough because it is only a reaction.To be perfect it has to be not a reaction but an understanding, and it is missing that.In reaction you simply move to the other extreme, and every extreme is dangerous. For a few days it may give you the feeling that you are free, but all extremes prove to be prisons. And from the extreme there is no growth because there is nowhere you can go ahead.Growth is always in the middle.Extremes are horizontal: the past has lost its value…there is a vacuum. Certainly the natural tendency of the mind is to create opposite values to the past – because it has failed – and replace them. You are certainly replacing new values in place of the old, but you are forgetting that they were extremist and you are also extremist. So the change is only superficial. Deep down you are still in the same position.Certainly a new man is needed, but the new man will not come out of reaction. The new man can come only out of understanding the old – where it has failed and why. And it is impossible to miss that it was extremist. It went too far in one direction, denying the other direction completely.For example, it may have been spiritualist – denying materialism completely. It may have been otherworldly – denying this world completely.The reactionary person will be just the opposite, will accept this world and deny the other world, will accept materialism and deny spiritualism. It is simply putting things upside down. It is not going to help. It is a relief for a few days…again you are caught in the same old game.My understanding is that man, if he really wants to be new, has to be more understanding and less reactive. Reaction needs no understanding; it is anger, it is frustration, it is revenge. But in revenge, in anger, in frustration, you cannot produce the new man.The new man has to be understanding, meditative, silent, calm and collected, centered. He has to be exactly in the middle where materialism and spiritualism meet, where that world and this world meet, where all opposites meet. And he has to be comprehensive, big enough to contain all the contradictions in him and create a symphony.The new age movement is there. It is a good sign that people are frustrated with the past, but that is not enough.It may destroy the past but it will not create a new future, and whatever you do out of reaction will be a continuity with the past. If the past was the thesis, you will be antithesis, but connected with it, dependent on it. Your whole excitement is in destroying the past, disconnecting yourself from it, but that is not enough – that is really wasting energy.Your energy should be creative – of the new man. And the new man cannot be created without meditation, because that is the only way to find a more clear consciousness, perceptivity, sensitivity. And that is the synthesis of the opposites – so there is no question of any reaction. It is action on its own, not related to something as reaction.Reaction never brings freedom.You can see it in J. Krishnamurti’s life – a man of tremendous potential who has lived his whole life in reaction. Whatever he was taught by his teachers, masters, there seems to be a wound in his heart. It is a strange situation which has never happened before.People have become enlightened on their own, but this was a forced enlightenment. He was not allowed to meet ordinary people, not allowed to mix with ordinary people. And he was continuously trained, disciplined so that he would become a world teacher. And one can understand – twenty-five years of continuous discipline and torture, anybody will react – and he reacted.He started denying all those values that were imposed on him: discipline, discipleship, initiation, the necessity of a master, the necessity of holy scriptures…everything that was forced on him he denied, rejecting, reacting, furiously. And it is sixty years, and he has been doing the same thing.The theosophists have not created a world teacher. Their whole effort has created an anti-world teacher, but this is not balance. He has paid too much attention to his past, he is not out of it. He will be out of it the day he drops his reaction. People think him revolutionary because they can’t make the distinction between revolution and reaction.Reaction is not the birth of a new consciousness, it is simply a revenge. He is still fighting. Those twenty-five years have been such a deep wound – it has not healed in sixty years. And he won’t allow it to heal because now it has become his whole life.If he had not reacted but, without any seriousness and without being angry, had simply come out of the theosophical movement saying, “Forgive me, I cannot do this,” and if he had forgotten them and moved on his own insight, he would have become a world teacher with a tremendous understanding. He would have been of immense help to people. He has worked hard these sixty years, but nobody is being helped.The same is the situation with the new age movement – they are just going on a reactionary trip. I would like them to stop in the middle: forget the old and put your whole energy into creating the new man, because without the new man there is no new age.Osho,There is a great potential of creative, crazy and intelligent energy amongst the European artists, poets, writers and theater people. Their life is full and hot and they are totally surrendered to their profession. Meditation is a strange phenomenon for them. Most of them don't even want to hear anything about it. Please comment.Anybody who does not understand meditation cannot be a great poet. From where will he get the inspiration? He is unaware of his own sources. He can compose poetry – it will be verbal, linguistic. He may fulfill all the rules that are needed, but there will be nothing poetic in it. It will remain prose in the form of poetry.On the other hand the meditator may not write poetry, but his prose is poetry. Whatever he says has poetry in it.The people who have not heard about meditation cannot be great painters. Meditation is the background of all great creativity. Whatever they do – painting, music, poetry – it will remain mundane.And the danger is that without meditation they can always go mad. So the craziness is a potential danger. To be creative is a strange situation. If you are creating things through your mind…the mind has a very limited scope and it is not meant to be creative. It is a memory system, but because it has also the capacity for imagination, you can turn that capacity for imagination into poetry, into painting, into music. This is going to be dangerous because your mind potential is very limited. You will be exhausting it.That’s why all these people look crazy, a little bit outlandish. Something seems to be wrong with them – they are not normally healthy. The problem is that they have used the energy of the mind which keeps you normally healthy and now there is an empty space in the mind. And that is what gives you the feeling that something is loose in their heads.Creative energy has to come from meditation, because meditation has no other purpose. And meditation is vast, its resources are infinite. You can share in poetry, in music, in sculpture as much as you want, and fresh waters will run in.The mind has a limited quota. It is not supposed to be creative, it is supposed to be only a computer. Computers can also create: if you feed them poetry, they will reproduce poetry, but they cannot bring anything new. And that is the poverty of the mind. It is only a biocomputer.So whatsoever these people are doing, their poetry must be stolen. It may not be stolen from one source, it may be stolen from many sources so you cannot find from where they have got these ideas. Their painting will be stolen.I am reminded of Picasso….One of his paintings was sold at a very high price – one million dollars. And some critic suggested to the purchaser, “Have you inquired whether it is an authentic Picasso? There are so many people who are copying, and it is very difficult to find out which is authentic and which is not. Picasso was also present at the exhibition; you could have asked him.”The man said, “There is no question, because while he was painting it, then too I was present. We are friends. It is absolutely authentic. I need not inquire of anybody. I saw with my own eyes that he was painting it.”But the critic was suspicious. They both went to Picasso – both were friends of his. Picasso’s girlfriend was also present, and they asked, “What do you say about the painting? Is it authentic or not?”Picasso looked at the painting and said, “It is not.”The man said, “But this is too much. I saw you painting it.”And Picasso’s girlfriend said, “That man is right – you have painted it! And now this is unnecessarily hurting the man. He has wasted one million dollars on it and this is not a time to joke.”But Picasso insisted, “It is not authentic. And the reason is that I have painted this painting before. This is only a copy of it. I had no other idea at the time, so I simply repeated an old idea which was liked very much. I have copied myself. So you are both right, that you have seen me painting it. But I am talking from a different viewpoint. It does not matter who copies it – whether Picasso himself copies it or somebody else – but it is a copy, it is not authentic. The vision was not authentic…I had no vision when I was painting it. I had no joy when I was painting it. I was simply painting it for the exhibition, and finding nothing original coming to me, I simply painted an old painting.“If you don’t believe me I can tell you in which gallery the original painting is and you can take this painting and compare it. There is the original. This may even look more beautiful than that because I have grown. That painting was done when I was amateurish. So this may look even better now I am expert. But I cannot lie. The truth is, it is a copy.”They went to the gallery, and there was the painting. Certainly it was amateurish and this one was far better. But Picasso said, “That is the original. I have not painted it. I was not there when it was being painted – the idea had possessed me totally. When I painted this I was just an expert painter. It was done only by the mind, I was not possessed by anything. Please forgive me, but I cannot lie. You can say to people that it is Picasso’s own painting, but don’t say that it is authentic.”Now this man is making a tremendously great distinction. Mind can repeat but cannot create. And by repeating it is exhausting its limited sources and it drives the person crazy. And finally, the man is going to go mad.I do understand what is happening in the West. So many people are painting, so many people are playing music, so many people are dancing, so many people are composing poetry, literature…but there seems to be nobody who is going to be a master. They will all end up in madness, sooner or later.They are giving the indication that they don’t care about meditation – they have not even heard the word. And even if they have heard it they don’t want to get into it.They don’t know anything about what meditation is – it is your greatest source of energy. The mind is a small mechanism – you can reach to meditation and use the mind in any way. The mind has to be used for any expression, but then the energy will be coming from meditation. You won’t look crazy. You will look more peaceful, more calm and more quiet, more at ease. And whatever is expressed through you will have something of the beyond in it.The mind is superficial; it can create superficial things. The mind is not at peace, so whatever it creates has the impact of tension, anguish, anxiety, craziness.To be in contact with meditation changes the whole quality. It is not only today that it is happening; for almost one century slowly, slowly the painters, the poets, and other dimensions of creativity have lost contact with meditation. Looking at their paintings you can see the craziness. In fact, the crazier the painting, the greater people think it is. The paintings have gone so crazy that you don’t know which side is up and which side is down.One man was purchasing paintings from Picasso….The man wanted two, and Picasso only had one. Picasso went in and cut the painting in two! Picasso’s girlfriend said, “What are you doing? You have destroyed a great painting.”He said, “Don’t be worried. I have created two paintings – and you will see.”He sold them as two paintings. Neither did he know what it was, nor did the other person know what it was.You cannot cut a real painting in two because it is an organic unity. But if it is just crazy – throwing colors on the canvas without creating an organic unity – you can cut it into two pieces, or four pieces…Then it becomes four paintings…and nobody is supposed to ask “What does it mean?” Meaning has been lost long ago.And the man was immensely happy to have two paintings. He paid for two paintings.Music has fallen very low, dance has fallen very low…almost to the state where they can only be described as disgusting, ugly. They have taken the color of sexuality. All your music, all your dance, is nothing but sex provoking. You enjoy them because they are sex provoking.It is a kind of subtle masturbation. This is the first time that art has fallen so low.Looking at an ancient Zen painting, or Zen poetry, or a Sufi story, you are transported higher, you don’t fall downwards. They touch higher centers of your being.Even if a man like Gautam Buddha, who does not paint, who does not compose music or poetry, who does nothing that is thought of as a creative activity…creative arts…. But the way he is, the way he speaks, or the way he remains silent is in itself a poetry, a painting, a sculpture.In Indian temples you will find the statues of Buddha, and in Jaina temples you will find statues of Mahavira and twenty-three other Jaina prophets. You can’t make any distinction between those twenty-four tirthankaras and Gautam Buddha, except one. Buddha has his hair piled up like a crown, and the Jaina tirthankaras don’t have hair. Otherwise, you cannot make any distinction, their posture is the same….And twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas – even Jainas cannot make any distinction, so they have to invent symbols for each. Underneath the statue there is the symbol line for Mahavira, and other symbols. So if you ask, “Who is this?” they will look at the symbol and they can tell you. Otherwise there is no difference.I was visiting a great Jaina temple….The priest was a very learned man. And I asked him, “Can you imagine twenty-four persons over a long stretch of time being exactly the same?”He said, “I have never asked myself the question, and nobody has inquired about it. This is certainly impossible to have twenty-four persons exactly the same: their eyes, their noses, their faces, their bodies…”I told him, “You should find out.”The next day when I was leaving, he said, “I could not sleep the whole night. I don’t see any way to find out; the scriptures say nothing. And your question is absolutely relevant, it cannot be denied.”I told him, “You don’t be worried because I know the answer. These are not the statues representing personal identities, these are the statues representing the qualities of meditation, silence, beauty, centering. And it was good that the sculptors never bothered about physical differences – they have looked at the spiritual similarities. These statues are not of the physical bodies, the physical bodies cannot be the same for twenty-four persons. They have looked at the spiritual qualities.”It is certainly an experience to sit silently in a Jaina temple watching a statue of Mahavira, or any other prophet – just looking at it. And you will be surprised that you start feeling certain qualities – tremendous silence, a great beauty. The centering of the statue somehow creates a synchronicity – you start feeling centered, calm and quiet.Jaina temples are the best in India. Neither Hindu temples nor Buddhist temples can compare with the spiritual quality that Jaina painters, sculptors, architects, have brought. Hindus don’t have great temples. Buddhists must have had at one time, but their temples and their statues have been destroyed. In fact, they were the first in the whole world to make the statue of Buddha.At least in the East no one had seen statues before Gautam Buddha’s were made. That’s why in Arabic, in Persian, in Urdu, the name for image or statue is but, which is just a slight change of buddha. They were the only statues. In these languages the temple is called butkhana. That means the place of the buddha, the house of the buddha. The word buddha became synonymous with statue.There are big temples in China, in Japan and other countries, but Jaina temples have certainly a unique quality. The reason I can understand – the Jainas are the richest people in India. They could manage billions of dollars to make their temples. Hindus are poor in that way; they could not manage. And Buddhists did not live in India for long – only five hundred years after Buddha. And for three hundred years they worshipped, not the statue of Buddha, but only the statue of the bodhi tree.For three hundred years Buddhist temples had only the bodhi tree carved in marble. There was nobody sitting underneath. And that was very symbolic and very significant. Buddha was not even represented. The meaning is clear-cut – that sitting under this tree, Buddha disappeared as a human being and became a universal force. Now, how to make an image of a universal force? So for three hundred years they were not creating it for a very valid reason.But slowly, slowly they found that over three hundred years people lost the idea of Buddha. There was only a tree. Nobody remembered that somebody had sat under the tree who had become so absent that he could not be sculpted.At that very time, Alexander the Great came to India. His face was beautiful, his body was beautiful – and all the Buddhist statues resemble Alexander the Great as far as the physical shape is concerned. They had no pictures, no paintings of Buddha, no idea how he looked. But seeing Alexander, they thought that he must have looked better than this man. He comes very close.So none of those statues of Buddha resembles Buddha. We don’t know how he looked: the statues are of Alexander the Great. And he had a Greek beauty – a very handsome man, a very disciplined body. They changed the statue totally. They took the outer form of Alexander’s body. He was not a meditator, he was not a silent man, he was not compassionate, he was as cruel as one can be. He was murderous. He was so full of desire that he wanted to conquer the whole world.He was just the opposite of Buddha, who was desireless, silent, the most cultured man humanity has produced. So they have taken the outer shape, but they have put all the qualities…Sitting before Buddha’s statue you will find the same happening to you, and this I call objective art. It is not your crazy mind and its crazy ideas.The people who created these statues must have been meditators, otherwise it is impossible for them to bring to marble those qualities. It is really a great, unbelievable phenomenon that they have changed stones into silence, into sermons….In the West, whatever is happening in the world of art is crazy. It will remain crazy and will go more and more mad and will go on falling lower and lower, unless these people are introduced to meditation. That will help their own individuality and that will help to transform the very quality of their art.Without meditation they are just spent cartridges. They will go on repeating what they have been doing and they will do all kinds of stupid things. They will make collages…cuttings from newspapers and magazines, and joining them…. They will show their craziness in every way.In American jails I saw, in almost every cell in all the five jails I was in, they had cut naked women in ugly postures from magazines – which to a refined mind, to somebody who knows something of silence and peace, will not look sexual. They will look simply perverted. But the whole of the walls of the cells were covered with all kinds of pictures.In the cell in the first prison I had an inmate with me. He had all those pictures. He said, “Please forgive me, but what to do in this jail? So I have put these pictures…”I said, “It doesn’t matter. If you enjoy them, it is perfectly okay. And I am not going to be here for long – maybe one day or two days. Don’t get disturbed by me.”And in the morning I saw him kneeling on the ground, putting his head on the bed, on the Bible, and praying to God. Then I tapped on his shoulder and I said, “This is stupid.”And he said, “You did not object to those nude women and you are objecting to my prayer to God…?”I said, “There is a contradiction. Can’t you see? You should stop at least one activity. And I think those pictures are more important. You have put them on the walls to look at for twenty-four hours, and this you do for five minutes in the morning…this is not so important.”He said, “You must be crazy.”I said, “If I was not crazy, why should I be here? But you tell me which is really important – these five minutes…? And I have been watching you. Although you are putting your head on the Bible, you are looking at the pictures. And you call me crazy!”He said, “That is true. This I am doing just because I have been told from my childhood that he is the savior. I have been five years in this jail and I have to be here ten years more. So I was just telling him, ‘You are compassionate, and you know how my family must be suffering, so save me from this misery.’ Ten years is too long. Somehow I managed to pass five, but I don’t think I will be able to survive ten years.”I said, “That’s perfectly okay. But while you are saying that, why are you looking at those pictures? If you go on doing that Jesus will not hear you, because you are not interested in Jesus or his Bible. You are simply trying to use him, but your real interest is on the wall.”He had at least fifteen pictures cut out of magazines and pasted there. And then I found that in almost every cell there were the same kind of pictures.These people in the West, if they don’t want to go mad, they will have to go into meditation. They have more potential than ordinary people, but it is a strange thing that artists are very egoistic. They may be following any kind of art but they are very egoistic, and that ego prevents them, and that ego is going to cause their madness.So whether they listen or not…if they don’t want to listen to the word meditation, they can use other words – use witnessing, use awareness, use alertness, use consciousness – they all mean the same.Perhaps meditation reminds them of religion and they have reacted against it – they have thrown the baby out with the bath water.Use other words: consciousness, awareness, watchfulness…which do not have much association with religion.Use some Eastern terms for which they have no antagonism: nothingness, nirvana…. Perhaps they may get interested – “What is nirvana? What is nothingness?” Then you can explain to them exactly what meditation is.Use any name, but meditation has to be introduced into their lives to save them, and to save through them many others who will be corrupted by their art.

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The Sword and the Lotus 01-25Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Sword and the Lotus 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Good evening. Islam has offered it with the Koran, and Christianity with the Bible. What is your offer?They have offered to you because they wanted to purchase you. It was an insult to your humanity.The very effort to convert anybody is trespassing his spiritual territory. It is an effort to enslave you through some doctrines, logic, but basically it is not a spiritual endeavor, it is political, the politics of numbers.I am not a politician, and I am not interested in converting anybody. I don’t have any religion to which I can convert you. I cannot give you anything that you have not already got.So my approach is totally different. I take away from you that which you don’t have, but which you believe that you have – your ego, your desires, your jealousies, your anger, your cruelties – all that prevents you from finding your real treasure.I want to take away these shadows from you which are not authentic, which have been imposed on you by others. You are a victim. And I want to give you nothing but your own being, which you have already got but you have forgotten it. All that I can do is to help you remember it.I am reminded of a very famous parable….There was, in Japan, a thief who was known all over the country as the master thief because he had never been caught. And he never stole anything from anybody without warning him ahead of time. Even the emperors, the great warriors, the samurai – he would inform them, “Tonight, be aware! I am coming.”And still he was never caught. In fact, a time came when people started feeling proud that the master thief had chosen them. It was a great credit, because the master thief was not going to choose somebody ordinary.The man was getting old. His son asked him, “Your whole life you have been one of the most famous men. Everybody knows that you are the master thief, but nobody has been able to catch you red-handed. Now you are old and some day you will die. Won’t you teach me your art?”The old man said, “If it was an art I would have taught you already without your asking. It is neither a craft nor a skill nor an art – it is a knack. If you are willing, I am ready to give you a chance. Perhaps you can get hold of the knack.”The young man was enthusiastic and he said, “I am absolutely ready.” But he was unaware of what was going to happen….That very night the father said, “Then come and follow me.”The old man was almost beyond eighty. The young man was not more than thirty – healthy, strong. But out of fear and nervousness – it was not a cold night – he was shivering. But he was amazed that his father was going ahead of him so normally, so casually, like somebody going for a morning walk. And they were going to the king’s palace, which is the most dangerous place to enter.And then to steal, to get away…the young man was already losing hope. The old man dug a hole in the palace wall, but with such care, with such awareness that there was no noise at all. Brick by brick he removed…and the young man standing by his side could not believe that you could do such a thing in somebody else’s house in the night. And the father was doing it as if it was his own house.The hole was made, the father went in and he asked the young man to come in and follow. Now he was repenting why in the first place he had asked to learn this art – this was dangerous! “I cannot imagine how I am going to get back home. And this man has chosen the king’s palace to teach me. He is dangerous, he has no love for his own son. He should have started from a small place – some poor man’s hut.”The whole house was surrounded by guards, but the old man went on working. He had many keys, he managed to enter to the very innermost room of the palace and he told the young man, “Go inside the cupboard because I know the king has immensely precious treasures studded with diamonds, emeralds and other precious stones. So you collect as many you can and I will wait outside.”The man went into the cupboard. He could not believe his eyes – he had never seen such jewelry. But while he was looking at the treasures the old man gave him a shock. He closed the door of the cupboard, locked it, and shouted loudly, “Thief, thief!” He ran out from the same hole he had come in, leaving the young man locked inside the cupboard.You can imagine what happened to the young man. He wanted to kill his father! But he had no hope that he would ever see him again. He would go directly to jail for his whole life. It was such an unfortunate moment that he had asked…but now nothing could be done.The whole house was awake. Servants were running here and there, and they found the hole in the wall. It was certain a thief had been in. They found all the doors open.One maidservant went, following the doors which were open, and reached to the innermost chamber – there was nobody. The man was inside the cupboard but he could see that some light had come in; the maidservant was carrying a candle in her hand. He could hear her footsteps, and suddenly he started making scratching noises as if some rat was inside the cupboard. He was amazed at himself, what he was doing. And the maidservant, thinking that there was a rat inside, unlocked the door. And as she opened the door, the young man blew out the candle, pushed the maidservant, ran away as fast as he could, and jumped out of the hole. A crowd of guards, and the neighbors, and the master of the house, and other servants…all were following him with torches in their hands.He was a champion, a national champion in running. But he was amazed, he had never run this fast, even while he was competing for a championship, a national championship. He was running at least four times faster. It was a question of life and death, not just winning a trophy.But he was afraid they would catch him anyhow. Where could he go? If he went to his house he would be caught. But as he was running, he came across a well and he saw a rock. He took the rock, threw it into the well and ran away. All this happened not through thinking, neither the noise he had made in the cupboard…because the mind can only do something which it knows already. Now this was an absolutely new situation – the computer of the mind could not function.In a new situation the mind stops because it has no answer. Ask the old questions and it is a great scholar.Nor had he ever run with such a great speed. His mind was not doing it; it was something deeper than the mind, greater than the mind, more vital than the mind – it was his basic energy. This is what is called running “from the very guts.” And then suddenly, when he threw the rock into the well, he was not able to understand what he was doing and why he was doing it. It was all happening – it was not a conclusion of the mind.And because of the noise in the well the whole crowd gathered around thinking that he had jumped into the well. And even though they had torches they were of no use for looking into the well. The well was deep and they would have to wait for the morning. And they thought that now there was no problem either. Either the man would die, or if he survived the whole night, in the morning they could catch hold of him. “Just keep the well guarded” – and they all went back home.The young man reached his home. He could not believe that his father was fast asleep, snoring. He looked at his father and he thought, “What to say to this old man?” He was angry, but he was also amazed that he had put his only son in such a dangerous situation. And still he was not tense, he was already fast asleep.He shook him, he pulled his blanket…The father, without opening his eyes, said, “So you are back. Good, my boy. Just go to sleep. I know you want to tell the whole story now, but there is no need, you are back. I have understood the whole story. You did know the knack of being a master thief. It is not a question of the mind, it is something deeper than the mind. Now go to sleep. In the morning we will discuss in detail what happened.”He was not even interested to know. He didn’t open his eyes.It is simply a knack to make you remember yourself. If it was an art it would have been very easy – a craft, very easy. Because it is a knack, it is the most difficult and mysterious phenomenon.The master has to create devices in which he hopes it may happen. If it does not happen, he creates another device. The real master is nothing but a very creative artist about devices.And some day or other, some device or other succeeds, and suddenly your mind stops. Suddenly, you become aware that you are not the mind. Just one moment’s taste is needed – you have found the key.Then you can go to the same space again and again. And slowly, slowly that space becomes your very being, your very breathing. I don’t have a Holy Bible to give to you, I don’t have a holy Koran to give to you, because I don’t believe that any book is holy. All books are written by man. The holy books are only an exploitation, cheating. None of them is written by God. They are not even first-class literature.I don’t have any holy book to give to you. My hands are empty. I don’t have a sword in my hand, because fear cannot make you self-realized. Fear can reduce you into a slave. Fear cannot help you to remember your being.Neither have I bread and butter in my hand, because I don’t want any poverty on the earth. The religions who are increasing their numbers by giving bread, by giving medicines to the poor, opening orphanages, converting the untouchables, opening schools and hospitals – on the surface it seems they are doing great service.It is not a service, for two reasons: one, their motivation is to increase their numbers. They are purchasing you very cheaply and in such a way that you don’t even feel that you are standing in a slave market – that you are being auctioned. And secondly, it is not service, there is another motivation. The more Christians you create, the more virtue you will be gathering in the other world. The more people you make Mohammedans, your paradise becomes more certain.So it is greed on their part. And it is politics, because as their numbers grow they start throwing pressure upon governments, upon nations.Just now the pope has been here. In his first day’s speech in New Delhi he was very much disappointed. It is reported that he made the remark that this has been the worst day in all his world travels. Now, a spiritual person does not get disappointed because only twenty thousand people have turned up to listen to him. And even they started leaving in the middle. Up to now he has been touring Catholic countries, so there were millions of people attending. In fact, these twenty thousand people had not come to listen to him, they had just come out of curiosity.But why should he be disappointed? You are disappointed only if you have a certain desire; otherwise, whether anybody comes or not it makes no difference.In that meeting he remarked in a very subtle, diplomatic, indirect way against the Hindu caste system, that all human beings should be treated equally. He is not aware or he is lying, because the sudras, the untouchables who have become Catholic Christians, they are not being allowed to worship with all the other Christians – they are segregated. They have been given different small churches to worship separately. Now the man had some nerve to condemn Hindus.And the sudras who became converted to Christianity became converted only on the grounds that they were promised that they would be treated equally. And they are not treated equally – they cannot even worship in the other churches, with the other Christians.So they are Christian sudras; there is no change at all. It has not been a gain in any way. It has been a loss, because when they were Hindu sudras the Indian constitution was giving them special privileges. In jobs there were limited quotas for them. Whether they were more proficient or not, those limited places were given to them. In universities, in colleges, they were given special scholarships. Whether they deserved them or not, that was not the question. They have suffered for centuries, and now some compensation has to be made. By becoming Christians they have lost all those privileges, because they are no longer Hindus. And as far as their being sudras is concerned, they are still sudras. So they have been cheated badly.And the pope had not the guts to say directly to the Hindus, “Your caste system is inhuman.” He did not mention Hinduism. A criticism has to be direct and clear, honest and sincere. Why was he afraid of making a direct criticism? He was afraid because he was going to move around India, then everywhere he would be condemned and protested against because the caste system is the very corner stone of Hinduism. It is ugly, it should not be there, but even critics are such cowards.And you hope these people can give you spiritual experience? They don’t have it themselves. Their spirituality is just their seniority; it is bureaucracy. It is not that somebody becomes a pope because he is enlightened, he becomes a pope because he is the seniormost priest. They cannot give you anything. Yes, they can force you or purchase you.As far as I am concerned I have no religion to convert you, I have only an experience to share with you and perhaps you can get the knack of it. Sometimes just listening to me, a moment of silence may descend on you and in that silence you may see that you are not only the thoughts that pass through you, but an awareness.The moment you become alert to your awareness you have found the key. Then it is up to you to use it as much as you can. And whenever you have time, space, don’t waste it in stupid things – playing cards, watching a football match, watching two idiots wrestling…Stop all that nonsense, that is not going to help you grow.Use all this time, energy, just sitting silently, enjoying the peace that descends when you are only a watcher. And it goes on deepening, it takes you ultimately to your innermost core. And to experience the center of your being is to experience also the center of the whole universe.We are different only on the periphery.At the center we are one, one with the stars far away, one with the smallest leaf of grass. In existence there is no inequality.Knowing this, experiencing this, you don’t become a Mohammedan, you don’t become a Christian, you don’t become a Hindu. You simply become religious – without any adjective. I am against all the adjectives; just being religious is enough. You don’t have a Hindu chemistry, a Mohammedan mathematics, a Buddhist geography…that would be nonsense.You don’t have a Hindu love, a Mohammedan love, a Christian love…Love is simply love, it needs no adjectives. So is spirituality, so is religiousness.I want you to be simply religious.Osho,I am puzzled as to why I have identified myself with this particular body and ego. And if my essence is in the universal consciousness, what keeps me from seeing through the eyes of other beings?An old businessman was dying…. It was evening time, the sun was setting and it was becoming darker. Suddenly, the old man opened his eyes and asked his wife who was holding his hand, sitting by his left side, “Where is my eldest son?”The wife was surprised. This was the first time he had ever inquired so lovingly about the eldest son. He had never bothered about his children – he had no time.The wife said, “Don’t be worried. He is sitting on your right side.”He said, “Then what about the second son?”She said, “He is also sitting on your right side, by your eldest son’s side.”At that moment, the dying man, who had only few breaths left, suddenly came to life. He had not been sitting for months, he was so sick and so weak. But he managed to sit up and ask, “Where is my youngest son?”The wife said, “Don’t get so worried. They are all here – he is just sitting by your feet.”He said, “And you say to me not to be worried…! If they are all here, then who is tending the shop?”And the man fell down and died with heart failure.What do you think this man is going to be in his next life?The law of existence is that whatever essential desire is at the moment of your death, that becomes the seed of your next life.It will be easy to understand it this way – you can even experiment….When you are going to sleep, just watch what is the last thought before you fall asleep. And then when you wake up, remember what is the first thought. You will be surprised – they are exactly the same thought.The thought that you fall into sleep with is the thought that you wake up with. The same is true about death, because death is a little longer life, a little deeper sleep, but the law is the same. Whatever is the last desire hovering on your mind and being while you are dying will be the first when you wake up in another life. This will create the passage and the form of your birth.The question is that if consciousness is universal then why can’t you see from other people’s eyes?Consciousness is universal, but for you it is only a principle, not an experience. Principles are good if you are sitting an examination; they are of no use as far as existence is concerned. If it was your experience that you have a universal consciousness then you would be able to see from other people’s eyes too. In fact, they would not be other people any longer.I will tell you one incident that happened in Ramakrishna’s life. It is not a story, it is a historical fact….Ramakrishna died from cancer of the throat. The cancer became so big that it clogged the whole throat. He could not eat anything, he could not drink anything. It was really a tragic scene for his disciples.They all persuaded Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s very close disciple, to ask Ramakrishna, “Why don’t you ask God. If you ask, that very moment the cancer will disappear.”He tried many times. He would close his eyes, tears of joy and ecstasy would flow, and when he opened his eyes he would say, “It was so beautiful.”But they would ask, “Have you asked? For what did you go into meditation?”He said, “This is a difficult thing. The moment I reach into deep meditation I forget all about the body, all about the cancer. I even forget all about God. It is so ecstatic and so blissful.”Then they all approached Ramakrishna’s wife, Sharda, and asked her, “Now, only you may be able to persuade him. We have failed.”Sharda had never asked for anything in her whole life. And many times Ramakrishna had told her, “You have never asked for anything. You are a strange wife. Every wife asks for something, goes on asking continuously; her desires are never fulfilled.”Sharda said, “Finding you I have found everything, but if you insist then promise me just one time, if I ask something you will have to fulfill it.” And he promised.So all the disciples said, “This is the time. What are you waiting for? He is dying, and he has a promise to fulfill. So you go and ask him.”She asked. Ramakrishna closed his eyes. This time there were no tears, no ecstasy. He was simply calm and quiet, and then he opened his eyes and said, “Sharda, you will have to forgive me, I cannot fulfill your demand. The reason is, I have asked the ultimate reality to remove this cancer because my people are unnecessarily suffering because I cannot eat, cannot drink, and I received the answer, ‘Ramakrishna, don’t be childish. It is time for you to start eating from other people’s throats! It is time for you to start drinking from other people’s throats!’“So you have to forgive me but I have received the answer. Now all the throats here are mine, so don’t be worried about me. Now I am no longer an individual. Soon this body will be gone. But even before the body is gone, I am already one with the universal existence. Your throats are mine and your eyes are mine, and it was certainly stupid of me to ask. But because I had given the promise, I had to ask.”Ramakrishna died within three or four days. But before he died he made it clear to everybody: “Remember, when you are eating, don’t eat anything that I don’t like, don’t drink anything that I have prohibited you, because now I will be drinking from your throats and I will be eating from your throats.”On his death he transformed thousands of his disciples who were secretly smoking, who were drinking alcohol once in a while. Now it was impossible. Now you could not deceive because Ramakrishna was within you.Your question is very significant but it is only theoretical. You are asking why you cannot see from other people’s eyes. You are still surrounded by your own ego, your own desires. You are living in a small cage, made by your own hands. You will have to come out of it. You will have to spread yourself all over existence, then perhaps your question will be answered. I cannot answer it because it is only theoretical.While Ramakrishna was alive…another incident will help you to understand….One day they were crossing over the Ganges from one side to the other side with at least thirty disciples in a boat. And suddenly, in the middle of the Ganges, Ramakrishna started shouting, “Why are you beating me? Don’t beat me, it hurts.”And the disciples said, “What are you saying? We are your disciples all around and in the middle of the Ganges, who else can beat you?”But tears were coming from his eyes and he showed his back. They took off his shawl to see his back. There were scratches and blood was oozing as if somebody had beaten him badly with a stick. They could not believe what had happened. And as they reached to the other side they found a crowd. A sudra, an untouchable, had touched a brahmin, and the brahmin had given him a good beating.And the most surprising thing was that when they removed the sudra’s clothes and looked at the backs of both Ramakrishna and the sudra, the scratches were exactly the same; the blood was oozing in exactly the same way.They asked Ramakrishna, “What happened? This man has been beaten, but why have you got his beatings on your back?”Ramakrishna said, “He is a sudra, but he is far more developed than this brahmin. He has always been coming to me, and I have found such a deep intimacy with him.”In English there are three words: sympathy, antipathy and empathy. Sympathy means feeling with you, in your sadness, feeling your sadness; antipathy means feeling happy that you are sad; and the third word, empathy, means not just feeling like someone else, but actually living it the way he is living it.If he has a wound, in empathy you will have a similar wound; if he dies, you will die, you have become so connected with him.And Ramakrishna said, “This is a lesson for you. You are my disciples, but this would not have happened if any one of you was beaten. This man comes only when everybody is gone so nobody sees that a sudra has come. And slowly, slowly such a deep synchronicity has evolved that although he was beaten, I was beaten also.”The day Ramakrishna died that sudra also died.These are historical facts for which there were thousands of eyewitnesses. It was not very long ago, just one hundred years have passed….It is possible to see from somebody else’s eyes, and it is possible to live through somebody’s heart, but for that you will have to withdraw all your egoistic barriers. You will have to go so deep in meditation that you become universal.Osho,This question is from a lady who is staying here at the hotel…Where is she?She has left; she has left the discourse.Leave the question. That’s what my feeling was – that the lady has left. The question cannot be answered.Osho,Can the watcher, the consciousness, ever be judgmental about what he sees, or is it still the ego judging the ego, the mind condemning itself?Consciousness is never judgmental. Consciousness is only a mirror. The mirror reflects, but it never gives any judgment. A beautiful woman may be standing in front of it or an ugly woman may be standing in front of it. It reflects both without any distinction. It has no judgment. Its function is to reflect exactly, authentically, whatever is in front of it – a sinner, a saint…Consciousness simply reflects – that’s why it becomes very difficult to understand people of consciousness, people of awareness.In Gautam Buddha’s time there was a man who was very angry, violent, and for some reason he became so murderous that he took a vow that he would kill one thousand people and cut off their heads. And just to remember how many he had finished off, he would also cut from each, one finger. And out of those fingers he made a garland – just to keep count. He was not very educated. One thousand was a big number. And it would take years to kill one thousand people.He moved outside the city and he killed many people, almost nine hundred and ninety-nine. His name became known as Angulimal, the man who wears the garland of fingers.And his terror was so great that the road was no longer functioning – nobody was going on the road where he used to live. Even kings were afraid to move with their armies on that road. A single man had threatened the whole empire.He lived in the empire of Prasenjita. Gautam Buddha was going from Prasenjita’s empire to another empire, and finding a beautiful road absolutely without traffic, he chose it.His disciples said, “What are you doing? Have you not heard about Angulimal? Even his own mother, who used to visit him before, is now afraid to come to see him because he needs only one finger more to complete his garland. And he is such a man he would not even hesitate to cut the head of his own mother. So even his mother is no longer coming to see him. What are you doing?”Gautam Buddha said, “If you had not told me I might have changed the route, but now it is impossible. The man is suffering because he needs one finger, because he needs to cut one head. I have one head and I have ten fingers and if nobody goes on this road then how is that poor man going to fulfill his goal? I am going. If I cannot go then nobody can go.”They could not understand his logic, what he was saying – going by your own hand into death’s mouth…?But when Gautam Buddha said he was going, they had to follow. There was always a competition amongst the followers who remained close to Gautam Buddha, but today it was a different matter! There was a competition for who would remain far away! So there was a big gap between Gautam Buddha and his followers which had never been there before.Angulimal was making his sword more sharp. He was rubbing it on a stone, on a rock, because for many days nobody had come that way and today he saw, from far away in the distance, that a few people were coming. So he was getting ready. He was immensely happy that today his desire would be completed. But as Gautam Buddha came closer, he saw the man – he saw the beauty of the man, he saw the peace and the love and the compassion of the man. And even the man who had killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people without any consideration, hesitated: “This man is not worth killing. The world needs this type of man more and more. I am a sinner, a murderer, but I am not so fallen as to kill this innocent man.”So he shouted at Gautam Buddha, “Listen, don’t move a single foot closer to me! Return back. This is the first time I am allowing someone to go back alive. Perhaps you are unaware of me, I am Angulimal, and look at my garland of fingers. I have killed nine hundred and ninety-nine people. And if you step one inch more then I will not take into consideration who you are. I can see you are no ordinary man. I have killed kings, but I have never seen such beauty and such radiance; I have never seen such eyes so penetrating. You are unique. Please listen to me and go back. Don’t force me to kill you.”Gautam Buddha said, “Angulimal, you are wrong. I stopped moving almost thirty years back. The day my mind stopped, all movement stopped. It is desire that keeps people moving. I don’t have any desire, how can I move? I am not moving, Angulimal, you are moving. Your mind has so many thoughts, so many desires, you are constantly moving even while you are asleep. So you stop! I am not going to stop because I have already stopped thirty years ago.”Angulimal said, “You are not only innocent, beautiful, and a unique being, you are also mad! You are coming closer to me – I am standing, and you are saying that I am moving and you are not moving.”“But it is no joke,” Buddha said. “You have to understand it clearly.”Angulimal shouted, “You see this sword shining in the sunlight? Soon it will cut your head off. Listen to me!”Buddha said, “I cannot do anything. One cannot stop twice. You have just to forgive me. Everything has stopped. Time has stopped, mind has stopped…everything has stopped for me. For thirty years there has been no movement.”And he went on coming closer to Angulimal. Finally, Buddha was just standing in front of him and he told Angulimal, “If you want you can cut my head; in fact, I have come only for you. Hearing that you have been waiting for years only for one head, this is too much; somebody should take compassion. And I have no use for this head, I have no use for this body. I can live without this body. You can have the head, you can have my fingers…whatever you want…. But before you do it, would you respect the wish of a dying man?”Angulimal said, “Yes, I would not have listened to anybody, but you are a man of tremendous courage. You have even made me afraid. Whatever you wish I will fulfill.”Gautam Buddha said, “Then cut a branch of the tree under which we are standing.”Angulimal immediately cut a branch with his sword and said, “Strange, you are proving stranger and stranger! What kind of wish is this?”Buddha said, “It is only half of the wish. The other half is: now join it back.”Angulimal said, “My God, I have come across a madman! How can I join it?”Buddha said, “If you cannot join it, then what right have you to cut it? Secondly, by cutting you think you are a great warrior? Any child can do that. If you have some intelligence and courage, join it. That will prove your mettle – not cutting.”Angulimal said, “That is impossible.”Gautam Buddha said, “Then drop that garland of nine hundred and ninety-nine people – throw it away. Throw this sword. These are not for really brave people; these are for cowards to hide their cowardice. I will make you a really brave person.”Angulimal said, “That I can understand. You are the most brave man I have ever come across.”He threw the sword, he threw the garland of fingers, and he fell at the feet of Gautam Buddha and asked him, “Please initiate me. I know you cannot be anybody other than Gautam the Buddha. I have heard about Gautam the Buddha and I can see that nobody else is standing in front of me.”Buddha initiated Angulimal.Now this I say is a man of awareness – he has no discrimination. He did not say, “You are such a sinner. You have killed so many people single-handedly that no murderer can compete with you…in the whole history of man, single-handedly. And now you want to become a saint?”No, he gave him initiation.His disciples could not believe that he would do it. He had refused great scholars, he had refused great pundits, and he was not refusing a sinner.It was getting late, so they had to come back to Prasenjita’s capital. Prasenjita heard what had happened. He himself was so afraid of Angulimal he had stopped traveling on that road. And he was very much worried because Angulimal was so close to the palace and that man was simply mad.Prasenjita came the next day to see. He had always respected Gautam Buddha. He had always come to listen to him. It was the first time he came with his sword – you don’t go to listen to an enlightened man with a sword. And Prasenjita said, “Forgive me. I had to bring this sword because I hear you have initiated Angulimal” – and he was so nervous and perspiring.And Buddha said, “Yes. But there is no need to bring a sword. Angulimal is now a sannyasin, a bhikkshu. You are not to be afraid of him.”But Prasenjita said, “That’s okay. Where is he? I just want to see his face. That man has been a terror my whole life.”Angulimal was sitting just by the side of Gautam Buddha. And Buddha said, “Look at this person – this is Angulimal.”And hearing the name of Angulimal and seeing him, Prasenjita immediately pulled his sword. His name was such a fear, such a terror.Buddha laughed. Angulimal laughed; he said, “Keep the sword in the sheath. If you are such a swordsman, then you should have come while I was Angulimal. Now I am a sannyasin. Keep it in the sheath!” And the way he said this, Prasenjita had to keep it in. Angulimal was, after all, Angulimal. Even the emperor had to follow the order.Buddha said, “Angulimal, you will have to change your tone. You will have to change your ways because now you are a sannyasin. Today you will go begging, and anything can happen because this whole capital has been in terror of you. When you go to beg perhaps you may not get any door open…just the fear…. But don’t feel offended, those poor people can’t see the change. Perhaps they may start taking revenge, but now you have to prove that you are a sannyasin.”Angulimal went ahead. Buddha followed him from far back to see what happened. And actually this is what happened – no door opened; nobody came to give him anything to eat. People started throwing stones, standing on their terraces, on their roofs – still afraid, not coming close. But they had piled up stones on their roofs, on their terraces, and they were throwing stones. Finally, Angulimal fell on the road and they continued to throw stones. He was bleeding all over the body.When Buddha arrived he was covered with blood and stones. He pulled him out of the stones – it was his last moment. Buddha said, “Angulimal, you have proved that you are a sannyasin. You have proved that a sinner can become a sannyasin in a single moment. You lived like a sinner but you are dying like a saint.”Angulimal touched Buddha’s feet and died.Hundreds of times Buddha was asked, “Why did you initiate a sinner?”And Buddha again and again said, “In my consciousness there is no distinction. The society may call somebody a sinner and somebody a saint – that is their distinction. But my consciousness only reflects the truth behind the mask. And I could see the immense potentiality of the man – wrongly directed. He needed only a slight turn, just a compassionate, loving turn. He proved a better saint than many of my other sannyasins are going to prove. And he was my youngest sannyasin – not even one day old. It was just last evening, yesterday, he was initiated. Only one night has he been with me.”Consciousness is non-judgmental. So whenever you start judging, remember, it is the mind. Whenever you start judging, remember, it is your conditioning, and your conditioning is not very mature.(A woman’s voice is heard to interrupt from the back of the hall.)It is the same lady whose questions I told you that I would answer when she asked a real question about herself. Today she asked – perhaps with a desire that she would get an answer.I chose her question to be answered, but before answering her question I had to talk about the pope, and she left immediately….(Again the woman interrupts.)Then come here.(There is much laughter as the woman comes to the front.)I have been waiting for you. Give her her question.(She reads her question.)Osho,When you spoke to me the other night, you said I was coming closer to a real question. I felt so incredibly excited to hear you speaking to me. This excitement helped me to understand that when I asked about your seemingly insulting remarks, I was asking out of fear. I was afraid you weren't being loving – that if you don't love Polacks, maybe you also don't love me. So I understand that what I wanted to ask was: Do you love me? But whether the answer is yes or no, what does it matter? Isn't the real question: Do I love myself? And that answer is no. And my real fear is that I will never find this love in the deep well from which I should draw nurturing and love for myself. There is only a mud puddle in which I wallow.I hear you say I must walk the path alone – I am so afraid. While traveling this river of existence, I have been battered against huge boulders and am afraid to travel any farther. Sometimes I can feel that this fear is my own creation but it is so strong it stops my breath. I do not want to give up. Is there any help you can give me?Sit down…(Again much laughter from everyone.)I can see the sincerity of your question. I can also see why you became offended when I criticized some people. You thought that perhaps if I am not respectful to the so-called great people, I will not be loving to you either. That is where you misunderstood me.I have not insulted, not criticized a single ordinary human being. I have certainly criticized people who are pretenders, who are not showing their original face, but are covering it with a mask of superiority. Somebody has to pull their mask. It is not insulting, it is not disrespectful. In fact, they also will be grateful one day that somebody pulled their mask and revealed their original face, because only your original face can grow. The mask cannot grow; the mask is dead. And your original face is almost forgotten. You have not only deceived others, you have deceived yourself too.The most neglected thing in the world is your original being, and that’s why there is so much fear.The original being has no fear. The problem is that our original being remains retarded, and our physical body goes on growing old and we go on pretending things which we are not.I hit only when I see somebody is carrying a big ego – it needs to be punctured. But you don’t have any ego – you need not be afraid of me. I have never hurt anybody unless I see that somebody is carrying a dangerous, canceric ego with him. Then I have to cut that ego. And of course the job of a spiritual surgeon is a thankless job.Your fear is out of your conditioning. I was hitting the pope, Christianity, and those are your conditionings. Somewhere, deep down, you were also feeling hurt, your conditioning was also shaken. It is your conditioning that is creating all the troubles for you, and you are protecting it.You say you were afraid that I would not love you, that I would not say yes as far as love is concerned. Because of the fear you have already protected yourself in the question. You have to see it – just seeing is all that is needed. You have to see that on the one hand you want to be loved – who will not want to be loved…?You want to be loved, but you are afraid perhaps my answer may be no, and that will be insulting, so you protect yourself beforehand. You continue the question, that does it matter whether I say yes or not? If it does not matter, why do you mention it at all? It matters – we have to look deeply into our questions – otherwise you would not have mentioned it. It matters immensely, but you are afraid of the no. And who knows, it is better to keep yourself protected. And the protection is in the next sentence – does it matter whether I say no or yes? I say to you, it matters, and I say yes.I have never said no to anybody, because love is not something to me as a relationship. It is something more of a state of my being. I cannot do anything but love. Even the people I criticize – I love them, otherwise I wouldn’t take so much trouble to criticize them. It is not that I don’t love them and that’s why I criticize them. I love them, and I would like them to be more authentic, because they can help humanity immensely by being more authentic.If the pope drops his ego he will help millions of Catholics to drop their egos. But if he goes on pretending to be infallible, a representative of God, he is helping other people also to have big egos because their religious leader is in direct communication with God. Because their religious leader is great, they are great.The master is great, hence the disciple is great. Every disciple wants his master to be the greatest master in the world for the simple reason that is the only way that he can be the greatest disciple in the world. He is not worried about the master! But behind him, in his shadow…I was visiting one of the shankaracharyas, one of the Hindu leaders. He was sitting on a high pedestal. By the side of his throne – Hindu shankaracharyas sit on a throne. By the side there was a small table lower than his pedestal on which was sitting an old man, also a Hindu sannyasin.As I went in there were at least two hundred people gathered to see what would conspire between me and the shankaracharya. The shankaracharya said to me, “You will be happy to know that this old man who is sitting by my side is so humble that he always keeps his table lower than mine.”I said, “If he is really humble then the people who are sitting on the floor are more humble. If this is the sign of humility, then this man is just middle class. The first-class humble people are sitting on the floor. And if he wants to be more humble he should dig a ditch and sit in the ditch – the deeper the ditch the better! Then he will be really humble. And if he is humble by sitting just four inches below you, what about you? You are trying to introduce me to this man but you have forgotten that you are sitting higher than him, you are sitting higher than everybody. If, just by sitting higher or lower, people become humble or egoist, then…”A spider was just above his head. I said, “That spider seems to be the greatest guru in the world. He is just sitting on your head.”He was very embarrassed. Still he continued, “This man was the chief justice of the Supreme Court; he is no ordinary man.”I said, “After renouncing the world, after renouncing everything, he still remembers that he was the chief justice of the Supreme Court? And it seems whether he remembers it or not, you are feeling very gratified that you have a disciple who was the chief justice of the Supreme Court. You are enjoying it. This enjoyment, this nourishment is for the ego. And I want you to be aware that this man is sitting just four inches below you waiting for you to be dead. The moment you are dead he will be sitting in your place. Naturally he is the successor, nobody else is sitting so close to you as he is.”I said to the retired chief justice of the Supreme Court, “If you have any understanding, just get down from your place and sit on the ground.”But he would not move from there.I said, “Is there some trouble, do you need somebody to move you? Are you paralyzed? Are you deaf? Are you hearing me or not?”And I told the shankaracharya, “Even in the name of religion you go on creating hierarchies. The same kind of bureaucracy as there is in politics, you create in churches. But you have some place in that hierarchy so you don’t want to lose your place. And you are always hoping to get higher. But this is the same ego, the same trip, the same number.”I was hitting the pope for your sake because the pope is not here. But the conditioning of the Christian mind is here, and that conditioning has to be broken.Fearlessness is the basic quality of a religious man. But all the religions are trying to make you fearful, afraid of doing something wrong, and particularly Christianity more than any other. All the other religions of the world have a hell for the people who are not following their code of conduct, their prescribed rules – they will be thrown into hell. Only Christianity is a religion whose hell is eternal. It is better to get into anybody else’s religion and their hell because that hell is for a time according to your sins. Then you will get out of it.But from the Christian hell you cannot get out. Once you have fallen into it you have fallen forever. And this is simply absurd, so absurd that one of the most significant philosophers of Europe, Bertrand Russell, had to write a book called, Why I Am Not A Christian. He was born a Christian, but as he became aware of all the things – these are so absurd…He was a mathematician, one of the greatest mathematicians. He has written a book, Principia Mathematica, which is thought to be the greatest book ever written on mathematics. Nobody reads it – it is difficult to read it, because just to prove that two plus two is equal to four, you have to read one hundred and sixty-five pages. Then the conclusion comes that certainly two plus two is four. A very intricate and complex argumentation – one hundred and sixty-five pages only for this small thing. The whole book is one thousand pages.Why did Bertrand Russell have to write a book called, Why I Am Not A Christian? In the many things that he puts in it, this is one: Christians have only one life; Hindus, Jainas, Buddhists have millions of lives. It is possible for a Hindu in millions of lives to commit so many sins that he may go to hell for millions of years.But for a Christian who has only a life of seventy years, eighty years, Bertrand Russell says, “Even if I go on committing sin day and night without sleeping, continuously for eighty years sinning and sinning, then too eternal hell is not fair. As a punishment you could put me there for eighty years…eighty years I was committing sins. You can put me there for eighty years, one hundred and sixty years, but you cannot put me for eternity. How could I commit so many sins to deserve eternal hell?”None of the popes, none of the Christian theologians have answered the book because there is no answer – the thing is so clear.Bertrand Russell says, “As far as I am concerned, if I count all the sins that I have committed and all the sins that I have dreamed about but not committed, then too, the hardest-hearted judge cannot send me to jail for more than four or five years, dreams included. But to send me for millions and millions and millions of years, no end…!”The Christian hell has only an entrance, no exit; you simply get in, and finished! Seventy years’ life – how can you manage to commit so many sins? Bertrand Russell was a mathematician, so he was simply thinking in terms of mathematics – that this was improbable.Your fear has to be understood as basically Christian. The Christian lives in fear, and the more sincere a person is, the more he is in a difficulty because he takes everything very seriously. Disobedience is a sin; not going to confess your sins to the priest is a sin. The sins that you have committed are there; if you are not going to confess them, this is another sin.One day it happened that a Catholic priest was taking confessions….One of his friends was a rabbi, and they were both very much interested in football matches. That evening there was a football match so the rabbi had come to the church to pick up his friend, the priest. But the Catholic priest said, “Wait a few minutes, just a few minutes while I finish with these people. I have just to take their confession and give them some penance.”But in the middle, a phone call came that his wife was seriously sick, suddenly taken sick – maybe a heart attack or something. So the priest said, “You sit, because there is a curtain, and behind the curtain sits the priest. Outside the curtain is the confessor who confesses his sins.”He said to the rabbi, “You please sit here. And you have heard what kind of punishments I give to people: you have to come every Sunday to church, you have to read the Bible every day…things like that. You manage, and I will be coming soon.”Now the rabbi had never done such a thing, he was in a difficulty. A man came and he said, “Forgive me, Father, but I have committed adultery again.”The rabbi asked, “How many times before have you committed adultery?”He said, “Four times.”“And what was the punishment that I gave to you?”He said, “Each time you said, ‘Donate one dollar to the church.’”The rabbi said, “That is very simple. This time you donate ten dollars to the church.”“But,” he said, “I have committed only one adultery.”The rabbi said, “Nine adulteries in advance…No need to come nine times, just give ten dollars to the church.” And he told the priest, “You people don’t know how to do business – when you catch hold of somebody, just one dollar…?”The priest said, “What do you mean?”The rabbi said, “I have taken ten dollars for one adultery – nine dollars in advance. For the nine adulteries that you can commit, you are free.”And the priest said, “What are you saying? This is not the Catholic religion what you are doing!”He said, “I don’t know the Catholic religion. I simply know what business is!”In fact, fear is created by condemning your nature, your biology, your love…everything that gives you joy is condemned. Then naturally you become miserable. On the one hand you are miserable; on the other hand your nature demands its fulfillment. It wants to be loved, it wants to love, but then there is fear.That love is not accepted by the church. You can love Jesus Christ but you cannot love a human being, you cannot love in an ordinary, natural human way. You can have spiritual love as much as you want, but the spiritual love is not going to satisfy you.Spiritual love comes when your natural love reaches to its peaks, when your natural love brings you to such a blissful state that you want to go beyond it. Spiritual love is not against the natural love, it is ahead of natural love. Then there is no fear. Then this world and that world are no longer separated. Then your body and your soul are no longer separated. Then there is nothing like sin.I have never come across anything which I can call sin. There are only mistakes, errors, which can be corrected. You need not be afraid. Remember, one of the greatest needs of human beings is to be loved and to love. If that is not fulfilled you will feel like an island in an ocean – alone, utterly alone, deserted, nobody to share in your pain; nobody to share…nobody to dance with you, to sing with you, nobody to sit in silence with you.I teach human love, because it is in the fulfillment of human love that divine love flowers – not against it, but in absolute continuity with it.You have to be in paradise from this very moment if you want to be in paradise forever. Paradise all the way, not only in the end. Because all the way you are so sad and so miserable and so much in suffering that by the time you reach paradise, I don’t think they are going to allow you in!You should go dancing to God. But if your life is not a dance, how can you go dancing to God?You should go singing to God, but your life has to become a song.I am a pagan without any religion.I teach simple naturalness, spontaneity. And I have seen in thousands of people who have come close to me that their fears have disappeared, their heaven and hell have disappeared, their God has disappeared. All that has remained is their own eternal consciousness, and to know it is such a benediction, is such a bliss that you can go on sharing it with the whole world; you cannot exhaust it.But your conditionings from the very childhood have gone very deep. You will have to be courageous enough to take them out. Children are the most suppressed people of the world.In one Christian school the lady teacher was talking about the Christian trinity – God the father, Jesus Christ the only begotten son, and the Holy Ghost. Then she asked all the children to make a picture of the trinity from their imagination. She looked around – everybody had done a good job according to their imagination. But at one small boy she stopped…. He had made a beautiful picture of an airplane with four windows.She said, “What is this? What do you mean by this? Where is the trinity?”He said, “Can’t you see it? In one window there is one man looking out – that is God the father.”She said, “Okay.”“The second window the person looking out is the only begotten son.”She said, “Okay.”“In the third window, this is the Holy Ghost. You cannot recognize him because nobody knows how the Holy Ghost looks, so I have just made him according to my own imagination.”She said, “That is okay, but what about the fourth window?”He said, “Lady, you are really dumb! This is Pontius the pilot. Without him the whole airplane would fall down.”Laugh at your conditionings, and let them all fall down.Be free to love, to dance, to sing.Be free to be human – this is your birthright.

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The Sword and the Lotus 01-25Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Sword and the Lotus 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Holding your hands and feeling your compassion I feel like crying all the tears of my body, out of too much beauty. I can't stand it; I am shaking and shivering. My inner woman starts coming to life. A need to please, to express myself…My ideas about the real man lie at my feet, shattered.What to do?The question asks one of the most important things about man’s totality. In this century Carl Gustav Jung, one of the most ingenious psychological researchers, found out that man is not only man, and woman is not only woman. The man is both and so is the woman.Man and woman are two parts of one whole. If you are a man that means your unconscious will be a woman. If you are a woman your unconscious will be a man. It was a revolutionary thought in the Western world but not in the East. The East has known it for at least five thousand years. There are statues in the East symbolizing the same concept of totality – Shiva, Nataraj the dancer, and Ardhanarishwar, half woman and half man.In Tantra it has been accepted for centuries that it is impossible to have man just be man for the simple reason that everybody is born out of a father and a mother. Both contribute to the being of the child. Whether the child turns out to be a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter; his basic constituents came from both sides, man and woman. Something in the child will remain of both.But society has not been so cultured, so civilized, so psychologically sane as to understand the implications of it; they are vast. If every man is carrying a woman within him, society has not taken care of it – no society in the world.If every woman is carrying a man within, nobody has taken note of it. The truth has been known for centuries, but societies have ignored that truth. And the result is this whole humanity is in tremendous suffering, misery, divisions, splits, and nobody feels at rest because half of him is always ignored, half remains undernourished. How can you feel contented?On the contrary, every society of the world has insisted from very childhood that a boy is a boy and a girl is a girl. In small details they are reminded again and again…If the boy is climbing a tree it is okay, but this is not right for a girl.In my childhood, just beside me, there lived a neighbor who was principal of a school. He had a daughter of my age, and because she saw me climbing trees, naturally she also followed. Her father came out and said to her, “Never do it again. This is against womanhood. You are a GIRL.”The girl said, “But you are not saying anything to the boy who is climbing.”He said, “It is not a question of climbing. Boys are allowed to do many things that girls are not allowed to do. The boys are also not allowed to do many things.” A boy playing with dolls is not allowed. Everybody laughs at him: “What are you doing? Are you a girl?” Girls play with dolls; it is not manly.We have created such a division and a split – the man is some different species and the woman is some different species.In my childhood I loved to have long hair….My house and my father’s shop were together, so each time I was coming in and going out, I passed through his shop.And the people would ask him, “Whose girl is this?”And my father felt so embarrassed that finally he took hold of me and said, “This cannot be continued. To every customer I have to give the explanation: he is not a girl, he is my boy. But it is embarrassing. Don’t you feel embarrassed?”I said, “It doesn’t matter. I love long hair, and if they think I am a girl, that is their problem. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”He took out his scissors and cut my hair. I said, “You be careful, you will repent it.”He said, “Don’t try to frighten me. That’s what you always do.”I said, “Then you can do it, and see.”And he had to repent it his whole life. He cut my hair and I immediately went…and just on the other side of the road were the shops of the barbers. And I loved one barber – he was an opium addict, so whenever I had time I used to sit with him. He talked about great things. Nobody was ready to listen to him, and he loved me because I listened to him. I said, “These things are great and these people are simply idiots, they don’t understand.”He said, “You are the only man who understands me and I wait for you, because these people don’t know how to appreciate great things.”He would recite songs when he was really deep into his intoxication, and it was a joy to listen to those songs. One line from one song, another line from another song, something from a bhajan, a religious song, something from a film…and in between he would go on composing his own ideas.So I went to him and I said, “Today I need your help.”He said, “Whatever it is I will do.”I said, “You just shave my head.”He said, “That is a really difficult thing. If your father comes to know I will be in trouble” – because in India a boy’s head is shaved only when his father dies.But I said to him, “I have never asked anything. If you are not going to shave my head, I am not going to come again to your shop.”He said, “No, wait, you are my only customer who appreciates me.”He shaved my whole head, and I went back.My father saw me coming into the shop. He said, “What has happened?”And his customers said, “What has happened to the boy? It seems his father is dead.”Now my father was in a more embarrassing situation. He said, “He is not dead, I am his father. But he was right when he told me that I would repent. Now I am going to have to answer to the whole town that I am still alive!”People started coming. Because I was going around the town, everybody saw me and they thought that my father was dead. People started coming to show their sympathy, and when they saw my father sitting in the shop they said, “What is the matter? Who has died? We have seen your boy completely shaved.”And my father said, “It is all my doing. In anger I cut his hair, knowing perfectly well that he would do something, but this is the last thing…I will never do anything to him again because he is unpredictable.”He said to me, “You can do one kindness to me – until your hair grows a little, can you come from the back door?”I said, “You are again asking me to do something against my will. I can come, I can always come my whole life from the back door, but don’t tell me, because I will create some trouble.”So he said, “It is okay, don’t come from the back door. Let me face the town. Anyway you have already moved around the town. Everybody knows – people are coming to sympathize and they find me alive. So it is only a question of a few days and they will all know that I am alive and you have done…And that opium addict – what to do with him? You cannot even communicate with him. You say something – he answers something else.”He said to me, “I wonder how you manage to talk with him. For hours I see you sitting in his shop.”I said, “He is one of the most lovely men. It doesn’t matter what he says, it doesn’t matter whether it relates to what I have said…I enjoy what I am saying, he enjoys what he is saying. We both enjoy – there is no question of communication. It is not a business, it is pure enjoyment. And he says such beautiful things that nobody can say when he is in his senses. Just the other day he was shaving the head of the great wrestler of the town and I whispered in his ear, ‘Just shave half the hair and leave half.’“He said, ‘But he will be very angry, and he is a wrestler and I am an old opium addict.’“I said, ‘You don’t be worried. I am here.’”He shaved half of his head and then he said, “I have remembered something and I have to go immediately home. You sit, I will be coming.”That was his way to escape from the shop.The wrestler waited for a few minutes…then half an hour…. Then he asked me, “Is this man going to come back or not?”I said, “I don’t think…because that man is an opium addict one never knows where he gets caught – discussing with somebody, he may not have reached his home yet. It is better you go.”He said, “This is strange. With half my head shaved I will look like a fool!”I said, “But he has not taken any money from you. You can go to another barbershop and you can save half the money.”He said, “You are his partner or what?”I said, “We are just friends. And unless you go, he will not come. So the faster you go, the better.”He had to go to another barbershop where people laughed at him. And they said, “In the first place why did you go to that madman?”So my father tried to persuade the opium addict, “Never do this thing to my child” – but he would talk about something else.And the embarrassing part for him was somebody thinking me his daughter, not his son.And this continues your whole life…. A man is a man and many things are forbidden to him. A woman should remain graceful, should remain within limits, should follow certain ideas that make her feminine.Society has not listened to the great Tantra philosophers, nor are they listening to Carl Gustav Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. But I want it to be emphatically understood that unless we accept all the qualities in man and all the qualities in woman, we will not be able to make humanity liberated.Half a being is always in bondage.For example, no man is allowed to cry and weep; he has to be strong. Even if somebody dies and his heart is full of tears, he has to keep himself strong. He has not to show his weakness – as if tears are weakness.Women are allowed to weep, to say things in their sadness, in their anguish, and have tears rolling down from their eyes. But perhaps you don’t understand that because women can cry and scream and shout, and it is acceptable, they don’t go so easily mad as the man does. They don’t commit murders, they don’t commit suicide. The proportion of suicides for men is double that of women. What makes it that way?The reason is man goes on accumulating his anguish. Society has taught him to repress feelings, emotions, sentiments – he has to be just a thinker. He will not show emotions even to his friends, to his wife, to his children, to his parents. No, everywhere he has to remain aloof, detached – he is a man.The woman cries very easily – any small hurt and tears come to her eyes. But you don’t know the healing force of the tears. Every man has to learn that tears should be allowed, because if nature meant that man should not weep, then nature would not have given man’s eyes glands for tears. Men and women have the same size glands for tears – nature cannot be unwise.There are moments when you want to cry, and it is good to cry – it is a relief. It removes a burden from your heart. If you go on accumulating all this, one day it is going to explode. That’s why you come across cases where people, whom you had always thought so nice, have murdered – you cannot believe it – or have committed suicide. You cannot believe that a man who was so religious, reading the Gita every morning, going to the temple, doing all the rituals – how could he commit suicide? But you have never seen tears in his eyes, you have never seen his sentiments, emotions, his heart feelings, his wounds. He was covering them.There is a limit to everything. A moment comes when he cannot contain it anymore, and rather than being exposed, he would like to commit suicide. That seems to be more manly than everybody knowing that this man cries, weeps.The women – if they were allowed to play the same games as boys are playing, to cross the rivers as the boys are doing, to climb the trees and the mountains as boys are doing – it would be very difficult or even impossible for anybody to rape them.Our society is responsible for making the woman so fragile, so submissive, that when somebody rapes her she cannot do anything. She has never been allowed to do anything – no exercise, nothing that could have made her stronger. We have created a strange society of split people.Your question is that listening to me, being near to me, you feel so full of love that a strange thing happens to you: you see your so-called manliness falling into parts, and suddenly your “woman” is taking you over.Love is not of the mind but of the heart – it is womanly. Whenever love takes over, your man feels upset, unwilling, afraid. Whenever there is love the woman blossoms. Without love, the woman shrinks. The men who love power never fall in love. Even if they fall in love they keep themselves at a distance.For example, Adolf Hitler…you cannot conceive what kind of love this was. He loved a woman, but he behaved with her almost as if she was a soldier and he was the commander. Going out of his home he told her, “While I am out you are not to go to your mother’s house” – which was just in the neighborhood. There was no reason in it – why? She had not seen the mother for many days – she was sick, old, and there was no reason why she should not go. But you cannot ask a man like Adolf Hitler, “Why?” He will immediately shoot you: that is his answer; he does not believe in giving answers.But the woman thought that he had gone…. She inquired of his secretary. He said, “He will not be back for at least eight hours.”She said, “That is enough time. I will be back within half an hour.”She went to see her mother. She came back before Adolf Hitler was back, but when he came back the first thing he inquired of his secretary was, “Has the woman gone to see her mother?”And the secretary had to say, “Yes, but it was only for half an hour, and there was no harm…”Adolf Hitler said, “I am not asking your advice and I am not asking whether there was harm or not.”He went in and shot the woman immediately, then and there, without even asking her whether she had gone or not.Do you think this is love? Can love do such a thing? Can love be such an unforgiving…so hard, so stone-hard, so mechanical? – it is not a love relationship. Then another woman came into his life, but he never allowed her to sleep in his room. The reason, he writes in his own autobiography, was, “I don’t trust anybody while I am asleep, not even a woman who thinks she loves me. She may be a detective, she may be from the enemies. She may simply shoot me, kill me, poison me…do anything.”He never allowed the woman, and for ten years they were in love. But what kind of love was this?The day Germany was defeated, the bombs were falling on Berlin and he was hiding in an underground safe place. He asked his secretary to call a priest immediately because he wanted to get married.The secretary said, “What a time you have chosen. We are finished. It is only a few minutes more before Berlin will be taken by the enemy. For ten years that woman has been asking you to get married to her and you have been postponing. Now what is the urgency?”He said, “Don’t waste time. Catch hold of a priest and force him to come here. I don’t have much time, and before I die I want to get married.”And he got married – just to die together. Then both poisoned themselves and allowed their people to burn their bodies. That was the only time they were ever alone together in the same room.Why had he chosen this moment? Because now there was no fear. Death was going to happen anyway; there was no need to distrust.Man thinks he loves. Woman loves.She does not think that she loves.For man, thinking comes first; love is secondary. Hence his love has not the beauty, the same divine flavor that a woman’s love has. He could have it. Nature has made you both alive, but your woman is repressed, you don’t allow her to raise her head. And this has created so many problems that you are always in need of a woman – a woman is always in need of a man.But if a right kind of psychology prevails in the world and every child is brought up with both his sides growing together, he will have the strength of a man and he will also have the softness, the lovingness of a woman.Somebody from Japan, a Zen master who has fallen in love with me so much that in his monastery he teaches Zen through my books…And when I was in jail in America he went round the monasteries in Japan to get signatures of Zen masters, in protest.I don’t belong to any religion, but if there is really a religious man, he belongs to me.He sent me a statue of Gautam Buddha, but a very strange statue, more representing Gautam Buddha truly than I have seen in any other statue. In one hand there was a lotus flower and in the other hand there was a sword. And the strangest thing was that if you looked from one side, if you looked from the sword side, the face looked like that of a warrior. If you looked from the lotus side, the face looked so feminine, so beautiful that you could not conceive that this man could fight.A buddha has to be both together – a sword and a lotus flower. He has to be a man and he has to be a woman – in their ultimate flowering.If the right psychology is prevalent, every man and every woman will feel a certain independence. The need for the man, or the need for the woman, will disappear, because you have the woman within you and you have the man within you.One thing, you will have a certain independence which you don’t have right now. And this is one of the causes: husbands and wives are continuously fighting because you cannot love a person totally on whom you are dependent. Nobody likes dependence.The man cannot love the woman totally because he is so dependent on her.I used to be a teacher in the university, and next to my quarters was a Bengali family, a professor of mathematics, a very simple man. The first day I entered my quarters – and the walls were so thin you could hear everything that was going on in the neighbor’s house – it must have been in the middle of the night, one o’clock, that the professor shouted, “I am going to commit suicide. It is enough!”And the woman said, “Who is preventing you? This is your umbrella, get out!”Bengalis cannot go anywhere without an umbrella.I was a little puzzled what to do, whether I should interfere. I had not even been introduced to these people, but not to interfere did not seem right. And this was strange! I was puzzled whether he was going to commit suicide, and the woman giving him his umbrella…? This was simply ludicrous. But I went out, and the professor had gone fast with his umbrella towards the railway station which was very close.I asked the woman, “I am new and I don’t know what is going on here. I am not supposed to interfere, but in the middle of the night your husband has gone to commit suicide and you don’t seem to be worried – you have even given him his umbrella. At least you should have kept his umbrella, then he would not have gone – because Bengalis cannot move without the umbrella.”She said, “You don’t be worried; you are new. He cannot commit suicide without me! I am absolutely needed in everything. You just wait – he will be coming back soon.”Within fifteen or twenty minutes he was back. And the woman said, “What happened?”He said, “What happened? You gave me the wrong umbrella! It does not open!” – and there was no rain and there was no need for it to open. “I have told you always to give me the right umbrella whenever I am going out. But you don’t take me seriously – and I was going to commit suicide, absolutely decided. I had even reached the station, but when I tried to open the umbrella, it wouldn’t open. And just to teach you a lesson I had to come back.”Then I felt relieved and I went to sleep. I said, “These people are not going to commit suicide.”The woman was perfectly right: “He cannot do anything alone – he will need me even in suicide. Without me he cannot do anything. So don’t be worried, you just go to sleep. Within half an hour he will be back. And this is almost an everyday routine; it is not new. The first time I also had got really worried, but when it started happening every day…! At any time he would go to commit suicide – for any single mood, reason. Then I thought, ‘This is just…he does not mean it; he does not understand the meaning of suicide.’”Why are men and women constantly fighting? They are fighting because they feel a certain dependence on each other. And nobody likes dependence – everybody hates it. That hate is there that poisons your love. That hate is there that creates constant conflict.What I am proposing is that if every man and woman is brought up with the idea that you have both the wings, you are not alone, that hidden within you is your opposite pole, then you will have a certain balance and your need will change into something new. You will love a woman, but it will not be a need, it will be a joy, it will be a sharing.You will love a woman who resembles your inner woman; there will be a certain deep connection. You will love a man who resembles your inner man. And if you are not fighting with your inner man, you cannot fight with your outer resemblance.And it is stupid to ask the astrologers and the palmists and the tarot card readers, and all kinds of idiots around the world, to decide your marriage.In one town I lived for a few years….Just in front of me there was a brahmin who used to read people’s birth charts and decide whether the marriage would be a happy marriage or not.One day a man came to me and he said, “I am a very poor man and that astrologer is the best in the city and he is asking ten rupees – I can pay at the most two rupees. I am really very poor. It is the question of my son’s marriage and I want the best astrologer to decide whether the couple will be happy.”I said, “You don’t be worried. You just wait here, let me go to the astrologer and when I am there then you come.”I went to the astrologer and I said, “I have been living in front of you for two years and I see you every day fighting with your wife. Could you not manage to figure out your birth charts? I am going to expose you unless you listen to me.”He said, “I will listen to you but don’t expose me.”And at that moment that man came. I said, “The first thing is: do his job free.”He said, “But I have refused him before; my fee is ten rupees minimum.”I said, “This man’s chart has to be done free, otherwise I am going to expose you.”He said, “Wait! Don’t say a single word more. I will do whatever you say. And whenever you want somebody to be done free, just send a note to me and I will do it. Don’t talk so loudly if my wife comes in, because then you will not be needed to expose, she will expose the whole thing. She even beats me. All this astrology is bogus! But what to do? – this is the only profession I know and it is going very well.”No astrologer can decide. It has nothing to do with your birth and the stars. It has nothing to do with the lines on your hand.And all the marriages are being made according to the astrologers – particularly in this part of the world. Every marriage is almost an arranged marriage, and they are all failures, without exception.I have lived amongst many, many families; traveling, I have been a guest to thousands of families, and I was surprised, it is the same story – they are quarreling.The reason is that we have not yet found the right way of matching a couple. You cannot do it if the man and woman are brought up in such a way that both their sides are fully grown up; they will find their own man, their own woman.There is no need for any arranged marriage. An arranged marriage is simply a fake; it is deception. And deceiving your own children for their whole life – to suffer, to go into misery, to fight and still to go on keeping a smiling face to the world…they cannot say what is happening inside. Everybody thinks everybody else is living a beautiful life, and everybody is in the same boat.Your question is significant – that finding a love arising, your manliness is fallen, shattered. Suddenly your woman, of which you were not aware, has arisen. All the qualities of the woman – the softness, the beauty, the music, the poetry…allow it; don’t be worried. What has fallen is not your real man. What has fallen is the man cultivated by the society. Once you accept your woman, you will soon discover by the side, your real man, which cannot fall down, which cannot be shattered on the ground. The shattered one was just imposed on you.People are telling you that this is the way a man should be, and nobody is bothering whether this is human or not. You may start crying and weeping when tears are coming to you, you will be surprised that it is the woman part of you which is crying and weeping. But suddenly there comes a tremendous strength which is not the woman, which is the man. Your tears have cleaned all the rubbish that the society has imposed on you.So what has fallen down on the ground, scattered, is not your reality; it is just a pseudo-reality which has been imposed on you – that you have to be like this, that this is the way a man should be, this is the way a woman should be.Nobody has looked into your nature, nobody has respected you in your totality. You know now perfectly well that surgery has succeeded in changing a man into a woman, a woman into a man. If both are not present in you, the surgery cannot succeed. Both are present in you: one is showing itself; the other is hiding behind. Surgery can change it. The other can show, and the one that was showing itself can be hidden. That is a very simple process.One of my sannyasins, Leeladhar, is one of the best plastic surgeons, who has changed many men into women, and many women into men. He was worried whether he was doing right or wrong, so he asked me.I said, “Whatever you are doing is perfectly good. If a man is tired of being a man he should be given a chance to be a woman. If a woman is tired of being a woman she should be given a chance to be a man. And if this is possible in this life, why wait for death? Death does it.”I have met many small children who remember their past life, but one strange thing I became aware of was that if the child is a boy, in his past life he was a woman; and if the child is a girl, in her past life she was a man.This was so universal that it gave me a certain clue, that every man gets tired by the end of his life and starts thinking that perhaps women are enjoying more. And every woman gets tired, because you don’t know the other person’s inner world, you only see the outer side.There is a Sufi story….A man was very miserable and he was a mystic, just praying the whole day. Finally, he said to God, “I have never asked you anything. I thought you yourself must understand, but it seems you are not looking at me. I have to make it clear to you, that it seems I am the most miserable man in the whole world, but I don’t want you to take all my misery. All I want is to please let me change my misery with anybody else – I am ready. Can’t you even do that?”That night he slept, and had a dream that God called the whole town and told everybody to collect all their miseries into a bag and carry it to the mosque.The mystic was surprised. He thought, “Perhaps he has heard my prayer.”He immediately took all his miseries in his bag and rushed toward the mosque. And he was surprised, because the whole city was running towards the mosque, and all were carrying bags far bigger than he had. His bag was the smallest!He said, “My God. Now I am in trouble. I never knew that these people were hiding so many miseries. Their bags are touching the ground; they are just dragging them.” And he had just a small bag hanging over his arm. He said, “This is going to be just absolutely foolish. These are my miseries, and now I have to change with any of these…” And he looked around – everybody had a bigger bag. Naturally, that’s why they were lagging behind and others had reached the mosque.Finally, when everybody reached the mosque, the voice of God said, “Hang your bags around the mosque. I will put the light off, and then you can choose any one that you want. Everybody is free to choose – the misery of your own choice.”And before the lights went out the mystic rushed to his own bag. But he was surprised that he was not the only one who was rushing towards his own bag, everybody was rushing towards his own bag.He said, “This is strange.”He asked his neighbors, “Why are you rushing? Why are you in such a hurry?”They said, “Whatever we have in our bags, at least we know. And we have lived with these miseries our whole life, so we are well acquainted. In fact, now we have lived so long that they don’t matter much. We have become accustomed…. Choosing somebody else’s bag, one does not know what is in it. At least one thing is certain, that you would have to begin to be acquainted with new miseries that nobody wants.”Everybody, without exception, was holding his own bag, so that somebody would not come in the darkness and snatch it. But nobody was ready, everybody was with his own bag. So God said, “It seems there is no need to put the light off – you can go home. You have chosen.”And they were immensely happy. everybody was happy that he had got his own bag back.The mystic woke up smiling. He said, “This has been a great dream and it has revealed a truth, that you see the other faces but you don’t know what they are carrying inside…what suffering, what anguish.”So it happens, by the time of death, everybody wishes to be changed to the unknown part of himself that he has repressed. If he had known both he would have died not asking to be a man or a woman, but asking something more – something higher, something concerning consciousness, meditation. He would have asked, “In ignorance I have lived long; now give me light. Now let me live in light and consciousness.”If he had been aware of both these sides he would have asked, “Enough is enough. I have known man, I have known woman. I have been both, and I am perfectly satisfied. Now I want to go beyond, beyond man and beyond woman.” And that is the state of enlightenment….So don’t be worried. Whatever falls down and gets shattered does not belong to you. Let your woman come up, and soon you will find your man also coming up. Allow them both equal respect, allow them both unity. It will make you an individual for the first time – undivided. That is the meaning of the word individual.And an individual man loving an individual woman will have a totally different flavor of love. It will not be just physical, it will not be just biological, it will have something of the spiritual in it. It will grow towards spirituality. They will help each other towards spirituality, they will become partners in a pilgrimage towards godliness.Osho,Please accept my love.Beloved Master, when a person weeps it is usually sad, but your sannyasins also weep when they are happy. Would you like to talk to us about tears?Tears have a language of their own. The language is: anything that cannot be expressed through words overflows through tears.If you are in immense pain, tears may come. If you are in immense ecstasy, tears may come. If you are deep in love, tears may come. If you are in profound silence, tears may come.Tears can come on many occasions, but one thing will be similar on each occasion: whatever is happening within you is something that cannot be expressed through words.Children weep because they want their parents to fulfill some of their demands which they are afraid to say. They are afraid that the answer may be no. They cannot bring their demand into words because they don’t want to be rejected, they don’t want to be ignored.Tears come to their eyes, and the parents understand their tears better than their words. And the tears create a bridge of communication. The parents become more soft, available, open…they want to know what the reason is, what they want: “Why are you crying?”Now it is a better situation to get a yes from the parents.You will sometimes find sannyasins full of tears – they don’t make any demand on me; their tears are of gratefulness. But there are experiences you cannot talk about; in fact, saying them seems to be profane.If you really love someone it seems so difficult to say, “I love you,” because the word love is so small and the feeling is so big, that when you hear yourself saying, “I love you,” you yourself feel frustrated – it is not what you wanted to say. It was something alive and so big, and this word love is just dead. It is not breathing; it has no heartbeat. Your love was your totality, and this word carries nothing of your totality.Then tears become the language of expressing…whatever is inexpressible.Tears have a beauty of their own, a poetry…wordless, a song which only can be heard from heart to heart.The tears of the sannyasins are not to demand something, but to thank because they have got something already.Osho,Would you please talk about women's liberation in the context of your vision of a commune?They are not two things. Women’s liberation will also be men’s liberation. It may sound strange, but if you go into the sources it will be very easy to understand.One fundamental thing: you cannot make anybody a slave unless you are ready to become enslaved by your slave. Slavery is always two-sided.Sometimes it happens that the master is a bigger slave than the slave. The master becomes dependent on the slave for everything. And the second thing: when you make somebody a slave, you are creating trouble for yourself, because the person will always hate you. He may show love, he may show reverence, but that is superficial. Deep inside he is boiling with hate and fire.Man has made woman a slave, but you can see what I am saying to you, the truth of it. Have you seen any husband who is not henpecked? Strange…In a small school a teacher was asking students puzzles. And he asked, “Have you seen somebody who when he goes out of the house is one thing and when he comes back to the house he is something else?”One child immediately started waving his hand frantically. The teacher said, “What is the matter? Do you know?”He said, “Everybody knows it, but is not courageous enough to say. I can say it. It is my father. When he goes out of the house he looks like a lion, and when he comes back into the house he looks like a rat. And all these boys know it, but they are afraid to say it. I do not bother, because my father and mother are so constantly in a fight that they don’t have any time for me. I am completely free to do anything, to go anywhere.”What has made the woman bitchy? It is not a natural quality. What has made the woman continuously nag the husband? It is not natural.It is a revenge, the feminine way of revenge. You have reduced her into a slave. You have taken away all her freedom, you have made her just a possession.My sister was being married and I told my father, “If the word kanyadan, donation of the daughter, is being used, I will never come back to this family again. Then you can think I am dead.”He said, “But this is strange. That word has been used for centuries.”I said, “I don’t care about the centuries, I care about the meaning of the word. You can donate things, you can donate money – you cannot donate people! And I will not allow it, even if the marriage party goes back. Let them go to hell!”He said, “I was worried that you might create some trouble, but I had not thought about this kind of trouble. The marriage party is coming – you can hear the band, and the people are coming closer – and you ask me not to use the word kanyadan…! But what about the brahmin priest who will say, ‘Where is the father? He has to come and do kanyadan.’”I said, “I have made arrangements with the priest before I talked to you.”The priest used to live just behind my house. There used to be a big neem tree in the middle – and it was a very narrow street – and I had spread the gossip around the town that the tree was full of ghosts. And the brahmin was very much afraid, because he had to pass through that street. He was the only person who lived behind our house, the only person who had to go through that street. And he used to ask me, “Is it true?”I said, “Do you want to experience? I have some acquaintance with those people because I live in the house…”And one day I managed to give him some experience….He used to almost run in the street. From the main street he would start running saying, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, Hare Rama…” just to avoid the ghosts which were there. And he had just begun with, “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama…” when I gave him the experience.I had just done a simple thing. As he was coming from his work in the town – some worship, some marriage or whatever – it must have been ten o’clock in the night, it was a dark night…I had a drum with me and a big blanket. As he came under the tree, I threw the blanket over him so he could not see what was happening, and I just banged the drum and threw the drum also over him. He got so confused at what was happening, he ran away, back down the street. And by chance, the drum fell over his head. I had not thought that it would go that way – that his head was completely covered by the drum, and underneath the drum was the blanket covering his whole body. So by the time he reached the road, people started running, thinking that the ghost had come onto the road!He had to shout and struggle, “I am the brahmin who lives behind! I am not the ghost! It is the work of the ghost that I am in such a situation.” But there was no other way. So he was always very polite and respectful of me after the experience. Whatever I said he always said, “Yes, I will do it.”I told him, “My sister is going to be married. You are not to use the word kanyadan, because no person can be donated. It is not a gift – a human being given as a donation? If you use kanyadan, then remember, from this day you will never be able to reach your home…every day those ghosts will trouble you.”He said, “I will do everything, but please no more blankets, no more drums.”So I told my father, “He is willing.”From the very beginning we try to create the woman to be a slave in life. Naturally, she goes on gathering anger, and in her husband’s house millions of women – because almost half of humanity are women…Half of humanity is simply wasting its life in kitchens, routine work, looking after children – terrible jobs, and the whole day waiting for the husband to say something soothing, something beautiful.But the husband has his own problems: his boss in the office; his files gathering on the table; everybody is after him to “finish it.” He is working hard, but he comes home with a lot of files. And the moment the woman sees him coming with all the files, that means the office is coming home. She bursts forth, she explodes…her life is simply ruined. The whole day cooking, taking care of the children. And in the end she was thinking that the husband would be back and they would have a few moments of loving communication, and he is coming with the whole office. Naturally, she gets mad and she throws those files. And while he is eating she goes on nagging him for this, for that…she does not allow him to eat well.One man saw on a restaurant a sign saying, “Come at least one time and you will find everything just like your home.”He came in and sat at a table. A waitress came by and she asked, “What would you like?”He said, “First bring me a cup of cold tea.”And she said, “Cold tea? If you like I will bring it.”“Then bring my food – burned chappati, vegetables so hot with so much spice that tears come out of my eyes…that is the proof. And thirdly, sit in front of me and nag me!”The woman said, “But this is a restaurant.”He said, “Look at your sign! Only then will I feel at home.”This is the “home” where everybody is living. And you call this life?The man is harassed in the office, the woman is harassed the whole day by children and neighbors – and then the husband comes…. Both are not in a normal state; they start quarreling about everything, arguing about everything, and soon dishes are being thrown. The woman is hitting him with the pillows; he is shouting and trying to keep her cool because what will the neighbors say? Children may wake up…. But how long can one keep cool?Man’s liberation is possible only if the woman is liberated. The woman should be educated, should have financial independence, should be an earning member of the family, should not be dependent on the husband. The woman should have as free movement in society as man has. The woman should have time to be creative, to play music, to paint, to read, to write. And you will be surprised – all her nagging will disappear, all her bitchiness will go, because that is the energy that has become creative now.You cannot condemn the woman, because if you want to have an experience, then just take her job for twenty-four hours. First cook the food – then you will know! At least I know that I cannot even make a cup of tea. It is a miracle for me how a chappati is made.Then taking care of the children, who are the real devils – either you will kill them or you will kill yourself. Just twenty-four hours! And children have their own ways: the whole day they sleep, and in the night they make every effort to wake everybody.Sometimes they say they want to go to the bathroom, and somehow you drag them to the bathroom. And just a few minutes afterwards they are waking you up again – they need water…They have been sleeping the whole day and now they are awake. And you want to force them to sleep; sleep is not something that you can enforce.And if the child goes on waking you up again and again, you are going to hold him by the neck and tell him, “For the last time: either you or me – decide! We both cannot exist in the same bed!”It is very natural that the woman has become nagging and bitchy and fighting. And you can see she doesn’t mean it. When she throws the pillow at you, you can see it – it never hits you. It is not that she cannot hit you, she does not want to hit you. It is simply anger somehow being expressed. She never throws heavy things at you that you may go blind or your nose may fall off or your head may get broken…she never does. Even if a pillow hits you, it is not much of a hit.And if you watch carefully, she always throws those plates which are worthless – she wanted to get rid of them! Either they were broken or chipped or something. They are not the real ones; they were useless plates. She is careful; she knows – because whom is she going to hurt?But the anger is there and it needs some expression. Unless you give it a creative dimension…and the only possible way is that man and woman should both be liberated from each other.The liberation movement should not be only women’s liberation, it should be men’s and women’s liberation – together, because they both are in slavery. It is interdependent. One cannot become free; they both can become free or they both will remain slaves. The women’s liberation movement has not understood it yet and it needs a whole psychological change of atmosphere.Marriage should be dissolved. People should not live according to the law, they should live only according to love. The only problem has always been children. And my solution is that every small village should become a commune. Bigger villages should become two or three communes, big cities should divide into dozens of communes, and the children are the responsibility of the commune.Every member of the commune should donate to the commune for the health of the children, for the education of the children, for the care of the children. The children can come to the home – the father and mother can meet the children – but the children basically live in commune hostels and do not belong to private parties, to families. Then there is no problem. If two persons find that their love has disappeared, then there is no need to remain together: it is ugly, disgusting.The moment you see that the love has disappeared, you have to say good-bye to each other with gratefulness, with friendliness, with thankfulness for all those moments that you lived together. You will always relish those beautiful moments. But what can you do? – it is beyond you. Love comes like a season and goes like a season. As long as it remains, good; it is immensely beautiful. But when it has gone, then to go on hanging onto something dead is going to make you also dead.It was because of children that the old societies decided that you should remain together – because you have to take care of the children; otherwise what will happen to the children?A simple solution is that every commune of one thousand people, two thousand people – that means two thousand couples, four thousand people – gives the whole responsibility for the children to the commune. And the commune can take care of the children more responsibly, more carefully. More educated nurses can be put to take care; doctors can be there to take care; teachers can be there to teach. And children will not be spoiled the way they are spoiled now.They will have a wider vision than our children have. Our children have a very small vision because they are attached to a family. Five persons, seven persons – that is their whole world.It happened….By the side of my house there was a temple, and between the temple and my house there was some land which technically my father could win a case in the court and take. But actually, the land belonged to the temple. It was a legal and technical matter.I told my father, “If you go against the temple – I have nothing to do with the temple, but if you go against the temple then I am going to be a witness against you, because you are taking advantage of a technical mistake. The land does not belong to you and you know it. And not only am I going to be against you, I have convinced your father, my grandfather. He is going with me because they may not take any note of me. I am so small” – I must have been ten years old – “they may not take any note of me, so I have convinced my grandfather. He is going with me. So two generations on each side against you. You have to decide.”He said, “You have talked with my father?”I said, “Certainly. Because it is a simple matter. The land does not belong to us. Just in the papers of the temple, technically it is not written that it belongs to them. But don’t take advantage of a technical mistake.”He said, “But I have never heard of anybody’s son being a witness against his own father.”I said, “My loyalty is not to the family. My loyalty is towards truth. If you are on the side of truth I will be with you, but in this case I cannot be with you.”Children living in a family are bound to become loyal to the family. Then they don’t care whether they are fair, just, or not, they just fight. People go on fighting for generations.One of the families in front of my house was the enemy of my family for generations. I was the first to enter into their house….The man was shocked. He said, “Where are you going?”I said, “I am coming to your family with a message of friendship. I don’t know who the people were who fought. I don’t know even the names of the people who fought. I know my grandfather and I know my grandfather’s name, his father’s name. Beyond that I have no knowledge. And this has been going on for ten generations. How many generations do you remember? Can you tell me all the names? Can you tell me who began all this nonsense? And we have not been on talking terms. I have come with friendship. I am inviting myself for dinner today in your house.”He said, “This is strange, but perhaps you are right. You are welcome, but have you asked your father?”I said, “I don’t need to. Whatever I want to do, I do it and then I inform him. Then he can express his opinion. It does not make any difference, I have done what I wanted to do. I know he will ask, ‘Why did you not ask me?’ But that is my problem, you don’t be worried.”And they were very happy. The children were very happy, because it was such a strange thing. They were just living in front, and we saw each other, but we could not talk to their children; they could not talk to us. We were going to the same school, but we were not talking to each other, we were enemies. And you don’t have any idea why. The children were happy; it was a celebration.My father came home and he was informed that I had gone inside that house and I had not come out for almost two hours. He said, “This is unbelievable. For ten generations we have not talked to each other. Now he has gone beyond the boundaries, let him come.”When I came back home he was really angry and he said, “Why did you not ask me?”I said, “It is simple, because I wanted to do it. And now you are free to express your opinion. I knew that you would say no, so what is the point of asking? And I have not done anything wrong. I have made a beautiful friendship, I have opened the door for you too. I have invited the man and his children for dinner tomorrow in this house.”He said, “What?”I said, “Yes. I have eaten there – I invited myself into their house. Now, in return what do you want? I should at least be this much courteous.”He said, “My God, then I have to go out of this house tomorrow.”I said, “You have not to go anywhere. You have to be here and you have to receive them, because this is foolish – ten generations ago, and who knows who was right and who was wrong? Those idiots are dead. Why should we go on clinging to the dead, just because we belong to their family?”The family creates a very small commitment to a very small number of people. A commune frees you from commitment. And psychologists say that if children can be freed from the family then ninety percent of mental diseases will be simply finished. You will be surprised to know that these two things are related.Ninety percent of psychological diseases will disappear if children are no longer part of the family, because it is the family that creates all kinds of trouble. It makes the children Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist; it makes the children communist, socialist; it gives the children all kinds of beliefs which divide people. And most basically, every boy carries an image of the mother in his heart, and every girl carries the image of the father. And for her whole life the girl will look to the husband for her image of her father to be fulfilled – which is not possible. And the boy will look to his wife for his image of his mother to be fulfilled.His mother is the most perfect woman he has known. His wife should be as perfect. Now the wife has not come there to be your mother, nor are you there to be her father. But these ideas can be destroyed only if children are living together – not in the family, but under the supervision of the whole commune. They will not have any image and then they won’t be expecting their wife to be this way, their husband to behave this way…and thousands of conflicts will disappear.The future of the family is gone. The commune has the future, and only the commune can make you so free that marriage becomes non-essential. Two persons decide to live together – they live together. They decide to separate – they separate.The law does not come into it; the government has nothing to do with it, nor has society anything to do with it. It is two persons’ personal affair! And they are contributing to the commune for the care of their children. Even those who don’t have children – they are also contributing to the commune, because all the children are their children. A feeling of vastness…every child is loved by the whole commune…. Every person of the age of his father becomes his uncle; every woman of the age of his mother becomes his aunt. We are giving him a bigger, richer experience. And with this richer experience he will be a man of multidimensional capacities.Man’s liberation is absolutely necessary just as is woman’s liberation. And they both should be together to figure out how they can be free. There is no need to fight, because anything that comes out of fighting has some ugliness in it.The liberation should come out of understanding. All intelligent men and women should get together, and try to understand the problems all over the world and how they can be solved. And I don’t see that there are many problems. There are very few problems – which can easily be solved.The last question:Osho,I am thankful to this beautiful existence that you are with us. I am grateful that you are not one of those tirthankaras or avataras who is so far from ordinary human beings that there is no possibility to be other than in awe of them, and worship them from afar. You teach us to be thankful to existence for all that it has given us. But how can I be thankful to those people who are not of this understanding? Especially those who speak against you and try to destroy your work? Can you say something?Existence is very compassionate. It is not indifferent, it is not just a spectator. But you have to perceive the depth of everything. For example, you love me, and you love me because I am not a savior or a prophet or a god but just a human being like you. You are worried because there are people who oppose me – don’t be worried. This is the way existence functions.The way of existence is always to create antithesis to every thesis. Only then does something become important. If nobody opposes me, then what I am saying will not have any effect. I would like that the people who love me and the people who oppose me are equally divided – and that’s what existence does – that they are equally powerful, equally divided, and there is not a single human being who remains indifferent: either he is my friend or he is my enemy.And I am grateful to both, because both work for me. The friend works in a way; the enemy works in another way. You have just to see the depth – that opposites are complementary. The enemies also work – in fact, more than the friends. The friends may remain silent in their love, in their peace, in their silence, in their meditation, but the enemies cannot sit silently. They have to talk about me day and night; they have to dream about me day and night; they have to oppose me whether anybody listens to them or not. They are my advertising agency.

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The Sword and the Lotus 01-25Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Sword and the Lotus 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Many people, when they try to understand the origin of creation, are puzzled: why does the ultimate, which was one, have to be immediately two after creation? In other words, positive and negative, male and female, and so on. The ultimate in all its power, existence, fullness, could have helped creation on a male-male basis, on a female-female basis, or a joined together basis, as a theosophist once explained. He wrote that at the time of creation the human creatures, male and female, were born joined together at birth and they walked on four legs.Of course, the ultimate in all its power could have solved the problem of progeny in a different way from that which we know now.Is this a question which is solvable, or will it be better to have it added as unknown to limited thinking, to the mind as such?There are many questions which are created by man himself; they don’t have any roots in reality.First, man starts with assumptions and slowly, slowly forgets that the assumption is not reality. For example, the question of the ultimate – that in the beginning it was one, then why did it become two? It is absolutely man’s creation – the whole idea.Nobody has any right to talk about the beginning, because nobody could have been a witness to it for the simple reason that if there was a witness, it was not a beginning. The witness was there – the beginning must have been some time before the witness. It is a simple, rational and logical understanding that to talk about the beginning is all nonsense.Christians say that in the beginning was the word. Now this is sheer stupidity because “word” means a sound with a meaning, and meaning is impossible unless there is somebody to give it meaning.One thing is certain: in the beginning there cannot be a word. It would have been better if they had chosen sound – but just better, not right. Even to accept that in the beginning there was only sound, you need some ears to hear it. Without ears there is no sound. This is something scientific which you have to understand.For example, you see my robe is green. It is one of the very strange things that science has come to discover that when the light rays fall on anything…the light rays have all the seven colors of the rainbow….On my robe the light rays are falling. The robe is absorbing all the colors except green; that means this robe is not green at all. It is an appearance, and the appearance is possible because it is not accepting the green ray, so the green ray hits your eye. All other colors are absorbed, so they don’t come back to your eyes. Only the green is left; it hits your eye, and naturally your eyes see it green. This robe can be any color, but it is not green, in fact it has no color – only when light falls on it does it have a certain quality of absorbing.But if you all close your eyes, including me, then this robe will not be green. Then all your clothes will lose their colors, because for colors to exist, eyes are needed.Take it from a different angle…. Common sense thinks that a blind man lives in darkness – that is absolutely wrong. The blind man has no eyes; he cannot see darkness. To see darkness you need eyes, and if you can see darkness, who is preventing you from seeing light? The blind man does not know anything about light, nor about darkness. The deaf person does not know anything about sound, and he does not know anything about silence. If there was nobody present and there was only sound – it is impossible, scientifically impossible, because sound can exist only with ears. Unless the eardrums are struck, there is no sound.It would have been better if they had chosen silence, but still not right because even for silence somebody is needed to feel it. If there is nobody, silence cannot exist.What I am trying to show to you is that the very idea of one in the beginning is an assumption. In fact, one cannot exist without two; two cannot exist without three; three cannot exist without four…ad infinitum. If one exists, that means one digit of an infinity; otherwise, one has no meaning. What meaning will you give to one?You can say it is not two, but you have brought two into it. You can say it is not three, but you have brought three into it.These are all assumptions, and once we accept them then they create a thousand and one problems. Then the problem arises: if there was only one in the beginning…The questioner has been an ambassador to England from Nepal. He is well educated, but even he is not aware of a simple fact: who told you that in the beginning there was one? On what grounds do you accept the ultimate “in the beginning”? Who told you that there has ever been a beginning?As far as I am concerned there has never been a beginning. Existence has always been here, and there is going to be no end. Existence is going to be always here.Changes may go on happening – new forms, new beings – but the inner core of existence is eternal. And all the philosophies talking about beginnings are childish. But this is a problem – once you accept an assumption without questioning it, you are getting into trouble.And that’s what happened to the theosophists…. They accepted the ultimate “in the beginning…” then they had to accept that there was a time and there will be a time again when man and woman will be born together, joined together, and will walk on all fours. And this is not only for theosophy, theosophy is a very new movement. It developed in the last century, and it has died out. It has no significance anymore.Jainism is the most ancient religion in the world. It also has a similar kind of theory – a little bit different, but the idea is based on the same assumption. Jainism believes that in the beginning, satyuga, the age of truth, every child was born with his partner – one boy, one girl, together; they were twins, not joined. A man and woman joined together, walking on four legs, looks absolutely ugly. I don’t think it is a development, it looks more like a cartoon than like a spiritual ideology.Jainism has a far better idea: a boy and girl were always born together. They were not brother and sister as it turned out later on; they were husband and wife. That’s why the Sanskrit word bhagini has two meanings. Very strange…one meaning is sister; the other meaning is wife. The meaning wife is older, but soon people realized that if twins marry, their children don’t survive. Even if they survive they are weak, intellectually retarded, will have some kind of physical weakness.Once it was realized the process was stopped. And the word bhagini, which used to mean wife, started to have a new meaning, sister, which is a very different meaning. And still the Sanskrit dictionaries carry both the meanings.Basically the word is very beautiful. It means two persons who have shared the same womb. It says nothing about time – whether they shared the womb together or at different times – but that they shared the same womb. People decided it should mean sister, and that it was an ugliness in the beginning when twins started marrying. But they had thought that it was a gift of nature, that nature had chosen who was going to be your wife. Where, in this whole world, will you choose who is made for you? The best way is to have both be born together. But genetics and gynecology studies all agree on one point – that the man and wife should be as far away from each other as possible. Then their children will be better physically, mentally, spiritually.We are using it for animals, but we are not scientific enough to understand the thing. We use crossbreeding with animals…you bring English bulls for your cows. If you were really scientifically minded, you would find husbands for your daughters in faraway countries, wives for your sons in faraway countries, so there is no blood relationship possible. That would raise the human quality…age, intelligence, health, everything. But these ideas of why the one became two…It never became two; it has always been two.And why is there so much of a problem about two? The two are complementary. They make one organic whole, but they are not one. Existence is dialectical. It uses opposites as tension. Now the questioner is asking why God did not only make men, and that he could have made the whole of existence on the same basis. It would have been a very colorless, dull, boring existence – just males wherever you go…horses, elephants, camels – all males. You would not find something attractive, because attraction needs some difference. And the opposite, the polar opposite, is the most attractive.Existence is dialectical: it is male-female; it is positive-negative. And recently, it has been proved beyond doubt that in Africa, in Europe, in America, one of the most dangerous diseases ever is spreading – AIDS. No other disease can be compared to it because there is no cure for it, and scientists are almost certain that there will be no cure for it. The disease is such that they cannot conceive of any cure. And the person has to die within two years, at the most, two years.Generally, people will die within six to eight months. If they live in a very controlled atmosphere they may survive two years at the most. Death is absolutely certain. This disease has happened through homosexuality, and that’s what you are asking in the question: why God has not created, why the ultimate has not created a single foundation, male and male.The disease has arisen out of homosexuality – one male making love to another male. Something seems to be very much against existence.Scientists have not yet come to a conclusion about what is causing AIDS, but my understanding is that when a man starts loving another man, the woman within both the men starts dying, because she no longer has any nourishment. She is ignored, she shrinks, and slowly, slowly she dies. And when the woman in you dies, half of you is dead.You have become only half alive. And the other half was your resistance against diseases, it was your organic support. Now you don’t have any support. You have lost contact with nature’s dialectics – this is the cause of the disease AIDS. The patient becomes vulnerable to all kinds of diseases, he has no resistance; any infection and he will get it. He cannot fight any infection; no medicine can cure him of any infection – he lives almost like a ghost.I am worried that there are lesbians also, particularly in the West – women loving women. Sooner or later they will bring an even bigger disease than AIDS.It took a long time for AIDS to happen. Homosexuality must be as old as your religions, because religions are the cause of homosexuality. They forced men to remain as monks separate from women. The women became nuns, but they could not meet the monks, they had to live separately. So homosexuality and lesbianism are both created by your so-called religions. The whole credit goes to your great religions.But it took thousands of years for AIDS to happen. Perhaps the woman is more strong…she is. Scientifically she is more strong than a man. That’s why lesbianism may take still a few hundred years before a greater disease than AIDS grips women. But it is going to come – you cannot survive against nature. You can go against it. It gives you enough rope, enough freedom. You can use it for your spiritual growth, you can use it to destroy yourself. And what is the problem if the universe functions through polar opposites?He is also asking…perhaps he thinks that the way men and women make love is ugly, so he is asking if the ultimate could not create some other way for reproduction, for progeny. Anything would cause the same question.I will tell you a story….It happened in the twenty-first century. One couple, very adventurous, went for a space tour. They reached a planet where something exactly like human beings had been living for thousands of years. They were immensely happy. The first house they entered, the people were very generous, very loving – they offered coffee. They drank the coffee and soon they were discussing things. And both the couples, from the earth and from the new planet, were interested in how children were created in their worlds.The man and woman felt a little embarrassed. They said, “First you show how you create children.”They said, “It is very simple.”They opened their refrigerator…The couple from the earth was amazed: “What are they doing? What has a refrigerator got to do with creating children?”…and they brought two bottles, one with some green liquid, one with some red liquid, and a big jar. And they mixed the liquid from both the bottles in the big jar.The couple from the earth was laughing: “What are you doing? Have you gone mad?”They said, “This is the way we make children. Now this jar will remain in the refrigerator for nine months, and after nine months you have a baby – you take it out of the jar.”The earth couple said, “My God! This is the way we make instant coffee. What a strange method you have got.”They said, “It may look strange to you, but this is how it has always been done here on this planet. Now you show how you do it.”They had to show, because they had promised. They were feeling a little embarrassed, but not afraid, because nobody from the earth was present and these people…idiots, mixing liquids from jars and waiting for nine months…. They could not believe that there was going to be a baby. They dropped their clothes and started making love.And both the people from the new planet were rolling on the ground with laughter. They could not believe it: “What are you doing?”The man was doing push-ups on top of the woman!They said, “You idiots! This is the way we make coffee! This is not the way to produce children!”It does not matter – anything would have been questionable. And I think the way things are, it is perfectly good. In fact, to make coffee in this way would be a little dangerous. And hearing that this was the way they made coffee, they both felt so bad because they had already drunk the coffee!Existence is dialectical.There has never been one, and there will never be one. It knows a certain kind of oneness, but that is the organic unity of the two.Yes, a man like Gautam Buddha knows oneness, but that too is dialectical. His inner woman and his inner man have come together to meet in a deep, orgasmic unity. From the outside you see him alone – he is not. In existence nothing can exist alone. To exist you need the support of the opposite, either from the outside or from the inside. If you can find the support from inside then certainly you have immense freedom, you are no longer dependent on the other.With the inner unity you cannot produce children, but you can go on reproducing yourself; you can go on giving a new birth to yourself. Each moment becomes a new birth and you go on higher and higher in peace, in silence, in bliss, in ecstasy…and it has no limits.The sky may have limits, but the growth of the spiritual organic unity within you has no limits. But remember, it is an organic unity between two polar opposites.Every man is a woman also, and every woman is a man also. So you can manage an inner unity – and that is real celibacy. The celibacy that is being taught by the religions – I condemn it because that is not celibacy… renouncing the woman, hating, getting away from the woman….Perhaps in hating the woman or the man you may start hating all that is feminine, or all that is male inside you too. You may never be able to accept your inner woman. If you could not accept the outer how can you accept the inner? You will try to kill it in every possible way. But by killing it you will be committing suicide. It will not be spiritual growth, it will simply be spiritual suicide.That’s what I see in your saints. Look into their eyes and you will not find life. Look into their life and you will not find joy. Look into their being and you will not find a dance, a song. All is dead. Their body has become just a grave and they are somehow dragging it towards the graveyard. Their only juice upon which they live is your respect for them. That gives them enough ego – your respectability, your calling them great saints, mahatmas…That is the only thing they have got – which is absolutely bogus, but you go on giving that, not knowing that you are helping them to commit suicide, that you are also part in their crime, that you are committing a tremendous sin.The whole idea should be dropped. There cannot be any beginning. How can there be a beginning? From where will all these things come? And if you can get all these things from somewhere, then this is not a beginning. Places exist from where you are getting all these things; contractors exist who are making all these things; suppliers exist who are ready to supply all that you want…Out of nothing, do you think there can be a beginning? And there cannot be an end, because where will all this disappear to?Scientists say you cannot destroy even a single small piece of stone – there is no way to destroy it. You can cut it into smaller pieces, but still it is there. You can do whatsoever you want, but it will remain in some form or other. You cannot simply destroy it so that it leaves no mark behind. This is one of the basic discoveries of modern science – that nothing is destructible. If nothing is destructible, then the other end should also be understood: it is not possible to create anything. If you cannot destroy anything, you cannot create either.We have not been successful in creating anything. Whatever we do is only combinations. You can create water by the combination of oxygen and hydrogen, but they are still there. It is not a creation, it is only a composition.You take something from one place, something from another place, and you can make a new thing – but it is not new. Neither has there ever been a creation, nor is there going to be a destruction. There is no god who created, there is no ultimate being who managed to run the world in a dialectical way.Existence is autonomous and it is eternal. But the problem with theologians, with philosophers, is that they simply invent a name and they forget that their beginning is only invention, imagination. Then they go on questioning and then they go on answering, making a big system.I have looked into all the systems of philosophy, I have wasted almost my whole life in looking into all the systems of the world, and only one thing that is similar to all of them is that they don’t have any base. Their basis is simply assumption.If you accept their assumption then their whole system looks very logical, very profound. They are all afraid that you should ask anything about their basis, because they don’t have any answer. And the basis is the first thing to ask about. The differences in their systems are not much, because their bases are all false; the differences are only of names. Somebody calls it absolute, somebody calls it ultimate, somebody calls it god, somebody calls it some other name. All these names are imaginary, and by changing names nothing is changed.Just look – as I was telling you, the Bible says, “In the beginning was the word…” The second sentence contradicts the first: “With the word was God…”And no Christian has the guts to question that in the second sentence, the first is denied. “In the beginning was the word…” The second sentence is, “With the word, there was God…” So the word was not alone. And in the third sentence it is said that God was the word.Can’t you see the contradiction? – so apparent. Then why don’t you simply say, “In the beginning there was God”? Why say, “the word”? “The word was with God…” And finally, you come to the real thing: “The word was God.” Why go this long way? Those first two sentences are meaningless. You should have said, “In the beginning was God.”But to protect God, so that God is not questioned… People will question the word and will get puzzled with the word, so they have created a great philosophy about the word and what it means for the word to be there. They have made a protection for poor God. But anybody who has eyes cannot be deceived.I am reminded….It happened in Bombay that a Hindu saint who used to come there always had a big following. He was delivering his morning talk, and a very rich lady was sitting in front of him with her small child who suddenly said, “Mummy, I want to go to the bathroom.”Everybody laughed because the talk was about Vedanta the ultimate god, and suddenly that boy brings the bathroom in.The mother tried to push him, “Sit down.”He said, “I cannot! I want to piss.”Everybody was laughing, and the saint felt very embarrassed. But the woman was very rich so he could not say anything to her. And he was a guest in the same woman’s house, he had been there for many years. But after the meeting he called the woman separately and told her, “You should teach your child some etiquette. In a spiritual meeting he talked about the bathroom and pissing, and that created such a disturbance that all my seriousness was lost and people must have forgotten all the great things that I was saying. That boy is a real devil. Either you should not bring him with you or you should teach him something.”The woman said, “He insists on coming. And he is my only child and I cannot leave him crying and weeping at home. I will not be able to sit listening to you peacefully because I will remember that he will be weeping and crying.”Then the saint said, “I suggest a simple thing to you. You just tell him that if you want to go to the bathroom you need not say that you want to piss, you can simply teach him to change the word piss. Instead of saying ‘pissing’, say ‘singing’: ‘Mom, I want to sing.’ Nobody will know what is going on; it will be a code language. And this is not difficult. Make it clear: ‘If you learn this, only then will I take you with me; otherwise no.’”The boy agreed. He said, “There is no problem for me. Whenever I feel, I will say that I want to sing. You have to understand, don’t forget!”After one year the saint came back. He was staying in the same lady’s house and just in the evening the lady said, “I am in a trouble. One of my sisters is seriously sick and I have to go to see her. I may not be able to come back in the night. The child is alone. It will be great kindness if you let him sleep with you in the bed because he has never slept alone.”The saint said, “There is no problem.”The woman left.In the middle of the night the child shook the saint and said, “I want to sing.”The saint said, “Are you mad? Is this the time for singing? In the middle of the night, disturbing all the neighbors…? Shut up and go to sleep.”The boy remained silent for a few minutes. He said, “It is difficult to shut up. You have to allow me to sing – it is coming.”The saint said, “What nonsense. The whole day I have been teaching people and in the night you won’t let me sleep, and your mother has left you in my care. I tell you, go to sleep. If you want to sing, sing in the morning!”He said, “I can’t wait that long. You don’t understand. I have to sing now.”So the saint said, “It seems you won’t listen, so okay, sing but sing very quietly. Just come close to my ear; sing in a whisper…nobody hears.”The boy said, “I warn you.” He said, “Don’t tell me later on. It seems you don’t know what singing means.”The saint said, “You think you know more than me? You just sing whatsoever you want to. Be finished and go to bed!”Half asleep, the saint suddenly jumped when the boy started “singing” in his ear…. He said, “My God! This you call singing!”He said, “It is your teaching…you told my mother…. Otherwise I was always telling the truth. You made me a hypocrite, now suffer.”And the saint said, “This is something. Could you not tell me what singing means?”He said, “That was the whole point – to hide the thing that it means. I thought that you have given the suggestion so you must know.”You can change the words but you cannot change reality. You can call it singing, you can call it dancing, you can call it anything, but if it is pissing, it is pissing.My approach is absolutely scientific and existential. I don’t have any assumptions. I cannot tell you that existence ever began, because I am not a witness to it. And I cannot conceive of anybody being a witness to it; it will be a contradiction. And if there has been no beginning, there cannot be any end. Things end only if they have a beginning.And I don’t see that there is anything wrong in the reproductive system; it is perfectly good except for your so-called religious people who have been condemning sex. Sex has nothing to be condemned. It is sacred because it gives birth to life. It has given birth to you. It has given birth to Gautam Buddha…it has given birth to all that we are proud of.You go on condemning the very origin. You want some changes, but what changes? any change will be questionable. So I don’t see any point in questioning.I accept nature as it is.And I accept it with gratitude, thankfulness.It is the most beautiful existence possible.Osho,As one grows old, one's ideas slowly change. Are your ideas about sex to super-consciousness the same? Your comment please.Perhaps you are not aware that there are two kinds of growth. Most people grow old; a few people simply grow up. I belong to the second category. I don’t grow old, I simply grow up.The body will grow old, but the body has nothing to do with my ideas. My consciousness grows up.I have more profound ideas about sex and super-consciousness than I had before. There has been evolution about everything in me, but whatever I have said before has deepened, has become more solid. Now I have more arguments for it – that’s what growing up means. Nothing has changed, only everything has become more clear, more solid, more conclusive.I have been thinking to speak – because I have never read my books – on each book again, so that you can see that I have not contradicted a single thing in those books. Although I have gone far away from those ideas, it is in favor of those books, not against them.Whatever I have said after my enlightenment is unchangeable. It can evolve, it can grow, it can bring more flowers to it, it can have deeper roots in the ground, but its quality, its taste will remain the same.And I hope that my sannyasins will learn to grow up, not just to grow old. Even animals grow old – buffaloes, donkeys – everybody grows old. It is only man’s prerogative, his privilege, to grow up.The body will take its own course, but your consciousness can go on growing up, can go on growing even when you are dying, can go on growing when you are dead, can go on growing wherever you are. That growth is eternal.Osho,Seers have said, “Guru Rama, Guru Vishnu, Guru Deva Maheshawar” – that the master is the generator, the operator and the destroyer.I cannot conceive how it can be true. Please enlighten me.The Hindu mythology has something equal to the Christian trinity. It is called the trimurti, the three faces of god – Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh. These are not three persons, but only three faces of one person.Brahma creates the world; Vishnu maintains it, sustains it, nourishes it; and Shiva destroys it. This is one cycle.Then another cycle begins: Brahma creates again, and so on, so forth. It is just a mythology, but mythologies have been so heavy on man’s mind that sometimes it is hilarious to see.Brahma is the creator of the world, but in India there is only one temple devoted to Brahma. Because who cares about Brahma? He has done his work, he is useless. He may be a god, a great god. He created the whole world, but he has no longer any worshippers. Just a single temple is devoted to him. You can see the mind of the people.I will not talk about the theology but its implication. Most of the temples are of Vishnu, or his incarnations – Krishna, Ram – these are all incarnations of Vishnu. Most of the temples are of Vishnu because he has the power, and power has to be worshipped. Right now he is everything, he can do everything, he can change everything – he is all powerful.Shiva also has millions of statues, but not many temples. That too is very significant. Vishnu’s temples are immensely rich, with great art, sculpture, beauty. Shiva is the poorest god. You can find any ax-shaped marble stone, put it under any tree and it becomes a temple of Shiva.Who cares about death, destruction? But people are afraid. So once in a while, placing a few flowers is perfectly understandable. But no great temples have been raised for Shiva. He lives under trees in the hot sun, in the rain, in the cold. People worship him just out of fear.Fear can never become worship; neither can business ever become worship. Vishnu is people’s business; Shiva is the god of death, god of destruction. He has to be kept friendly – he is dangerous.Another example you will find – you can look in the books of all the businessmen in India. I don’t know, it must be the same in Nepal – every businessman starts his books with Shri Ganeshaya Namah – Ganesh is Shiva’s son. Why is it that every book all over India, and wherever Hinduism has had any influence, starts with Shri Ganeshaya Namah – I bow down to Shri Ganesh, the great god? All other gods are forgotten. The reason is that in the beginning Ganesh was a very mischievous fellow – he used to harm, to disturb. Just to keep him calm and cool – “Please don’t disturb our business” – people started praising him: Shri Ganeshaya Namah. It was not out of respect, it was a bribery because he was a great destroyer. He was the son of the ultimate god of destruction and he used to play mischief all around. He would disturb people’s marriages, people’s businesses, so everything that has to be started has first to remember Ganesh.This is not religion. This is simply persuading Ganesh: “Don’t disturb us – we are on your side. We are not your enemies, we are worshippers…” Mythologies which have no reality in them – you can see Ganesh and you can understand that this cannot be a reality. Ganesh has the body of a man and the head of an elephant. This is not possible. And above all this nonsense, having the head of an elephant, a big belly because he loves laddus – and he is sitting on a mouse! That is his vehicle. Can you conceive it? Is it possible? That poor mouse carrying the whole load of a full wagon would have died long ago.But people never ask, never question their own mythologies. The same is true about Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh – just creations of the human mind. The world has never been created so there is no need of any Brahma. And it is not going to be destroyed, so there is no need of any Shiva. And between the two is Vishnu.The world is autonomous, it does not need anybody to maintain it. But all over the world people have strange kinds of mythologies dominating their minds. And they have devoted millions of hours, money, artists, to make temples for these imaginations. And then to look at people worshipping their own imaginary gods is so ridiculous.My father used to take me to a temple which was very close. It was a very beautiful Jaina temple with a standing statue of Mahavira, an ancient statue. I loved the peace of the temple. I loved the statue, its art, but I never felt like worshipping. A statue has to be appreciated as a beautiful object of art, there is no question of worship. You don’t worship the painting of Picasso.And my father would say to me, “You have to worship Mahavira because he is equivalent in Jainism to the supreme god. He has the same qualities. He is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient – he can see everything: past, present, future. He is everywhere present and he is all powerful.”I told him, “To tell you the truth, I have seen a mouse sitting on his head pissing, and your great saint Mahavira could not do anything. Perhaps he could not see above his head. All powerful? Everywhere present? And he could not even throw the mouse away? I have seen it with my own eyes, and if you want to see it I can bring a white mouse which my friend has, and I can manage the whole scene again. I can bring another friend who is a photographer and we will distribute the photograph all over the town: ‘This is your omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient god – now stop worshipping!’ He has lost power over rats, what can he do for you?”He said, “Don’t do any such thing. If you don’t want to worship, keep quiet.”I said, “You have to keep quiet. This was just an instance for you so you don’t continue harassing me that I have to worship.”This is man’s creation – beautiful. It should be kept in a museum, but it is not to be worshipped. For worshipping you have the whole universe which is not man’s creation – the stars in the night, the sunrise in the morning, the sunset in the evening, a bird on the wing…But I have never seen any religious person worshipping all that is not man-made and has such tremendous beauty, so much alive. And we are part of it, and you go on worshipping a stone that you yourself have named. That much for the mythology part.But your question is that the seers have said that the master is all – he is Brahma the creator, he is Vishnu the maintainer, he is Shiva the destroyer. This is the ugliest thing that anybody can write. And these seers are writing about themselves that they are the masters. You worship them because they are all three in one. They are Brahma, they are Vishnu, they are Mahesh.Where are you going to worship in the temples when the master is present?This is the ugliest part in it. If some disciple had written it, it would have been understandable – his gratitude. But the gurus, the so-called masters are writing these lines and they have been perpetuated for centuries. Nobody has even questioned that this self-appraisal is simply ugly, disgusting.I have heard that one day Mulla Nasruddin came into the restaurant and declared, “My wife is the most beautiful woman in the world.”Everybody was shocked, everybody knew his wife…he himself knew it.People gathered around him and said, “Mulla, have you had a revelation? Who told you? Has she been chosen Miss Universe? What has happened that you have to declare?”He said, “She has not been chosen, she has told me herself. I am a faithful servant. Whatever she says I believe it. She said that she is the most beautiful woman, and I said, perfectly right; I will go and tell my friends.”The seers themselves are saying to you that they are better than Brahma, better than Vishnu, better than Mahesh, because those gods have only one quality each and they have all the three qualities together.It is possible for a disciple who loves the master to call him God, because he has seen something of godliness for the first time in his life. But if the master himself declares that he is the god then it is ridiculous. Then it is not worth consideration at all.Those seers are simply being stupid. This kind of statement makes one think that they must have been idiotic. This is so egoistic – you cannot find any other statement which is more egoistic. These are the people who are teaching everybody to drop the ego, and they are the biggest egoists in the world.I would like to say to you that any master who claims that you have to worship him is no longer considered to be a master. A real master can only be a friend, not a god.It is possible for the disciple to feel the godliness of the master – that is another matter.Osho,What of Jaina and Sufi religions – is there any genuine master in the present moment anywhere in the world?Please give some light on this matter.Can’t you see the light?

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The Sword and the Lotus 01-25Category: THE WORLD TOUR

The Sword and the Lotus 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,In my heart I feel full of devotion and respect for you. Slowly, something inside is opening up towards friendship with you. Do I have to pass through devotion to become your friend? I shall remain respectful and pass both of them together.They only can exist together. The friendship with a master is no ordinary friendship. It has a reverence in it, love in it, devotion in it, tremendous gratitude in it. It is a multidimensional phenomenon.The ordinary friendship is a worldly thing, mundane. The spiritual friendship is not of this world, it belongs to the beyond. I have to use the same words which are used for the mundane because there are no other words, so you have to be alert and aware that whatever I say, you cannot find its meaning in a dictionary. It has much more in it. It is immensely rich.The word is small and very soft and the experience is vast and very infinite. And I can see in you it is not just an intellectual question, your heart is feeling immense pain because you are thinking that friendship means you have to bypass devotion, respect, reverence, and your heart is saying no.Listen to the heart, not to the dictionary.The heart never lies; the mind never tells the truth. The mind is a great speaker; the heart is very silent but it also expresses itself in tears.Your question is immensely significant because it is coming from the heart. The heart is feeling the pain because the mind has taken the word friendship in an ordinary sense, ignoring the heart. The heart is full of tears. Those tears are valuable.The understanding of the mind has no significance. In the world of spirituality it is only the heart that has to be listened to and followed. Your heart is giving you the answer. I am simply repeating it so that it becomes clear to you.The friendship with the master includes everything that is beautiful in all other relationships, and it excludes everything that is ugly in all our human relationships. It is the pure essence, the very fragrance of all our human relationships. It includes everything, but only the best part of it, the very cream of it.So don’t be worried, rejoice that it is happening to you and that your heart is strong enough not to let the mind decide. Your heart is strong enough to be the master and let the mind be simply a servant.Osho,When the master is standing at the door what should the disciple do?The question is from somebody very intellectual – perhaps a professor. It is a mind question.When the master is at the door it is too late! You cannot do anything. You cannot close the door in the face of the master, you cannot invite the master inside for the simple reason the ancient scriptures of the East say the master is death – and they mean it.To allow the master in means you will have to die as an ego, as a personality, and that’s all you know about yourself. Hence the fear, hence the question, what to do now? He is just at the door. One step more and you are finished. But there is no need to be worried.You will die as an ego but you will be reborn as the self, which is your reality. You will die as a personality but you will be born as an individuality, which is existential. Personality is just artificial.The master can take away only those things which do not belong to you. He cannot take anything away from you which is your authentic nature. The master cannot give you anything, he simply removes all the hindrances so that you can discover yourself.I am reminded of one historical incident….The world’s best sculptor, Michelangelo, was passing through the street where there were many shops of marble and different kinds of stone sellers. He used to go there often to find good pieces of marble. In front of the first shop, on the other side of the road, there was a huge piece of marble, very ugly looking, and it had been lying there for almost five years. He had never paid any attention to it. He went around the marble, looked at it, touched it, and was immensely happy. He came back to the owner of the shop and asked, “What will you take for that stone?”The shop owner said, “Nothing, you can take it, because I have kept it for five years – and nobody wants it. And I am paying unnecessary rent for it. I cannot keep it in the shop, it is too big. So I am keeping it on the other side of the road on somebody else’s land, and he is charging me rent for it. You are the first man in five years who has even inquired about it. Thousands of sculptors have been coming to the shop, but none has even paid attention to the stone. You can take it joyfully, with my thanks. You need not pay for it because I am getting fed up with it.”Michelangelo arranged for the stone to be carried to his home, and he said to the shopkeeper, “When I have worked it out I would love and appreciate very much if you can come to see what has become of the stone, because I have already seen it. It is only a question of chipping the stone here and there. Somebody is encaged in the stone who has called me, I have not to do much, I have not to create anything – just to remove the unnecessary parts.”And he created the most beautiful statue perhaps in the whole world – a statue of Mary, Jesus’ mother, when she takes Jesus down from the cross. Mary is sitting, and Jesus is lying in her lap dead…full-size; the stone was so big. He worked for one year on it, and when it was completed he asked the owner to come and see. The owner could not believe that that ugly stone could be transformed into such a beautiful statue as he had ever seen.But Michelangelo said, “It was Mary and Jesus who called me. I was coming into your shop and they called me, saying, ‘We are encaged in this stone – just give us freedom.’”That’s how every artist works. Before he starts making a statue he has already seen it in his vision. Then he has just to remove the unnecessary parts. The master is the greatest artist in the world. He does not work with stones or marble, he works with living human beings. When he accepts somebody to be a friend, it means he has seen the vision, the possibility, the potentiality – what you can become.You have chosen the master; you have invited him. Now he is at the door, and you are freaking out. Your mind must be worried.The master is certainly dangerous. If he is not dangerous he is not a master at all. He is going to destroy much in you – only then the real can be discovered. And you are asking me, what can be done when the master is at the door.You can do only one thing, being a professor, intellectual…I remember a story in Mulla Nasruddin’s life….He used to visit the cafe every evening, and he always talked and bragged about everything. That day he was bragging about his generosity, hospitality, and a friend said, “Mulla, you can talk about other things, but at least don’t talk about these things because we have been your friends for years. You have never asked us even for a cup of tea. Every day we have to pay for your coffee and anything that you eat in the cafe. You have some nerve.”He said, “You never remind me. Make me remember it. I am a man of great spirituality and I don’t think about small, mundane things – a cup of coffee or money, these things don’t matter. You should have reminded me. Today you have reminded me. You all are invited to my house. Come for dinner. The whole cafe…friends, acquaintances, strangers…. It doesn’t matter, everybody has to come; then you will know how generous I am.”They could not believe it, but he was inviting, so they followed him, a great crowd. And as the house came nearer, Mulla started walking slower. They said, “What is the matter, Mulla?”Mulla said, “You all know. You are all married. I am also married, so there is nothing to be kept secret. I forgot all about my wife. Talking about great things I forgot about my wife. In fact, in the morning she had sent me to purchase vegetables and it is night now and I have wasted the whole day talking about spirituality and great things. And finally I ended up with you, and now I am coming with a crowd for dinner and there is nothing in the house. You can understand my situation. She will kill me.”They said, “This is strange. You should have remembered. How should we know it? But now we are not going back.”Mulla said, “I am not telling you to go back. You just remain standing at the door. Let me go in and persuade my wife; it will take a few minutes. I am sorry, but you will have to wait, because if I enter with this whole crowd, she will go mad.”They understood; they had the same problems. They said, “Okay, we will wait for a few minutes. You go and persuade your wife.”Mulla went in and told her, “A gang of stupid people is following me. Now only you can save me.”The wife said, “What is the matter?”He said, “Nothing is the matter. You simply go there and ask them, ‘Why are you standing here?’ And they will certainly say, ‘We are waiting here for Mulla Nasruddin.’ And you can say, ‘He has not been seen since the morning. He had gone to purchase vegetables and I have been waiting the whole day.’”The woman said, “Strange…why so many people should come and…”Mulla said, “But you have to save me. It is a question of prestige.”The wife went out, opened the door, and said to the people, “What are you doing here?”They said, “We are not doing anything. We are simply staying here because Mulla told us to stay here.”The wife said, “He has not been seen since the morning.”They said, “This is something. He came with us, we all are eyewitnesses – in front of us he entered into the room.”The wife said, “You must be mistaken, he is not in the house.”They said, “Then we would like to look in the house because he has invited us for dinner.”The wife said, “Dinner?”At that point – Mulla was listening to the whole conversation from the second story; he had opened the window a little bit and was watching what was happening. When they said that they were going to search the house he thought, “This is going to be difficult.”He shouted from the window, “You are simply idiots. He may have come with you but you don’t understand logic, he may have gone from the back door. Are you not ashamed arguing with a poor woman? Feel ashamed and go back home!”Now he forgot that you cannot deny yourself – that is impossible. You cannot say, I may have gone from the back door. Then who is talking? But in the fury, in the anger, and they were trying to force themselves into the house, and the poor wife would not be able to prevent them and he was bound to be caught…!You are in the same situation. You can tell the master that you are not at home. That’s what millions of people are saying, that they are not at home. So it is not just a joke, it is a reality for millions of people. All the people who deny the existence of the soul are saying, “I am not at home.” Then who is denying?Half the world is communist today. They don’t believe in the soul; they argue about it. I have been arguing with many communists, and I was surprised that they are not aware of a simple thing: who is arguing?You are conscious, and you are denying consciousness. You are alive, and you are denying the very principle of life. You are in a really difficult situation, you cannot escape now. That’s why I said it is too late. It is better to invite the master in, because he won’t care about your invitation, he is going to enter in.He is your master. You have accepted him as your master, and unconsciously you may have invited him many times to come to you, and now he has come. Now there is no way to escape. It is better to accept the fact that he is going to kill you as you have known you up to now, and he is going to give you a new birth.Socrates used to say that the basic function of the master is just to give birth, but every birth has to be preceded by death. Once you understand it, once you have passed through such an experience of death and birth, then you will live each moment of your life dying to the past and being reborn anew in the present. Then each moment is a death and a rebirth, and that is the only real life. Then you don’t carry dead weight of so many years, of so many lives – an unnecessary burden which does not allow you to live lightly, lovingly, dancingly.If the master has come to the gate you are fortunate – let him come in just for once, because next time he will not come. Next time you will be doing the same yourself. You will know the key.That death, every death, opens doors for new and fresh life. If you want to be alive intensely, you have to allow death to happen every moment and then you will know a totally new taste of vitality, of youth, of energy, of freshness. And with your freshness, the whole existence becomes fresh. With your youth, the whole existence becomes young.I have heard about one chief justice of the Supreme Court of America. When he retired he told his wife…and they had remained together for almost sixty years. They had had their honeymoon in Paris. He said, “Before I die I have a great desire to go back to Paris to the same hotel, to the same room, to visit the same places that we visited when we had our honeymoon.”The wife was also excited. They both went to Paris – the hotel was the same, the room was the same, the places they went to see were the same. But the old man said, “Something seems to be very dull, old. It is no longer the same Paris. I don’t see the same joy and the same dance and the same beauty.”His wife was more pragmatic – wives are always more pragmatic, more earthbound. She took the hand of the old man and told him, “You are wrong. Paris is exactly the same, perhaps more beautiful. In sixty years it has become bigger, more beautiful, better. But you have forgotten one thing: this is not our honeymoon, and we have become sixty years older. It is our old eyes which are so full of dust and death that we cannot see the youth and the freshness and the beauty. Don’t say Paris is no longer Paris, simply say that we are no longer the same.”She was saying a great truth: the world is what you are. If you are frustrated, sad, miserable, you will see the same things all around. And if you are joyous, your heart is full of song, you will see the whole world with songs and dances and flowers and fragrance. It all depends on you.So don’t be worried. It is a blessing that the master is at the door. It happens only to the fortunate ones.Osho,Ma Veena has deceased, and was just born again with the new name, Ma Prem Videh. She has entered into a new world feeling quite different.But I am a little confused. Please would you like to tell me about it?It is not only the experience of Veena who has died in becoming a sannyasin, and is born as Videh. This is the experience of millions of sannyasins around the world….Initiation is death and life.Initiation is a discontinuity with the past.You had lived a life, you had experienced many things, but all your experiences and your whole life were not a fulfillment. It was not a contentment, it was not ecstatic; it was more misery, more suffering, more pain. It was more dragging than living. That is the reason one starts looking for a new way of life, a new mode of existence.Sannyas is a revolution.It simply means that you are finished with the past, and you don’t want to repeat it. You have repeated it enough, and the repetition has made you almost a robot. It does not give joy. Every morning it is the same, every evening it is the same – tomorrow will be simply another carbon copy of today.How can you feel like rejoicing? Every day is bringing you nearer to the end. Death will come and erase you just the way people go and write their names on the beach, their signatures, and a wave comes and erases it all.Death comes and erases you completely as if you had never been here. Do you know how many people have been here? Each person is sitting on the corpses of at least ten persons. Every inch of the earth has been a graveyard.I am reminded of a very famous Sufi story….One king was unable to sleep in the night. He was tossing and turning when he heard somebody on the roof of the palace, walking. He shouted, “Who is there?”The man said, “It is none of your business. I am searching for my camel.”The king said, “You seem to be an utter idiot. Camels don’t get lost on people’s roofs.”But the man said, “It is true I am an idiot, but no more than you, because what you are searching for in this palace your father was also searching for, your grandfather was also searching for. For generations you have been searching in this palace and you have not found anything. You are wasting your time, and your death is not far away. It is possible that a camel may get lost on a roof, but it is impossible to find contentment, blissfulness the way you are searching for them and in the place where you are searching for them.”And his voice was so authoritative. The king had never in his life come across another man…he had only dealt with servants, soldiers, his own people, and they were always saying “Yes, sir.” And this man shouted from the roof.The king called his guards. A great search was made but the man could not be caught.The next morning the king was sitting in the court thinking about the man. Slowly, slowly he had calmed down and was thinking that perhaps he was right. “It was not the right way to tell me such a thing – in the middle of the night on my own roof – but what he said seemed to be significant. And the man cannot be mad!”At that very moment another man at the door started arguing with the guard, “I want to stay in this caravanserai for a few days.”The guard said, “You must be mad. This is the king’s own palace, his own home. There is a caravanserai, you can go half a mile more and you will find it.”He said, “I want to stay in this caravanserai!”The guard said, “But you seem to be absolutely stupid. You don’t understand a simple thing, that this is a palace.”The king was listening from inside; the voice was the same. He told the guards, “Bring that man in. I have been looking for him.”He looked at the man; he said, “Are you not the same man who was looking for the camel on my roof?”He said, “So you have come down to your senses. Yes, I am the man. And I had to do this just to make you aware that neither can camels be found on the roofs of houses nor can bliss be found in a caravanserai which you are mistakenly believing is your own house.“I came here before and there was another man – you were not here – and he was claiming the same thing, that it was his house. I came before that, and there was another man, and he was also claiming that this was his house. Now you are claiming it. I can say with guarantee, that the fourth time I come I will find somebody else claiming the same.”The king said, “You are right. One was my father, the other was my grandfather, the other was my great-grandfather. And it is possible that next time you come perhaps you may find my son in my place – I am getting old. But to what conclusion are you trying to lead me?”The man laughed. He said, “You have understood the conclusion – that it is a caravanserai, and many people have lived here and gone. It is nobody’s home. In this whole earth there is no home, only caravanserais. Why not accept a fact?”The impact of the man, his personality, was so much that the king immediately left the home and he said, “He is right. His methods are a little mad, but I have heard about many Sufis who use methods which look mad but their madness is only a device. I have understood. I am leaving this caravanserai in search of my home.”This man became a very famous Sufi himself. He went outside the capital, made a small hut there at the crossroads, and lived there. And every day there was trouble, because anybody who would come to the crossroads would ask, “Which road leads to the city?”And he would say, “Go right and you will reach the eternal city.” For a moment they would think, “eternal city…?”But one forgives mystics! These people talk strange things….“But this is the road…?” They would say, “You are certain?”He would say, “I am absolutely certain. You can go and find it yourself” – and that was the road leading to the graveyard.And those people would come back furious, and would tell him, “You seem to be really mad. There is no city, there is a graveyard.”But the king would say, “I told you beforehand it is the eternal city. Once a person starts residing there, he resides forever. It is the real city, you should have asked about the unreal city. The road on the left goes to the unreal city – where people live for a few days thinking that this is the city and finally have to leave and go to the eternal city. And I am always in trouble. People ask for the real city and I show them the real city, then they come with anger. You can go to the unreal city this way, but remember, that is an unreal city. Don’t take it for granted that it is real. I also used to live there. I want to find the real home before death finds me.”One becomes a sannyasin to find the real home, to find something of eternity, to find something which death cannot destroy. Certainly, it cannot be the body – it is a caravanserai. It cannot be the mind – it changes constantly.Initiation into sannyas is the beginning of the search for something beyond mind. And one who takes initiation with a deep love, a great adventure, understanding that whatever way he has lived was not right, that it was the dark night of the soul, and he is entering into the world of light…A simple initiation which for the outsiders will mean nothing, but for the person himself it is a mutation – his whole being is changed. His past drops from him and the future opens its doors. Now he starts living for the first time as a conscious human being. And this consciousness goes on growing.So what has happened to the questioner is a reality which has happened to many, many people. And this is the reason we change the name in sannyas – just to give you an indication that now you are no longer the old self. Just a hint to let the old be dead and begin anew, fresh from the very scratch – a new life, a new being, a new love, a new consciousness. Enter into a new universal truth.I am happy, Videh, that Veena is dead. Rejoice in the death of Veena, and rejoice in the birth of Videh.Osho,I am happier as your sannyasin compared to my life before sannyas. But I don't feel like meditating or praying. Without praying and meditating the changes happen anyway, and I am happy and contented. This seed of being sad has to go.Should I force myself to meditate, or should I wait and let this happiness grow, or should I be as I was?I am confused. Only you can guide me properly, because I don't trust anyone but you.First, there is no need to go back and live a sad and miserable life. That suits the stupid and the idiots, not anyone who has a little bit of intelligence. Life is to rejoice, life is to dance.Life is to drink the juice of it as totally as possible.I am reminded of an incident in paradise, in a restaurant….Lao Tzu, Confucius and Gautam Buddha – all three were sitting around a table discussing great things. Just at that moment a naked woman, immensely beautiful, came with a jar to the side of the table and asked them, “Would you like to taste some juice of life?”Gautam Buddha simply closed his eyes – he did not reply.Confucius half closed his eyes – he believes in the golden mean. And he said to the girl, “I would just like to taste, not to drink. I would just like to know how it tastes.” So he had taken just a sip and he said, “It is bitter. You take it away.”Lao Tzu took the whole jar from the girl’s hands and drank it completely in one gulp. Even the girl was surprised. Emptying the jar, he said, “Great. It was delicious. But to know anything really, one has to go totally into it. It was bitter to you, Confucius, because you are unaware of the new taste of life. You don’t have a trained tongue, trained buds; you have never lived life. You have always been an outsider on the boundaries with your half-closed eyes. Whatever you see is incomplete. Truth can never be seen incomplete – either you see it or you don’t see it. Truth is indivisible.“I had to drink the whole of the juice. Please forgive me. Without drinking the whole, it is impossible to give any judgment. You both are incapable of giving any judgment. Gautam Buddha is absolutely out because he knows no taste and he has closed eyes, he has not even seen how it looks. He has not seen the beautiful woman who has brought it. He is making himself blind and dumb; he is closing himself against life. So whatever he says about life is irrelevant.“And I will not trust any word from you either. Half-closed eyes can only give you a half truth. In just taking a sip, it may not even have reached into your stomach, you may not have digested it. It has not become blood and bone in you, and unless truth becomes your very being, your very heart, you have no right to say anything about it.“I am the only one with fully open eyes who has drunk it totally.”I love the story. It certainly is a story, because in paradise there are no restaurants – in hell there are.In paradise what will you do with restaurants? Saints don’t like restaurants. The restaurants would not find any customers. They would have gone bankrupt a long time ago. So it is simply an example, a parable, but very significant.So the first thing is: you are not to go back to sadness and misery, and even though I am saying you are not to go back, I don’t mean that you can – there is no way; you cannot. There is nothing to go back to. You were sad and miserable, now you are contented and happy. Why in the world should you choose to go back?As far as meditation or prayer is concerned, remember, you cannot force them. There are things in life which you cannot do violently, which you have only to wait for silently, inviting, welcoming, with open doors, awake and alert so that when the guest comes you can welcome the guest. And it is already happening to you. You say you have not meditated, still you are finding deep contentment and happiness. If there is contentment it means that without your knowing, some qualities of meditation have entered into you. Without knocking on your door, happiness has made a way into you.The connection between contentment, happiness, misery and sadness is almost like light and darkness. If you suddenly find that darkness has disappeared from your being, whether you know it or not, light has entered. Without the entry of light, the darkness cannot go.So my suggestion is that first be grateful that even though you have not meditated…you have just been listening to me. But in just listening to me something in you has become silent, for a few moments there has been a gap in your thinking. There have been times when you were there but there was no ego. Just sitting here, waiting for what I am going to say – in that gap, contentment has entered.In America, hundreds of television reporters used to come, and their only complaint with me was: “What can be said in ten minutes you take twenty minutes. We have a limited time and we don’t want to cut anything because whatever you are saying is so interconnected that if we cut anything it will be out of context. Why can’t you speak like everybody else? Why do you suddenly become silent? You speak a word and then you leave a gap.”I said, “This is the way I am going to speak, because it is a question not only of speaking, it is a question of giving moments of meditation to the people who are listening to me.“While I am speaking they are engaged, their minds are filled with me. When suddenly I stop for a moment, their minds also stop, waiting…. And those are the most beautiful moments, when they have a taste of meditation without knowing that they are meditating.”That’s what has happened to you. You have been in touch with meditation up to now without awareness. From now on you have to be fully aware. Contentment and happiness indicate – they are symptoms that a change has started happening inside you. No need to force, just go on as you are, enjoying your contentment more, allowing the same situation in which it happens, relishing every bit of happiness that comes to you and watching when it comes, what is the situation in which it comes. So move in that situation more and more. No need to force meditation, no need to force anything. Simply create the right atmosphere in which those things start happening on their own.And they are already happening. So you have just to see the knack of how they are happening and go on very easily, at ease, without any tension, without any effort, without any enforcement. Because the danger is if you become greedy and if you want them to happen more and you try to force them, you may destroy even that which is happening. So no effort, no will has to be involved in it.You have to be simply waiting.And waiting is prayer.Waiting for the unknown to enter in you.Waiting to be pregnant with the divine.You cannot do anything about it, but you can wait.And the last thing: you said you trust only me. If just by trusting me so much is happening to you, just think if you trust everybody how much more will be happening to you. Trusting a single human being has changed your life from sadness to contentment. If you can trust everybody without conditions, you will see a tremendous revolution happening every moment in your life, raising your consciousness to more and more glory and grandeur and splendor. Why distrust anybody?People distrust because they are afraid that trust can make them vulnerable, people can cheat them easily. So they close themselves. They lock all the doors, all the windows so nobody can cheat them, nobody can deceive them. But they don’t know that by locking all the doors, all the windows, they are preventing the sun to enter, they are preventing the fresh breeze to blow in, they are preventing the fragrances of the roses to come in. Of course, they have prevented the thieves also from coming in. What can thieves take away from you? You are just sad and miserable. Are you afraid they will take away your sadness and your misery? What have you got that you are worried about?It happened to Mulla Nasruddin….He used to sleep with all the windows open – according to my advice – all the doors open…. And naturally, a thief entered, and he collected everything in the house.Mulla was sleeping on a blanket. Seeing that the man had collected everything, he threw his blanket also on his pile. The thief was surprised. He said, “I thought you were asleep.”Mulla said, “I was pretending.”“You are a strange man – I am a thief.”He said, “No worry. You can take everything away – I am coming with you. Because what does it matter in which house we live? I will live with you. And I have found a servant. I was looking for a servant, and it is so difficult nowadays to find a servant. You have come on your own. Now where is your house?”What can people take away? Death is going to take it away at any moment. You have come into the world empty-handed, and you will go from the world empty-handed, so it does not matter. Between these two…What you have in your hands does not matter. What matters is that you lost trust, which is an immense treasure of your being.By trusting everybody you can lose a few things. They may steal your money, but if you can continue to trust even those…trust is a great treasure. Trusting people who can cheat you, who are going to cheat you, is real trust.I am not going to cheat you, I am not going to steal anything from your house. I have already stolen you. I am a different kind of man. When I have stolen you, I have stolen everything. Why bother about each thing separately – I do a wholesale job.Now you don’t have anything! You and all that you have belongs to me. So if people take away a few things, let me worry about it, you go on trusting.But trust the whole of humanity. Whatever happens, don’t lose your trust, because trust is so valuable. It is going to give you all that meditation can give, all that prayer can give, and without any effort. And if you can trust one human being, you know the knack of it and you can trust everybody.My sannyasins have to remember it: trust everybody, because you have nothing to lose. But don’t lose your trust, because that is such a great quality of your being that it will open your being to godliness.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A man came to Bahauddin Naqshband, and said, “I have traveled from one teacher to another, and I have studied many paths, all of which have given me great benefits and many advantages of all kinds.“I now wish to be enrolled as one of your disciples, so that I may drink from the well of knowledge, and thus make myself more and more advanced in the tariqa, the mystic way.”Bahauddin, instead of answering the question directly, called for dinner to be served. When the dish of rice and meat stew was brought, he pressed plateful after plateful upon his guest. Then he gave him fruits and pastries, and then he called for more pulau, and more and more courses of food, vegetables, salads, confitures.At first the man was flattered, and as Bahauddin showed pleasure at every mouthful he swallowed, he ate as much as he could. When his eating slowed down, the Sufi Sheik seemed very annoyed, and to avoid his displeasure, the unfortunate man ate virtually another meal.When he could not swallow another grain of rice, and rolled in great discomfort upon a cushion, Bahauddin addressed him in his manner:“When you came to see me, you were as full of undigested teachings as you now are with meat, rice, and fruit. You felt discomfort, and because you are not accustomed to spiritual discomfort of the real kind, you interpreted this as a hunger for more knowledge. Indigestion was your real condition.“I can teach you if you will now follow my instructions and stay here with me digesting by means of activities which will not seem to you to be initiatory, but which will be equal to the eating of something which will enable your meal to be digested and transformed into nutrition, not weight.”The man agreed. He told his story many decades later, when he became famous as the great teacher Sufi Khalil Ashrafzada.La ilaha il’Allah: there is no god but God. This is the fundamental essence of the way of the Sufis. This is the seed. Out of this seed has grown the bodhi tree of Sufism. In this small proclamation, all that is valuable in all the religions is contained: God is and only God is.This statement makes God synonymous with existence. God is the very isness of all that is. God is not separate from his creation. The creator is in his creation; there is no duality, there is no distance, so whatever you come across is God. The trees and the rivers and the mountains, all are manifestations of God. You and the people you love, and the people you hate, all are manifestations of God.This small statement can transform your whole life. It can change the very gestalt of your vision. The moment one recognizes that all is one, love arises on its own accord. And love is Sufism.Sufism is not concerned with knowledge. Its whole concern is love, intense, passionate love: how to fall in love with the whole, how to be in tune with the whole, how to bridge the distance between the creation and the creator.The so-called organized religions of the world teach a kind of duality – that the creator is separate from the creation; that the creator is higher than the creation; that there is something wrong with creation, it has to be renounced. Sufis don’t renounce, they rejoice. That’s what I am teaching you here: rejoice!My sannyas is a way of rejoicing, not a way of renunciation.Rumi has said:If you are not one with the beloved,seek!And if you are in union,rejoice!This assembly is a Sufi assembly. You are my Sufis, the Sufis of the new age. I am introducing you to the world of love. I am initiating you into the ways of love.Sufis talk about two kinds of love. One they call muhabbat; it means the ordinary love, lukewarm, momentary, partial. One moment it is there, another moment it is gone. It has no depth, no intensity. You call it passion, but it is not passionate. It is not such a flame which can burn you. You don’t become aflame with it; it remains something under your control. You don’t become possessed by it, you don’t lose yourself in it. You remain in control.The other kind of love, the real love, the authentic love, Sufis call ishq. Ishq means love with total intensity. One is lost in it, one is possessed by it. One goes mad in it.I have heard…The great Sufi master Ruzbihan was once on the roof of his khanigah while in a state of wajd. The khanigah is the place where Sufis meet. It is a temple of love. It is a temple of madness, of utter rejoicing. This is a khanigah. No other god than love is worshipped, no other prayer than love is preached. In a khanigah, only those who are becoming aflame with love, who are on the verge of madness are invited.Ruzbihan was on the roof of his khanigah while in a state of wajd. Wajd is a moment when you are not and God is, a moment of absolute harmony. A window opens and you can see the whole sky, you are no longer confined within the walls of your body and mind. For a moment, lightning happens and all darkness disappears. Wajd is a momentary samadhi, a glimpse, a satori. It comes and goes. Slowly, slowly, it establishes itself.But even to know God for a moment is of immense beauty and benediction. Even to know for a single moment that you are not separate from existence, that there is no ego, that all is one – la ilaha il’Allah – even to know this just as a passing experience, just like a breeze that comes and is gone… By the time you become aware of it, it is no longer there, but it has been there. It has refreshed you, rejuvenated, resurrected you.Ruzbihan was on the roof of his khanigah in a state of wajd, in a state of oneness with existence. It happened that a group of young people was passing by in the alley below, playing musical instruments and singing. They were singing:O heart,in the neighborhoodof the Belovedthere is no wailing,nor are the roof, door,or windows of her house guarded.If you are ready to lose your soul,get up and come now, for the field is empty.They were completely unaware of Ruzbihan. They were just singing. They were even unaware of what they were singing, what they were saying. It is a Sufi provocation, it is a Sufi song. The moment Ruzbihan heard it: “If you are ready to lose your soul, get up and come now, for the field is empty” – and he was in a state of wajd, of unity, oneness, unio mystica – his ecstasy was such that he was not there in that ecstasy at all. When Ruzbihan heard this, something possessed him, something from the beyond, and he flung himself from the roof, whirling and turning in the air, to the ground below.Upon witnessing this, the group of young people cast away their instruments, left their former ways, entered the khanigah, and became Sufis.What happened to that group of young people? For the first time, they saw ecstasy, wajd, love, madness for God. For the first time, they came across a man who could risk his very life. This is ishq. Ishq means you are ready to lose your life for your love. Ishq means love has become a higher value than life itself.Hence the people who are in love are thought to be mad by people who have not known love, are thought to be blind by people who have not seen through the eyes of love. The intellectual condemns the ways of love, he is afraid. Love is dangerous. To go through the heart is risky because the heart is non-calculative, illogical.Just remember this man, this madman Ruzbihan, jumping from the roof of the khanigah just because a few people were singing a song. They said, “If you are ready to lose your soul, get up and come now, for the field is empty” – and he jumped, without hesitating for a single moment. This is madness. The calculative mind is going to condemn it. But he was not hurt. He was so drunk, he was not even aware of what was happening. Nothing was happening to him because he was not there: as if God jumped through him. He was possessed by God, he was utterly drunk.Seeing him coming from the roof, turning, whirling in the air… They had seen many dervishes, whirling dervishes, but not a man like this. And when he came onto the ground, he was so innocent, he was so silent, his joy was such that seeing him, just seeing him, was enough for them to renounce their old ways. They threw down their instruments, entered the khanigah, and became Sufis.That’s how you have become Sufis with me. You have also jumped from your roofs. To become a sannyasin is a quantum leap, it is a non-calculated step. It is only for the mad ones. But God is only for the mad ones. Those who calculate remain part of the marketplace. Calculation keeps you in the world.One needs to be in such love that one is ready to risk all. That love is called ishq. You have all known muhabbat, the so-called ordinary love, which is just an emotion, a sentiment, superficial. One day you are in love, another day you are in hate. One day you love the person and you are ready to die for the person, and another day you are ready to kill the same person. One moment you are so nice, so beautiful, another moment you are so nasty, so ugly to the same person. This is not ishq. Ishq has depth. This is only circumference. This is just a mask, this is part of your personality. Ishq, passionate love for God, is not of the personality. It is of the essence. It comes from your center. From the very ground of your being, it arises and possesses you. It is not within your control; on the contrary, you are in its control. Yes, you are drunk, and you are mad.Sufis have found ways and methods of how to create ishq. That is the whole Sufi alchemy: how to create ishq in you, how to create such passion that you can ride on the wave of it, and reach the ultimate.It is said about Majnu…The story of Majnu and Laila is a Sufi story, a great love story. No other love story can be compared with it. There are many in the world, almost every country has its own love stories, but nothing compared to Laila and Majnu because it has a Sufi message in it. It is not just an ordinary story of muhabbat, it is the story of ishq.It is said that Majnu decided one day that, seeing Laila, he had seen all that was worth seeing, so what was the use of keeping his eyes open anymore? He decided that whenever Laila would come he would open his eyes, otherwise he would remain blind because there was nothing else worth seeing.For months Laila could not come – the parents were against, the society was against – and Majnu waited and waited under the tree where they used to meet, with closed eyes. Days passed, weeks and months passed, and he would not open his eyes.And the story says God took compassion on him. He came to Majnu and said, “Poor Majnu, open your eyes. I am God himself. You have seen everything in the world, but you have not seen me. Look who is standing before you.”Majnu is reported to have said, “Get lost. I have decided only to see Laila, nothing else is worth seeing. You may be God, but I am not concerned. Just get lost, don’t disturb me.”Shocked, God said, “What are you saying? I have never come to anyone on my own. Seekers and devotees pray and search and practice – then too it is very, very difficult to see me – and I have come on my own; you have not even asked for me. I am coming just as a gift, and you are rejecting?”And Majnu said, “If you really want to be seen by me, come as Laila because I cannot see anything else. Even if I open my eyes I cannot see anything else. I look at a tree and Laila is there. I look at the stars and Laila is there. Laila is in my heart and she has possessed my whole heart, so whatever I see, I see through my heart. I am sorry, but there is no possibility because there is no space left in my heart for anything else. I am sorry. Excuse me, but go away. Don’t disturb me.”This is ishq. Even God… Yes, even God can be renounced. When you love, when you really love, there are no conditions. It is unconditional. You love for the sheer joy of it. And love is absolute – it knows no wavering, it knows no hesitation.Sufism is a great experiment in human consciousness: how to transform human consciousness into ishq. It is alchemy.And this is what I am doing here with you. You may be aware, you may not be aware of it, but this whole experiment is to create in you as much love energy as possible. Man can be transformed into pure love energy. Just as there is atomic energy discovered by physics, and a small atom can explode into tremendous power, each cell of your heart can explode into tremendous love. That love is called ishq. Sufism is the path of love.Remember that it is a path, it is not a dogma. Mohammedans have a particular word for dogma: they call it shariat. Dogma, doctrine, religion, morality, philosophy, theology, all are contained in shariat. Sufism is not a shariat, it does not depend on books. Sufis are not people of books. Sufism is a tariqat: a methodology, a technique, a science, a path, a way to truth, to haqiqat, to that which is. Remember the difference between shariat and tariqat.Theology thinks about God. That is the very meaning of theology; it consists of two words, theo and logy: logic about God, contemplation, thinking, philosophizing, speculation about God. Sufism does not think about God because, Sufis say, how can you think about God? Thinking is utterly inadequate. You can think about the world, but you cannot think about God. You can only be in love with God, so it is not a theology, but it is a method. It is an experiment in your consciousness, an experiment to transform it from gross energy into subtle energy, from material energy into divine energy.Tariqat is the way by which the Sufi comes into harmony with the whole. And two things are the basic requirements to follow this method. One is faqr: faqr means spiritual poverty, simplicity, egolessness. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” he is talking exactly about faqr. It does not mean poverty, it means spiritual poverty. Even a king can be spiritually poor, and even a beggar may not be. If the beggar is egoistic he is not spiritually poor, and if the king is egoless he is spiritually poor. Spiritually poor means there is nobody inside; utter emptiness, a silence prevails. This poverty has nothing to do with outer poverty. Outer poverty can be easily imposed; that is not going to help. An inner poverty is needed.If you follow faqr, if you slowly, slowly dissolve the idea of separation from existence, the ultimate result is fana. Fana means a state of nonbeing, what Buddha calls nirvana. You simply disappear, but your disappearance is the appearance of God. If you are in the state of fana, then suddenly, out of the blue, another state is born; that is called baqa. Baqa means being. Sufism is the bridge between fana and baqa. First you have to be dissolved as an ego, then you are born as God. The dewdrop has to disappear as a dewdrop, into the ocean; this is fana. But the moment the dewdrop falls into the ocean, it becomes the ocean; that is baqa.Nonbeing is the way to being, and love is the most adequate method to disappear.That’s why millions of people have decided not to love. If you decide in favor of the ego, you will have to remain loveless. Love and ego cannot go together. Knowledge and ego go together perfectly well, but love and ego cannot go together, not at all. They cannot keep company. They are like darkness and light: if light is there, darkness cannot be. Darkness can only be if light is not there. If love is not there the ego can be, if love is there the ego cannot be. And vice versa, if the ego is dropped, love arrives from all directions. It simply starts pouring in you from everywhere.Just as nature abhors a vacuum, God also abhors a vacuum. You become a vacuum, and God rushes into you.The first thing is faqr, and the second thing is zikr. Faqr means spiritual poverty, egolessness, simplicity, dissolving the idea of “I.” And zikr means remembrance. Disappear as a person, then presence is left. In that presence, remember God, let God resound in you – la ilaha il’Allah. Let this remembrance arise in your nothingness. In that purity of nonbeing, let there be only one music heard – la ilaha il’Allah. Repeat it, sway with it, dance with it, twirl, turn, whirl, and let this music fill you. Each cell of your body should start repeating la ilaha il’Allah, la ilaha il’Allah, la ilaha il’Allah.And you will be surprised; it creates a kind of drunkenness. The very sound of this mantra is such; it is one of the most potential mantras ever invented by man, discovered by man. Just repeating it, you will find that something inside you is becoming psychedelic, something in you is changing. You are becoming light, you are becoming love, you are becoming divine. And not only you will feel it, even others will feel it.Meditate on these beautiful words of Nurbakhsh:Those who suffer for you sit waiting for relief. They have renounced themselves, their hearts, and religion. In good faith your lovers have traveled the road of loyalty.Now sit waiting on your threshold, pure of heart. The beggars sit in the royal court of your grace, hearts content, needs fulfilled. Your dependents, they have nothing to do with worldly kings, but prefer to sit in total poverty within your kingdom.Worshippers of your wine circle the cask, take up the glass and sit there, no longer questioning, serene. Afflicted, wounded by you, they judge their souls worthless.Why then should they sit waiting for medicine? In God’s house God’s men cannot sit negligent, like you false pretenders.Light shines to the highest heavens from the gathering of the Sufis, wild ones, sitting for God, by God, in God.A very significant statement by a great mystic, Nurbakhsh. He says, wherever Sufis are: “Light shines to the highest heavens from the gathering of the Sufis, wild ones, sitting for God, by God, in God.”If only God is, then Mansoor was right when he declared: “Ana’l haq” – I am the reality, I am the truth! Then the Upanishads are right when the seers declared: “Aham brahmasmi” – I am the absolute! Buddha is right when he declared: “Not only have I become enlightened, but the moment I became full of light I saw the whole existence as enlightened. I declare the whole existence as enlightened. You may not be aware, but I can see the light in you.”That’s the function of a master: to see the potential, to see that which can become at any moment actual, and to help to make it actual. You are gods in disguise.And when I said this is a Sufi assembly, I meant it literally. See this silence, this grace, this benediction that is showering on you? See this stillness? See this faqr? In this moment there is no ego in you, but only a pure silence. The personality has disappeared, there is only presence, and the light rises to the highest heavens. Wherever the wild ones meet, the mad ones meet, wherever there is simplicity and love, and wherever there is prayer, zikr, remembrance of God, this miracle happens. You may not be able to see it. It is happening. You will have to become tuned to this miracle that is happening here.I am not just teaching you about God. I am not interested in giving you knowledge about God. I am sharing my God with you, it is a sharing. I want to challenge your God, which is asleep inside you, to provoke it. And that is the work Sufis have been doing down the ages, provoking the potential into the actual.Khwaja Esmat Bokhari says:This is no Kaabafor idiots to circle.Nor a mosquefor the impolite to clamor in.This is a temple of total ruin.Inside are the drunk, from pre-eternityto the Judgment Day,gone from themselves.The Sufis call their assemblies “temples of total ruin” – kharabat – because you have to die, you have to disappear. When real Sufis meet, there is nobody to meet. The Sufi assembly is utterly empty of persons. Only God is. It is a kharabat, a temple of ruin. Very revolutionary words of Bokhari: “This is no Kaaba for idiots to circle.”I also say the same about this assembly: “This is no Kaaba for idiots to circle” – hence idiots are very angry with me – “nor a mosque for the impolite to clamor in.” This is not a place for the mob and the crowd. This is a place only for the chosen ones, only for those who are ready to die in their love, only for those who are ready to risk all in their search for God.This is a temple of total ruin – kharabat. If you come close to me, remember: you are going to die.Mohammed has said, “Die before you die.” That is a Sufi statement: die before you die. Death is coming, death will take you away, but that will not be a voluntary death. It will not be a surrender. You will be forced to die. A Sufi dies voluntarily, he dies in love. He does not wait for death to come, love is enough to die in. And to die in love is beautiful because to die in love is to go beyond death. Listen to Mohammed: “Die before you die.”If you can die here with me… I am a dead man. I have died. And all that I am teaching you is an art of dying so that you can move into the state of fana: you disappear. If you fulfill that condition of disappearing, God immediately rewards you with baqa – being descends in you – and that being is eternal.The door that you have to pass through is the door of love because only a lover is ready to die voluntarily. Nobody else can die voluntarily, only a lover – because the lover knows that death is not death, but the beginning of an eternal pilgrimage.We are not creating a Kaaba here for idiots to circle, not a mosque for mobs to clamor in. We are creating a scientific energy field, where your energies can be transformed into their optimum potential. When a man is really aflame with love, God has happened. Only with the happening of God can you be contented, and can you be blissful. Only with the happening of God does misery disappear, and do hells become nonexistent.God is already the case! But you have not been able to gather courage enough to die in love. Sufism will persuade you, will seduce you to die in love.A Sufi mystic says:l thought of you so oftenthat I completely became you.Little by little you drew near,and slowly but slowly I passed away.If you remember God… And to remember God means to see God in the trees and the birds and the people and the animals. Wherever life is, look for God, wherever existence is, search for God because only God is – la ilaha il’Allah. So he can be found anywhere. He has to be found everywhere. Don’t look for God as a person, otherwise you will go on missing.That’s why millions of people search for God but go on missing. They are searching for a certain image. God has no image, God is not a person. God is this wholeness, this totality. So don’t start looking for a certain personage, otherwise you will never find him – and not finding him, you will start thinking there is no God. You started from a wrong vision.Because God has been thought of as a person, there are so many atheists in the world. The atheists are there because of your so-called religious people. The so-called religious people talk about God as if God is a person, and they cannot prove him. They create a climate in which atheism naturally flowers. Almost half of the earth has become atheist. All the communists are atheists, and the remaining people are only so-called religious, they are ready to turn to atheism any moment.Do you know? Before the Russian revolution, Russia was one of the most religious countries of the world. It was as religious as India is. And just after the revolution, within five years, all religions simply disappeared. What kind of religion was this, which took only five years to disappear? And when the atheists came into power, people simply surrendered to atheism. That religion was false, it was pseudo.The same is going to happen in India. Any day this country will become irreligious; just let the irreligious people come into power, and all the temples and all the gurdwaras and all the mosques will start disappearing because this religion is not real religion.In fact, the very idea of God as a person creates doubts in you. How many hands has he? What kind of face? Is he black or white? Does he look like a Chinese or an American? What height? Old or young? Man or woman? How many faces has he? A thousand and one questions, and not a single question is answerable – because you have taken the very first thing wrongly. God is not a person at all. God is this impersonal existence.Keep this continuously in your heart – in Sufism, God is synonymous with existence, synonymous with isness; the suchness of existence is God – and then things will become easier for you to understand.Now the story:A man came to Bahauddin Naqshband, and said, “I have traveled from one teacher to another, and I have studied many paths, all of which have given me great benefits and many advantages of all kinds.”Bahauddin is one of the greatest Sufi masters ever. He is of the same status as Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Christ. Naqshband means “a designer”; he was a designer, and this story is a design. He used to create situations because people can only be taught through real situations. And he was one of the greatest designers.Gurdjieff learned his devices from the Order of Naqshbandis, the followers of Bahauddin Naqshband. They are still called Naqshbandis: “The Designers.” No other school of human transformation has created so many devices. Bahauddin used to say that people are so asleep that if you simply talk with them they will listen, and yet they will not listen. They will only hear, and they will not listen. And even if they hear, the meaning that they will give to you and your words will be their own. They have to be brought to actual situations. People are so asleep, they have to be hit by actual realities; only then can something penetrate their thick, dense, insensitive, unintelligent heads.A man came to Bahauddin Naqshband, and said, “I have traveled from one teacher to another…” There are many people who go on traveling from one teacher to another, from one philosophy to another philosophy, from one school to another school, and these people think they are gathering much knowledge. They are gathering just rubbish. Knowledge cannot be attained in this way. A rolling stone gathers no moss. A spiritual seeker has to be in an intimate love relationship with a master. It is a delicate phenomenon, it takes time. You cannot just go from one door to another; you will remain a beggar. Yes, you can collect some information, but all that information inside you will become chaotic because each school has its own methods, and those methods are perfectly right in that school, in that particular milieu. They have been designed by masters, there is a pattern which has to be followed. Those methods cannot be mixed by other methods, with other methods.If a person goes from one teacher to another teacher thinking that this way he is going to accumulate much knowledge, he will go neurotic because all those methods are right in their own context, but without the context they are dangerous. And the context exists with the master because only the master is fully aware of what is being done.A few people come here, and they will watch and they will try to collect a few fragments, and then they think they will try on their own. They are doing something very dangerous. I would like them to be alert, to beware: these methods can be dangerous without the context. The context exists in me, and the context exists here in the total situation that is being created. You have to be here to know something which can be beneficial. And you have to be very, very patient because these things cannot be delivered to you like goods, and these things take time.The love that exists between a master and a disciple is not like a seasonal flower. That love needs long, long periods of intimacy. The disciple needs to be in immediate contact with the master as long as possible. Only then slowly, slowly something dawns on his consciousness; slowly, slowly a ray starts penetrating him.Now, this man is like almost all so-called seekers. “I have traveled” – he said to Bahauddin Naqshband – “from one teacher to another, and I have studied many paths.” Now this is foolish, this is utterly foolish. You need not study many paths, one path is enough to follow. Why waste time studying paths? Follow, travel. If you want to go to the Himalayas you don’t study all kinds of roads, you simply choose one and you follow it. Why waste time? Life is very short. Nobody knows, tomorrow may be the end. One cannot go on throwing time and energy into unnecessary things.If you come across a master and you feel, “Yes, this is my home,” then be drowned. Then forget that any other methods exist, that any other paths exist. Then let love possess you. Only then, slowly, slowly, patiently waiting, something starts growing.It is like a child growing in the womb. If the mother is not ready to wait for nine months, the child will not grow. And the child that grows between a master and the disciple may take more than nine months – nine years, ninety years? One never knows because with each disciple it is going to be different. It depends on the pace of the disciple.But this man is a representative of the so-called seekers. They go from one teacher to another, studying all paths.“…all of which have given me great benefits,” – he said – “and many advantages of all kinds.” That is all nonsense, that is just consolation. You are collecting dregs. You are begging, and a few pieces from here and a few pieces from there, just dregs. You have never been an invited guest to any master’s world. And one has to earn it, to become an invited guest to a master’s table. One has to pay for it, it is not cheap.People come here also. They do one group and they are finished. They say they have learned, and now they are going somewhere else. For two, three days they have done meditations, and they think that they have known what meditation is. Now they will go somewhere else to learn some other methods. These are stupid people.And these people create neuroses for themselves and for others too – because when they start gathering too much, they start advising others. Sooner or later these kinds of people become teachers on their own. The world is in too much of a chaos because of false teachers. And who is a false teacher? The false teacher is one who went from one teacher to another, never stayed anywhere, never got rooted in any path, but has gathered much information, has become knowledgeable. Now he can teach. All that he teaches is gibberish, but he can enjoy teaching it, it is very ego-fulfilling. He is the knower, and the other is ignorant. It is very gratifying.Beware of these pitfalls, they are on every seeker’s path. And one can always convince oneself that many have been the benefits, many advantages. Man’s ego is such that he cannot confess that he has been foolish.Just a few days ago, a man took sannyas. He is a Jaina, has followed Jaina monks for many years. He is an old man. After taking sannyas, he asked, “Should I start your meditations, or can I continue my meditation that I have been doing for at least thirty years?” I looked into the man; there was not even a trace of meditation.I asked him, “How have those meditations been? Have they been of some help, have you been growing through them? Have you become silent, blissful, contented? Are you fulfilled? Has some light penetrated you through those meditations? Have you become aware of that which is?”He said, “Yes. They have been of great benefit. I have learned much, I have grown through them.”So I said, “Then it is okay, continue your old meditations. There is no need. But why have you taken sannyas?”He said, “I thought maybe something more, or maybe something is missed, although I have been doing perfectly well on my own, but maybe something more can be gathered.”I said, “Continue with your old meditations. Ask only when you see that they have not given you anything. I will not tell you to do my meditations before that.”And the next day he wrote a letter: “I am sorry. I could not sleep the whole night. What a fool I am. Nothing has happened. And how was it that I could say in front of you, ‘Yes, much has happened’? I was thinking,” he wrote, “that even if I say that much has happened, you would still say to me to do your meditations, but you simply said okay, then continue. Then I pondered over it. I went back, looked into my past, and those thirty years have been a wastage. Really, that’s why I have come to you to take sannyas. But my ego would not permit me to say that I have been stupid continuously for thirty years, doing some unnecessary things, meaningless things.”This has been happening to many people. Whenever people who have been doing something in their past come, they always pretend that much has happened. It is so difficult for the ego to confess.But when you come to a master you have to be true. If you are not true to your own master, where else are you going to be true? And how can the master help you if you are untrue? I could see that the man was almost a desert. Not even a single flower had bloomed in him, he had not known anything of the spring, but still he said what he said.Watch. This man is in everybody. This ego is hiding in everybody’s being. It goes on pretending.This man said, “Yes, many kinds of benefits and advantages have happened…”“I now wish to be enrolled as one of your disciples, so that I may drink from the well of knowledge, and thus make myself more and more advanced in the tariqa, the mystic way.”Bahauddin, instead of answering the question directly, called for dinner to be served.This is a design. In the modern age, Gurdjieff designed many things, exactly on the same lines as Bahauddin. The people who are not aware of the designs of a master will not be able to understand at all.For example, a man would come to Gurdjieff who has never eaten meat, and Gurdjieff would force him to eat meat. Now, just think of a vegetarian. He would simply escape; he would ask, “What kind of religion is this?”But by giving you meat, Gurdjieff wants to disturb your whole status quo, your whole chemistry because only in a disturbed state can your reality be known; otherwise you are too cunning. If a nonvegetarian comes to Gurdjieff, he will say, “Wait. For thirty days be a vegetarian, and then for three days fast, and then I will start to work on you.” Gurdjieff is neither for vegetarianism nor against; he is a designer.He would give parties for his disciples, particularly to new disciples, and would prepare many kinds of foods, and then all kinds of alcoholic beverages. And this would continue almost to the middle of the night, eating and drinking. And when everybody was utterly unconscious, then he would watch. Then he would sit silently, would go to people and watch – because people are so cunning that unless they are drowned in a drug, they will not reveal their truth.The man who was just pretending to be a celibate, when he was drunk, started to flirt with the woman who was sitting by his side. He was a celibate, and he was pretending that he was a monk and he had remained celibate – he was a brahmachari – but once he was drowned in alcohol, he forgot all celibacy, all brahmacharya. His reality surfaced.The woman who was pretending to be very elegant, ladylike, sophisticated, cultured, holier-than-thou, far above ordinary human beings… Once she was under the impact of alcohol, she was just the opposite; she started to behave almost like a prostitute.Gurdjieff would watch his disciples only when they were unconscious. And once he knew their situation, then he knew. Then he would not bother with what they said, he would start working on what they were.Bahauddin, instead of answering the question directly, called for dinner to be served. This is one of the Sufi methodologies: they never answer directly. Their work is indirect because you have become so cunning that there is no way to change you directly. You have to be hit from the back door.When the dish of rice and meat stew was brought, he pressed plateful after plateful upon his guest. Then he gave him fruits and pastries, and then he called for more pulau, and more and more courses of food, vegetables, salads, confitures.At first the man was flattered…That’s what happens when you start gathering knowledge: you are flattered, you start thinking that now you know, you become very, very egoistic. You don’t know a thing, but the knowledge that you have gathered gives you a false impression, as if you know. And slowly, slowly you forget that “as if” completely, you become knowledgeable. You start pretending to others and finally to yourself. You deceive others in the beginning, and then you are deceived by the impression that you create in others. When others start thinking that you know, you start believing it. How can so many people be wrong? If so many people think that you know, you must be knowing. Alone you may have doubts, but when you gather many disciples, the doubts disappear. “So many people believe in me, I must be right.” First deceive others, and then be deceived by those who are deceived by you. It is a mutual arrangement.At first the man was flattered, and as Bahauddin showed pleasure at every mouthful he swallowed…Bahauddin was creating a perfect situation. That’s what happens if you go to the so-called teachers. They will be very happy when they see that you have started learning, that you have started repeating like parrots; they will be very happy. When they see that you are repeating them, they will be gratified, their egos will be more fulfilled. Then they have many people who have become “his master’s voice,” who have become imitators.They will be very happy, just as parents are happy when they see their children are growing to look just like them. If somebody says, “Your boy looks just like you,” the father is gratified. He may be stupid and the boy may look stupid and just like him, but that is not the question. He is very gratified that he will not leave the world alone. He will leave this child in the world to remind it that he has been here; he is going to leave a signature on the world. And every parent tries to mold the child in just his own image. Down the ages that’s what parents have been doing with children.Children are the most exploited class in the world, and utterly helpless. There seems to be no way to help them to get out from the imprisonment that parents create for them in the name of love, in the name of the children’s welfare, for their future. And all that is being done is that the parents are trying to leave replicas in the world, imitators in the world. That is what their parents had done to them, and so on, so forth. It must go back to Adam and Eve; they created children in their own image. The Bible says God created man in his own image. He is the father, he must have created children in his own image. Then Adam and Eve must have created in their own image, and it has gone on and on.So you are not only a carbon copy. You are a carbon copy of carbon copies, of carbon copies. The original seems never to have existed.Then it is no wonder if you are in misery because only an original person can be in bliss – because truth brings bliss. You are false.But a teacher will be very happy when he looks at his disciples and they start repeating what he is saying. He pats them. That’s what Naqshband was doing with this poor man.At first the man was flattered, and as Bahauddin showed pleasure at every mouthful he swallowed, he ate as much as he could.And just to satisfy the so-called teachers, people go on accumulating knowledge as much as they can.When his eating slowed down…But there is a limit to everything.…the Sufi Sheik seemed very annoyed…That’s what happens with teachers. They are happy only up to the point you are swallowing, repeating. When you are really fed up, literally fed up, and you are too full and on the verge of vomiting, they start becoming annoyed: “So you have stopped growing.” And then out of fear, out of their annoyance, out of their anger, you will try a little more, whatever you can manage.…the Sufi Sheik seemed very annoyed, and to avoid his displeasure, the unfortunate man ate virtually another meal.When he could not swallow another grain of rice, and rolled in great discomfort upon a cushion, Bahauddin addressed him in this manner…Now he has created the perfect situation. Now even the most mediocre mind will be able to see the point.“When you came to see me, you were as full of undigested teachings as you now are with meat, rice, and fruit. You felt discomfort, and because you are unaccustomed to spiritual discomfort of the real kind, you interpreted this as a hunger for more knowledge. Indigestion was your real condition.”Now he has created a condition to hit the point deep into the heart. He has hammered this situation. He has created the exact situation in which the man was, but only now can he understand. It could have been said, but then he would not have understood.Let me remind you of a Zen story. The paths of Zen and the Sufis are not very different. Their methods are different, but their working is very similar. Zen masters also create situations; of course, their path is of meditation, not of love, and Sufism is the path of love, not meditation. But let me add one thing more, otherwise you will misunderstand.If you follow the path of meditation, love comes as a shadow, and if you follow the path of love, meditation comes as a shadow. They are always together; if you can manage one, the other has been managed without managing it. But as far as devices, designs are concerned, Sufis and Zen masters are alike.A professor of philosophy went to a Zen master, Nan-in, and he asked about God, about nirvana, about meditation, and so many things, and the master listened silently – questions and questions and questions.Then he said, “You look tired. You have climbed this high mountain; you have come from a faraway place. Let me first serve you tea.” And the Zen master made tea.The professor waited. He was boiling with questions.And when the master was making tea and the samovar was singing and the aroma of the tea started spreading, the master said to the professor, “Wait, don’t be in such a hurry. Who knows? Even by drinking tea your questions may be answered – or even before that.”The professor was at a loss. He started thinking, “This whole journey has been a waste. This man seems to be mad. How can my question about God be answered by drinking tea? What relevance is there? This man is a madman. And it is better to escape from here as soon as possible because who knows how and what he is going to do next. And he says, ‘Even before that, who knows, your questions may be answered.’”And that’s how it happened. The professor could not escape either because he was also feeling tired, and it was good to have a cup of tea before he started descending the mountain.The master brought the kettle, poured tea in the cup, and went on pouring. The cup was full, and the tea started overflowing in the saucer, but he went on pouring. Then the saucer was also full – just one drop more and the tea would start flowing onto the floor – and the professor said, “Stop! What are you doing? Are you mad or something? Can’t you see the cup is full? Can’t you see the saucer is full?”The Zen master said, “That’s the exact situation you are in. Your mind is so full of questions that even if I answer, you don’t have any space for the answer to go in. But you look like an intelligent man. You could see the point, that now even a single drop more of tea and it would not be contained by the cup or the saucer; it would start overflowing onto the floor. And I tell you, since you entered this house, your questions are over-pouring onto the floor, overflowing all over the place. This small hut is full of your questions. Go back, empty your cup, and then come. First create a little space in you.”To create space is meditation. The master had created a perfect situation.Bahauddin has done it in a similar way. He says, “You were in great discomfort, exactly like the discomfort that you are suffering from now, but you thought that discomfort was there because of your spiritual thirst. You were suffering, but you thought that suffering was just because you wanted more knowledge, that you were suffering because you didn’t have enough knowledge.“You were suffering because you already had more than enough! You were suffering from overburdening, you were suffering from undigested knowledge. But you thought your suffering was because you needed more knowledge and you didn’t have enough, hence the suffering. You misunderstood your discomfort.“This is exactly your situation. Now the situation is in the body, but it has been in your inner being for many years, maybe your whole life. You have suffered from indigestion.”Remember, knowledge has also to be digested. Only then does it become wisdom. If you go on eating and you cannot digest it, it will not become your blood, your bones, it will not become your marrow. It will become a problem. You will gather weight; you will become heavy, dull. You will not become more intelligent through it, you will become more stupid. You will lose awareness, you will become more unconscious. You will become more like a rock. You will become stagnant. You will lose your flow.“Indigestion…said Bahauddin,“…was your real condition.“I can teach you if you will now follow my instructions and stay here with me digesting by means of activities which will not seem to you to be initiatory, but which will be equal to the eating of something which will enable your meal to be digested and transformed into nutrition, not weight.“Eating is right if it gives you nourishment. It is wrong if it only gives you weight. Eating is right if it gives you vitality, eating is wrong if it just makes you heavy. It is meaningless. To be heavy is not to be vital. The vital person is not heavy, he is light, he is almost weightless. He moves on the earth, but his feet never touch the earth. He can fly any moment. Gravitation has no effect on him.Bahauddin is saying, “But you will have to fulfill a few things, only then can I teach you.” A real master can teach you only if you fulfill certain conditions. On your part that shows that you are ready to receive.Many people ask me, “Why can’t we be here without being sannyasins, and learn?” I say, “You can be here, and whatever you can learn you can learn, but unless you are an insider you will not be able to receive the grace that I am making available to you.” By being a sannyasin you simply show a gesture: “My doors are open for you. I am ready to become a host for your energy. Come and be my guest.” That’s what sannyas is, and that’s what a Sufi needs to be.“I can teach you if you will now follow my instructions and stay here with me…” Now, there are many people here also…Just a few days ago, a sannyasin came and he asked, “What groups should I do?” and I suggested some. He dropped out of the first group. He thought that I had not understood his real condition, that I had given him a wrong group: “This is not for me.” I had given him two other groups. He never went – because if the first was wrong, naturally the other two were also going to be wrong. Then he inquired, “What should I do? Because I feel the groups that you have given me are wrong. Can I choose my own groups?” I said, “Okay, you can choose your own groups.”Now he has chosen his own groups, but he is disconnected from me. Now he is alone. He is a sannyasin, but only on the surface.Yes, I gave him the first group knowing perfectly well that it was not for him. But that’s what the design was. Can he trust me, just for three days being in a group? Can he trust me? Yes, it was true that the group was not meant for him. It was just something to create a situation. The situation was that he started feeling discomfort in the group, and could not tolerate it even for three days – could not even trust me for three days. Had he trusted, he would have shown that he was a real disciple.Now, he is a sannyasin, but just because he is in orange clothes and has a mala. The contact with me is no longer there. I cannot find him, his doors are closed. Now he will be here but without me, and all that he will do he could have done anywhere else. Now he wants to do the Encounter group. He could have done Encounter anywhere else.If he is not with me he will not be available to Teertha’s energy either because Teertha, the Encounter group leader, has no other energy. He simply functions as my energy. He is in that state where he has become just a vehicle. He is no more. He is in the state of fana, the disciple has disappeared in him. Now he simply functions as me. His hands are my hands, his energy is my energy. He is just a passage. If this sannyasin is not available to me, he will not be available to Teertha either.You could have done an Encounter group in the United States, in England, in Europe, anywhere. You will miss the special quality of the Encounter group that is available here. It is a totally different phenomenon that is happening here. This Encounter group is not led by a group leader, the group leader does not exist. He is just a functionary, just a hollow bamboo. It is my song that filters through him to you.There is no need to come here if you cannot follow my instructions. And these are small instructions. If I send you into some more difficult task you will escape. You could not just do a three-day Intensive Enlightenment group. What kind of search is this? You don’t have any passion for truth, and you don’t have any understanding of the workings of a master.Do you see this chair I am sitting on? Just four days ago, I ordered Asheesh and Veena to prepare it specially for the Sufi lectures. They have worked day and night. They could complete the chair only at one o’clock in the night, just a few hours ago. They could have thought, “Why could he not have said so a few days before, why just four days before?” But they enjoyed it, they understood the design. And they went higher and higher in energy. Last night when they completed the chair, they were almost on a psychedelic trip! As they moved in surrender… It was difficult to complete it in four days, but they did.The chair was not the question at all. It was a naqshbandi, it was a design. They learned something out of it: if you surrender, you can go high. The deeper you go in surrender, the higher you go in consciousness. They could have said that it was not possible. They would have missed – and they would have never known what it was meant for. But I am happy that Asheesh and Veena both understood the point. They went into it in deep trust; they thought that when I said four days, then it must be possible, and they poured their total energy into it.When you pour your total energy into anything in trust, it becomes meditation. It brings ecstasy. Last night they must have moved into a kind of wajd, a glimpse.When you are with a master you have to be very, very conscious because each and every thing is managed in such a way that it helps your spiritual growth.“I can teach you if you will now follow my instructions…” – said Bahauddin – “and stay here with me digesting, by means of activities which will not seem to you to be initiatory…” And many times… For example, how is preparing a chair concerned with sannyas? And how is it concerned with meditation? Can’t I speak on Sufism on another chair? We have many chairs. How is it concerned with Sufism? If you think about it, it is utterly irrelevant. But that is not the point at all. If you think that way, you will miss the whole point.Bahauddin says, “You may not understand that what I am saying to do is initiatory in any way.” “…but which will be equal to the eating of something which will enable your meal to be digested and transformed into nutrition, not weight.”If you are suffering from indigestion, just a tablet that can help digestion… It may not appear to you how it is going to help because you don’t understand the inner chemistry of the body. But you have to follow the instruction of the master. That’s what trust is all about. And sometimes masters ask impossible things, but blessed are those who can go into even impossible things. The more impossible a thing is, the greater is going to be your maturity through it, attainment through it, enlightenment through it.The whole point is that the food should become nutrition, nourishment, not weight. Whatever the master is giving you has to become wisdom, not knowledge. Knowledge is weight, wisdom is nourishment. Knowledge is intellectual, your memory is just overflowing with information. Wisdom is not part of your memory, wisdom becomes spread all over your being. You need not remember your wisdom; knowledge has to be remembered. Wisdom need not be remembered at all, it is you. Knowledge remains separate; if you don’t remember, you will forget. Wisdom you cannot forget, it is you. Remembrance is not needed, hence it never creates weight.When Buddha speaks it is not a weight on him. When I am speaking to you it is not a weight on me. No effort is there, it is utterly effortless. It is a sharing. I am not trying to teach you something, but simply overflowing toward you.Wisdom is natural, like digested food which has become your vitality. Knowledge is unnatural, is destructive, like undigested food which is hanging, burdening your chemistry.The man agreed. He told his story many decades later, when he became famous as the great teacher Sufi Khalil Ashrafzada.He himself became a great master in his own time, but he could become that only because he agreed. The same I say to you: if you agree with me, sooner or later great light will be released from you. You will become a light unto yourself and not only unto yourself, but for others also. You will become a lighthouse for all those who are wandering in darkness. But the first requirement is agreement with me with no hesitation, with no condition from your side, an unconditional trust. Then this miracle is possible in your life too.La ilaha il’Allah.Enough for today.

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

The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why is love so painful?Love is painful because it creates the way for bliss. Love is painful because it transforms, love is mutation. Each transformation is going to be painful because the old has to be left for the new. The old is familiar, secure, safe, the new is absolutely unknown. You will be moving in an uncharted ocean. You cannot use your mind with the new; with the old, the mind is skillful. The mind can function only with the old; with the new, the mind is utterly useless.Hence, fear arises, and leaving the old, comfortable, safe world, the world of convenience, pain arises. It is the same pain that the child feels when he comes out of the mother’s womb. It is the same pain that the bird feels when he comes out of the egg. It is the same pain that the bird will feel when he tries to be on the wing for the first time.The fear of the unknown – and the security of the known – the insecurity of the unknown, the unpredictability of the unknown, makes one very frightened.And because the transformation is going to be from the self toward a state of no-self, the agony is very deep. But you cannot have ecstasy without going through agony. If gold wants to be purified, it has to pass through fire. Love is fire.It is because of the pain of love that millions of people live a loveless life. They too suffer, and their suffering is futile. To suffer in love is not to suffer in vain. To suffer in love is creative, it takes you to higher levels of consciousness. To suffer without love is utterly a waste; it leads you nowhere, it keeps you moving in the same vicious circle.The man who is without love is narcissistic, he is closed. He knows only himself. And how much can he know himself if he has not known the other? – because only the other can function as a mirror. You will never know yourself without knowing the other. Love is fundamental for self-knowledge too. The person who has not known the other in deep love, in intense passion, in utter ecstasy, will not be able to know who he is because he will not have a mirror to see his own reflection.Relationship is a mirror, and the purer the love is, the higher the love is, the better the mirror, the cleaner the mirror. But higher love needs you to be open. Higher love needs you to be vulnerable. You have to drop your armor; that is painful. You have not to be constantly on guard. You have to drop the calculating mind. You have to risk. You have to live dangerously. The other can hurt you; that is the fear in being vulnerable. The other can reject you; that is the fear in being in love.The reflection that you find of your own self in the other may be ugly; that is the anxiety. Avoid the mirror – but by avoiding the mirror you are not going to become beautiful. By avoiding the situation you are not going to grow either. The challenge has to be taken.One has to go into love. That is the first step toward godliness, and it cannot be bypassed. Those who try to bypass the step of love will never reach godliness. That is absolutely necessary – because you become aware of your totality only when you are provoked by the presence of the other; when your presence is enhanced by the presence of the other; when you are brought out of your narcissistic, closed world under the open sky.Love is an open sky. To be in love is to be on the wing. But certainly, the unbounded sky creates fear.To drop the ego is very painful because we have been taught to cultivate the ego. We think the ego is our only treasure. We have been protecting it, we have been decorating it, we have been continuously polishing it – and when love knocks on the door, all that is needed to fall in love is to put aside the ego. It is certainly painful. It is your whole life’s work, it is all that you have created – this ugly ego, this idea that “I am separate from existence.”This idea is ugly because it is untrue. This idea is illusory, but our society exists and is based on the idea that each person is a person, not a presence. The truth is that there is no person at all in the world, there is only presence. You are not – not as an ego, separate from the whole. You are part of the whole. The whole penetrates you, the whole breathes in you, pulsates in you, the whole is your life.Love gives you the first experience of being in tune with something that is not your ego. Love gives you the first lesson that you can fall into harmony with someone who has never been part of your ego. If you can be in harmony with a woman, if you can be in harmony with a friend, with a man, if you can be in harmony with your child or with your mother, why can’t you be in harmony with all human beings? And if to be in harmony with a single person gives such joy, what will be the outcome if you are in harmony with all human beings? And if you can be in harmony with all human beings, why can’t you be in harmony with animals and birds and trees? Then one step leads to another.Love is a ladder. It starts with one person, it ends with the totality. Love is the beginning, godliness is the end. To be afraid of love, to be afraid of the growing pains of love, is to remain enclosed in a dark cell.Modern man is living in a dark cell; it is narcissistic. Narcissism is the greatest obsession of the modern mind – and then there are problems, problems which are meaningless. There are problems which are creative because they lead you to higher awareness. There are problems which lead you nowhere, they simply keep you tethered, they simply keep you in your old mess.Love creates problems. You can avoid those problems by avoiding love. But those are very essential problems. They have to be faced, encountered; they have to be lived and gone through, and gone beyond. And to go beyond, the way is through. Love is the only real thing worth doing. All else is secondary. If it helps love, it is good. All else is just a means, love is the end. So whatever the pain, go into love.If you don’t go into love, as many people have decided, you are stuck with yourself. Then your life is not a pilgrimage, then your life is not a river going to the ocean; your life is a stagnant pool, dirty, and soon there will be nothing but dirt and mud. To keep clean, one needs to keep flowing. A river remains clean because it goes on flowing. Flow is the process of remaining continuously virgin.A lover remains a virgin. All lovers are virgin. The people who don’t love cannot remain virgin. They become dormant, stagnant; they start stinking sooner or later – and sooner than later – because they have nowhere to go. Their life is dead.That’s where modern man finds himself, and because of this, all kinds of neuroses, all kinds of madnesses, have become rampant. Psychological illness has taken epidemic proportions. It is no longer that a few individuals are psychologically ill. The reality is, the whole earth has become a madhouse. The whole of humanity is suffering from a kind of neurosis.And that neurosis is coming from your narcissistic stagnancy. Everyone is stuck with their own illusion of having a separate self. Then people go mad, and this madness is meaningless, unproductive, uncreative. Or people start committing suicide. Those suicides are also unproductive, uncreative.You may not commit suicide by taking poison, or jumping from a cliff, or by shooting yourself, but you can commit a suicide which is a very slow process, and that’s what happens. Very few people commit suicide suddenly. Others have decided for a slow suicide; gradually, slowly, slowly they die. But the tendency to be suicidal has become almost universal.This is no way to live, and the reason, the fundamental reason, is we have forgotten the language of love. We are no longer courageous enough to go into that adventure called love.Hence, people are interested in sex because sex is not risky. It is momentary, you don’t get involved. Love is involvement, it is commitment. It is not momentary. Once it takes roots, it can be forever. It can be a lifelong involvement. Love needs intimacy, and only when you are intimate does the other become a mirror. When you meet sexually with a woman or a man, you do not meet at all; in fact, you avoid the soul of the other person. You just use the body and escape, and the other uses your body and escapes. You never become intimate enough to reveal each other’s original faces.Love is the greatest Zen koan. It is painful, but don’t avoid it. If you avoid it, you have avoided the greatest opportunity to grow. Go into it, suffer love because through the suffering comes great ecstasy. Yes, there is agony, but out of the agony, ecstasy is born. Yes, you will have to die as an ego, but if you can die as an ego, you will be born as a god, as a buddha. And love will give you the first tongue-tip taste of Tao, of Sufism, of Zen. Love will give you the first proof that God is, that life is not meaningless.The people who say life is meaningless are people who have not known love. All that they are saying is that their life has missed love.Let there be pain, let there be suffering. Go through the dark night, and you will reach a beautiful sunrise. It is only in the womb of the dark night that the sun evolves. It is only through the dark night that the morning comes.My whole approach here is that of love. I teach only love and nothing else. You can forget about God, that is just an empty word. You can forget about prayers because they are only rituals imposed by others on you. Love is the natural prayer, not imposed by anybody. You are born with it. Love is the true God – not the God of the theologians, but the God of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, the God of the Sufis. Love is a tariqa, a method, to kill you as a separate individual and to help you become the infinite. Disappear as a dewdrop and become the ocean, but you will have to pass through the door of love.And certainly when one starts disappearing like a dewdrop, and one has lived long as a dewdrop, it hurts – because one has been thinking, “I am this, and now this is going. I am dying.” You are not dying, only an illusion is dying. You have become identified with the illusion, true, but the illusion is still an illusion. Only when the illusion is gone will you be able to see who you are. And that revelation brings you to the ultimate peak of joy, bliss, celebration.The second question:Osho,Did the real master Jesus, the one beyond all the Christian distortions, to whom I once opened my heart, did he send me to you?All the way back this time, tentative and unsure, I come to you. I would hold this mala and look at your picture and you would say to me, using Jesus' words, “Come unto me ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.”I was surprised by such happiness to be before you in darshan and was transported by the eternal now of your presence. Yet underneath, somewhere I have held back. I have a bitter hatred toward false teachers and have been afraid to be duped again.I come cluttered with my fear, doubt, pride, rebellion, guilt and wrath which erupts even at you. I come with the hard growth you have fostered in me.Osho, I long to trust and surrender, somehow knowing it is the best way for coming home totally, to you, to myself, to Jesus, to the universe.Alok, neither have I spoken to you nor has Jesus. It is only your Christian conditioning. You don’t know a thing about Jesus; you can’t know.And to come to me through Jesus is not to come to me. If Jesus remains between me and you, there will be no connection, no contact, no communion. If you understand me, then there is no distinction between me and Jesus, so why go on carrying this Jesus of your mind? This is just your past speaking to you, and you are trying to hide your past behind a beautiful name, Jesus. You don’t know a thing about Jesus.I am here, you are with me, and you cannot understand me. How can you understand a Jesus? The gap between you and Jesus is that of two thousand years. All that you know about Jesus is what you have been taught. Although you say that you don’t believe in the Jesus that has been given to you by the Christians… But what other Jesus do you know? If there had not been a Christian church, you would not even have heard of Jesus. All that you know about Jesus you know through the Christian propaganda.I am here confronting you, and still you are keeping a curtain between me and you. Now you call that curtain Jesus.Your question is relevant to many people. It is not only that wrong things can become barriers between a master and a disciple; so-called good things, beautiful things, can become even far stronger barriers between the master and the disciple. In fact, only the good things can be the barriers – because you cannot think of them as barriers.You ask, “Did the real master Jesus…?” What do you know about the real and the unreal Jesus? And how are you going to make a distinction between the real and the unreal? You will make the distinction – and you are living in darkness, you are groping in darkness. Out of your confusion, whatever you decide is going to be more confusion and nothing else. Who is going to decide what is real and what is unreal? You, Alok? That is sacrilegious.That’s what the Jews were doing when they crucified Jesus. They were deciding, and they decided, “He is not the real Christ. He is not the messiah we have been waiting for.” How are you going to decide?Now, Alok has two conditionings in his mind: one is Christian, the other is Communist. Now, Christians are dangerous, Communists are dangerous – Alok is doubly dangerous. He will have a concept of Jesus which is in tune with his Communist idea, his Jesus will be a Communist. His Jesus will be “Comrade Jesus.”And that will be fiction, your fiction. You impose something on Jesus, and everything can be imposed because people like Jesus or Buddha are so pure, so empty – they are white, empty curtains – you can impose anything on them, and they are so nonresistant.Jesus has said, “Resist not evil.” These people are nonresistant, you can impose anything. And now they are not there either, to do anything about it. Jesus cannot say, “I am not a comrade.” You can find statements which are of your liking, and then you can prove that Jesus was the first Communist. In fact, the real apostles of Jesus are not Thomas, Luke, but Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin, and particularly Mao – because Alok is Chinese too.What Jesus do you think is real? On what criterion will you decide? You will be choosing according to your mind; you will drop many things which don’t fit with you. And that is the wrong approach.You are already in great confusion, Alok. Just look at your confusion, and don’t try to find out what the “real” Jesus is. The best way is to find out who you are, what is real in you. And that is the reality of Jesus because the real is not separate. Whatever is real in you is real in me. Whatever is unreal in you is unreal in me. The only way to know is to come to a conscious state of your own reality, what is real in you. You are living in dreams and thoughts. You have not contacted your own ground of being, and you start deciding who the real Jesus is. Not only that, then that real Jesus sends you here to me. Now, you will not even be able to understand me because the Jesus that you have created in your mind will be continuously interfering.You ask, “Did the real master Jesus, the one beyond all Christian distortions…?” And what do you think, you are not distorting? Maybe it is your distortion, but do you think your distortion is better than the distortion of the Christians? It can’t be better; a distortion is a distortion, and all minds distort. Only in a state of meditation is there no distortion.So please, become more meditative. When you are silent, utterly silent and quiet, contented, fulfilled, just herenow, and no thought moves in your mind – the mind functions no longer and you are transported into an unbounded space, contentless, thoughtless, but fully alert – you will know what is real in you. And whatever is real in you, is real in Jesus, is real in me – because it is real. Real is real. It makes no difference between me and you, Jesus and Buddha. Reality is one.You ask, “Did the real master Jesus, the one beyond all the Christian distortions, to whom I once opened my heart, did he send me to you?” Why bother him? Can’t you come to me on your own? Can’t you have even that much responsibility? Are you are throwing the responsibility on Jesus, so if something goes wrong, he will be wrong? If I am not proved right according to you, Jesus will be at fault, and you can complain. This is childish. Why can’t you come yourself? When are you going to become a little more mature? The moment a person is mature he takes responsibility on his own shoulders.This is tricky, cunning, clever. Writing this question, you must have thought that you are writing a beautiful thing. And this is egoistic too: Jesus sends you, Jesus takes care of you, you are so important. On this earth there are millions and millions of people, and Jesus has chosen Alok! Just think of it, how great Alok is – and he sends him to me.Can’t you come yourself? How long are you going to lean upon others? Why are you so afraid of committing mistakes? This is just a fear of committing mistakes. Jesus will not commit a mistake; if Jesus sends, it must be right. If you choose, who knows? It may be wrong. But remember, people grow only through committing many mistakes. Each mistake is an opportunity to grow. Don’t be irresponsible and don’t hide your irresponsibility behind beautiful names. Jesus is only a trick of your mind.“All the way back this time, tentative and unsure, I come to you. I would hold the mala and look at your picture and you would say to me, using Jesus’ words…” Why are you making things complicated? Why can’t I say things directly to you? Why should I use Jesus’ words? It is your own mind that is imposing these words of Jesus on me. It is your own memory that is playing a tape, that is simply an old record.“Come unto me ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light.” Why should I say it through Jesus’ words? But neither have I said anything to you… I am here, so I can say, “Alok, I have not said a single thing to you.” Now Jesus is not here, he cannot refute you, but at least I can refute you. These are your words. These are your desires. You are afraid of me; you would like to rest, not to change. You would like the yoke to be easy, and it is not easy. You would like it to be light, and it is not light.Just remember Jesus again. He has also said – but that didn’t occur to you – that “Those who are going to follow me will have to carry their crosses on their own shoulders.” Now, to carry a cross on your own shoulders can’t be easy, can’t be light. It was not light even for Jesus; carrying the cross, the heavy cross, he stumbled on the way. Two, three times he fell on the ground.The road was uphill. They were going to Golgotha to crucify him, and they had forced him to carry his own cross. It was heavy, crosses can’t be light. It was not a gold cross that you can hang around your neck. It was not a cross that Christians, Christian priests, bishops, popes, hang around their necks. It was not a gold cross! His neck was going to be hung on it. The weight was heavy, and he was thirsty and hungry, and they were forcing him to carry the cross, and he fell two, three times.The crucifixion was not easy either. Death cannot be easy. When Mohammed says, “Die before you die,” it is not going to be easy. Don’t deceive yourself. The work of inner transformation is hard.But that’s what Alok is desiring, that it should not be hard – hoping against hope. When Jesus was crucified on the cross, he was really angry at God. For a moment all trust was shattered. He looked at the sky and asked, “Have you forsaken me? What are you doing to me?” For a moment it was really hard, unbearable. He recaptured his balance, that is another matter, but the weight was not light. It can’t be. No real transformation can be light.Then why does he say, “Come unto me ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest, for my yoke is easy and my burden light?” This is just seduction. I also seduce you, giving you an idea of a very easy sannyas. It is not.I have heard…An old man with his young son were lost in a forest. By the evening they reached a small hut. They inquired, “How far is the town?” They were utterly tired. Hungry, thirsty, they wanted to reach the town as soon as possible. They wanted to eat something and rest. And the old man was really old, very old.The man in the hut said, “The town is ten miles away.”Just listening to this, ten miles, the old man simply fell on the ground. He was not even able to take one step – ten miles?The woman who was also in the hut, the wife of the villager, said to her husband, “Please, make it two miles. Look how tired they are. Make it two miles.”When somebody is too tired, it is good not to say the whole thing. Bit by bit let them pass, two miles, then again two miles, then again two miles.So when you ask me, “When is it going to happen, Osho?” I say, “Soon,” just to keep you alive and moving. That’s what Jesus is doing, each master has to do. The whole truth cannot be told to you, you will not be able to bear it. You can absorb it only in small chunks, small bits. Once they are digested, you will be able to bear a little more.But don’t try to deceive yourself that Jesus has spoken to you. You say, “I was surprised by such happiness to be before you in darshan and was transported by the eternal now of your presence. Yet underneath somewhere I have held back.” That has happened because of your idea of Jesus – his sending you here, that I have been speaking to you through Jesus’ words, using his statements. That’s why you could not be totally open to me.Yes, you were happy, but that is nothing compared to the bliss that could have happened if you were really available. Jesus was standing between you and me – and not Jesus really, but your idea of Jesus. And Karl Marx is there, and Lenin and Mao. It is a big queue! To search for you behind this queue is very difficult, Alok.Let these people be dispersed. I am enough, just as Jesus was enough when he was here. There was no need for anybody else. When you are with a master, the master is enough. Either you are with him, or you are not. If you are with him, he is enough. Then you don’t bring Jesus, Buddha, etcetera; there is no need. I am not saying that they are wrong, but that there is no need. Why unnecessarily complicate the phenomenon? It is already complicated.Just face me. Just look directly into my eyes and let me approach you. Let me hold your hands. Either you are with me, or you are not with me, but don’t play these cunning games: “I am with you because Jesus has sent me.” I have never sent anybody to Jesus, so why should he send anybody to me? He was enough unto himself, I am enough unto myself.“Yet underneath, somewhere I have held back.” That is where your Jesus and Mao and all the others are standing and keeping you back, holding you.“I have a bitter hatred toward false teachers…” Why should you have a bitter hatred toward false teachers? That very hatred will not allow you to be in communion with a master. False teachers are also needed because there are false disciples. Where will they go? Do you never think of the false disciples? You may have never thought about it, never heard the word “false disciple,” but false disciples need false teachers. You get only that which you deserve. If you are false, you will get a false teacher.Why this hatred? The false is also necessary because knowing the false as false, you will be able to know the true as true. Otherwise how will you know? Recognizing the false as false is a great step. And the real disciple will be thankful even to false teachers – because he will say, “It is through them that I have been able to come to the real master.”A man of understanding can use everything. Even poison can be used as nectar. All that is needed is awareness, intelligence. Hatred is not needed at all. If you are full of hatred for false teachers, even if you come across a true master, your hatred will become a barrier – because how are you going to decide suddenly, “Now I have come to the true”? The suspicion, the doubt, the mistrust, the hatred will be there, and that won’t allow you to know the real. And if you can’t know the real, you will decide that he is also false. You are caught in a vicious circle.There is no need to carry any hatred, no need to carry any wounds. If you lived with a false teacher, that simply shows you were foolish. And living with a false teacher, you have become at least so wise that you know who is a false teacher.Mulla Nasruddin was selling a certain medicine – it was nothing, just sugar pills, homeopathic pills – and he was saying, “Whosoever takes these becomes intelligent.”Somebody purchased some, and the next day the man went to Mulla and said, “You deceived me. They were only sugar pills.”Mulla said, “Look, you have already become wise. Yesterday you could not see that they were just sugar pills. Now, you see? It has worked.”You were foolish if you got caught by a false teacher. Don’t be angry at the false teacher, just see your foolishness. He has not done anything wrong to you. You were foolish enough, that’s why you were caught. And if you have become aware that he is false, at least for this much you must be grateful to him. See? It has worked, you are wiser.And remember always, before coming to the right door you will have to knock on many wrong doors because a true master is a rare phenomenon: once in a while. You will have to search the whole earth, and only once in a while will you come across a real master. You will come across thousands of unreal pretenders, but they also help. There is no need to carry any hatred for them, they also help. Knocking on a wrong door, seeing that it is wrong, slowly, slowly you become aware of what is wrong. And that’s how one learns about what is right.“I have a bitter hatred,” you say, “toward false teachers and have been afraid to be duped again.” They cannot dupe you unless you are ready to be duped, unless you are willing to be duped. It all depends on you.Never throw the responsibility on anybody else – that’s what, Alok, you are doing in your whole question. You throw the responsibility on Jesus, that he has sent you here. You throw the responsibility on false teachers, that they have been duping you. And you keep yourself aloof, as if you are not involved in it at all, that you are not a participant. How can a false teacher dupe you if you are not ready to be duped?My whole effort is to make you aware of your responsibility – because only by becoming aware of the responsibility do you become mature. You become grown-up. Remember, just growing old is not synonymous with being grown-up. Everybody grows old, very few people grow up. Aging is one thing, growing up another. What is the meaning of growing up? – taking all the responsibilities, good and bad. Whatever happens to you, you are responsible for it. This vision will help you to grow because if you are responsible, you will become more conscious of each step that you take.You say, “I come cluttered with my fear, doubt, pride, rebellion, guilt and wrath which erupts even at you.” The whole problem is one: you don’t take any responsibility on yourself. That’s why you erupt in wrath and anger even against me, and for no reason at all.That’s what happened in America. Alok was running a center there in San Francisco. A few sannyasins had gathered, and they said to Alok, “We don’t feel Osho’s presence in your center as we have felt it in other centers.” And they were right; they were not wrong. They were really sensitive. They must have felt your presence, Alok, not my presence – because you have not yet allowed me to happen to you. You have been a fence-sitter. You have been just sitting on the fence, ready to jump if something went wrong, jump away and escape.You are not yet involved with me; you are not ready to die with me and live with me. You are still carrying your ego.They were right. And what happened? When they said this, that they didn’t feel Osho’s presence in Alok’s place, he didn’t listen to what they were saying, he didn’t meditate over it. On the contrary, he threw my mala, jumped on it, broke the mala, went to the ocean and threw it in. And that time he also felt that God was saying to him, “Throw away this mala!” and he threw it away. Then God said, “Now you also jump.” But he didn’t jump. He himself wrote to me, “I only followed half. I could not gather that much courage.” So if it is a question of throwing me away, you can throw away easily, but if it is a question of throwing yourself away, you cannot.If it is a question of choosing between me and you, Alok, you will choose yourself. And that is not the way of a disciple. A disciple would have done just the reverse, he would not have thrown away the mala. Yes, he may have jumped himself. He would have said to God, “Okay. If you say for me to jump, I will jump, but I cannot throw away the mala.”Remember, just the other day I was telling you about Majnu, who said, “I will only open my eyes to see my beloved Laila”? Then God came, out of great compassion, and he said, “Look who is standing before you! I am God myself, asking you to look at me.” But Majnu said, “Get lost. If it is a choice between Laila and God, I choose Laila.”If someday there is a choice between the master and God, the disciple will choose the master – because it is only through the master that he can reach God. The master is the bridge. Choosing God against the master, you will never reach because you will not have a bridge.You are full of “…fear, doubt, pride, rebellion, guilt, wrath…” but if you look deep down, these are only on the circumference. At the center is nothing but an egoistic, narcissistic, neurotic attitude. You are an egoist, Alok, and you will have to die as an ego. Only then can I live in you and transform you.Again, you say, “…I long to trust and surrender, somehow knowing it is the best way for coming home totally, to you, to myself, to Jesus, to the universe.” Again Jesus comes in. I am not separate from Jesus, Jesus is not separate from me. There is no need to say “…coming to you and coming to Jesus…” It is an unnecessary repetition.And the whole thing is very calculative. You say, “…I long to trust and surrender, somehow knowing it is the best way for coming home totally…” You are not yet risking. Calculating: to surrender seems to be the best way, the most rational way. But how can you surrender with this attitude? Surrender means there is no way left. Surrender means, “I have failed, and failed totally.” Surrender means there is no hope, “There is no possibility of my ever reaching the goal.” In that helplessness, in that hopelessness surrender happens. It is not something that you do. You cannot “do” surrender. If it is done it is not surrender; you are there standing behind it as a doer, you can take it back.Surrender means you have disappeared. Now you cannot take it back, there is no way. You cannot go back, there is nowhere to go back to. Surrender is a happening, and it only happens, not out of calculation but out of the failure of all calculation, when you have utterly failed. You have tried this way and that, and you have tried all the possible ways and you see that you cannot reach anywhere, you go on moving in the same groove.That’s what happened to Buddha. After six years of tremendous effort he came to recognize the fact that whatever he was going to do was not going to help.Because it comes from the ego, how can it take you out of the ego? It comes as part of the ego, is an extension of the ego; how can it take you beyond the ego? It is the ego who becomes the doer; the ego cannot decide to surrender. If it decides, it has deceived you again. Then it is there, controlling even your surrender, and the ego cannot control your surrender. If it is true, surrender means egolessness.Buddha worked hard for six years in all possible ways, and there was no way to come home. The more he tried, the farther away he was. One evening, sitting under a tree near the river Niranjana, he just became aware of the whole absurdity of effort as such. He laughed and went to sleep. There was nothing else to do; that laughter was the end of all effort. It was ridiculous. He laughed at himself, went to sleep. “For the first time” – later on, he told his disciples – “For the first time, I slept because there was no dream, no thought.”When you have dropped all effort, what dream can come to you? What thought can come to you? There is nothing to do, all doing has failed. He was in a state of utter hopelessness, helplessness. Don’t think that he was sad. When you are really hopeless you cannot be sad either. Sadness means you are still hoping; sadness means this effort has failed, that’s why you are sad. But some other effort will succeed. Again you will dream, again you will think, again you will plan, again you will project. Hopelessness means now there is no hope, not, “I am a failure.”In reality, there is no possibility for human egos to succeed because they are illusory, and an illusion cannot succeed.Seeing this, he laughed. In that laughter, the transformation happened. He slept the whole night without any dreams, without any thought. It must have been a deep, deep sleep. And by the morning, when the last star was disappearing in the sky, he opened his eyes – and as he saw the last star disappearing, he also disappeared. That’s the meaning of becoming enlightened. Then he used to say, “Doing, I failed. Non-doing, I arrived.”The whole secret, the great secret, the secret of the secrets, is in non-doing. Non-doing is surrender.Alok, you cannot figure it out. You cannot reckon, “Let us now surrender because surrender seems to be the best way to attain something – bliss, God, Jesus, samadhi, enlightenment, nirvana.” But then surrender is a means to some end, and true surrender is not a means to any end. Surrender is simply surrender. There is no question of going anywhere, one has simply relaxed. That very relaxation – and you have come home.You will not find me there, you will not find Jesus there, you will not find yourself there. You will not find the thing that you call “the universe.” You will not find anything that you have known or dreamed up to now. You will find a totally new phenomenon, utterly discontinuous with all that you have thought, dreamed about.But you say, “…I long to trust” – it is a desire in you – “and surrender, somehow knowing it is the best way for coming home totally, to you, to myself, to Jesus, to the universe.” You will not find anything – the universe, me, Jesus, you. Nothing is found when you are surrendered, when you are in trust, when you have come home. And what you find is inexpressible.The Sufis call… The first state when you surrender, they call fana fi’llah: disappearing into God. And then out of that disappearing, something starts appearing – that they call baqa bi’llah: appearance of the total, the inexpressible, the indefinable. That indefinable is called God, that incredible experience of disappearing into the whole and becoming the whole. You will not find anything that you can think about right now, all words are inadequate to express it. It is a wordless experience.There is not even an experiencer: there is no division between the knower and the known. The knower is the known, the experiencer is the experienced, the observer is the observed. All duality has disappeared. There is no subject, no object. It is a different state. You can call it transjective: neither subjective nor objective. It is transjective, it is transcendental to both.You cannot find a word that will be relevant to it. It is so utterly new, your old mind cannot supply even a word to describe it.The third question:Osho,Whenever I come to darshan, a deep sadness comes up. I feel like crying. I cry and then feel calm and exhausted. What is happening?Asti, the whole time that you have been here with me, you have been trying to deceive me. That’s the root cause of your sadness.Asti is afraid of groups. Hence she is afraid of meeting me – because if she meets me I will tell her to do Encounter, Tantra, Vipassana, Primal. Because of this fear she has been playing a deceptive game. When she arrives she never comes for an arrival darshan. She always comes for a departure darshan so I cannot give any group – because she is leaving the next day. Even if she comes for darshan, she never comes for a talking darshan. She sits at the back; she comes only for a silent darshan because if she talks, she is bound to be caught, trapped into some group. She cannot ask a question because if she asks a question, she will get a group. She cannot bring her problems to me. I have been watching, and I have been giving her enough rope. Now she is feeling sad.That is natural – you have been avoiding me. You are here, and avoiding growth. You have not yet surrendered to me, you have not told me, “Osho, do whatever you want to do with me. Tell me whatever you would like me to do.” You have kept yourself aloof, you have kept yourself away, you have been protecting. Hence sadness is natural.That’s why, Asti, when you come to darshan you feel sadness coming to you. When people come to darshan they feel great bliss arising in them. Why sadness in you? – because you know that you are being smart with me, clever and cunning. And remember, the people who are clever and cunning here are the people who are going to miss. Be innocent. Only then is there a possibility of transformation.Asti, I would like to tell you this story. You have been trying hard to be smart and clever, but all smartness, all cleverness is stupid. A really intelligent person need not try to be clever, a really intelligent person is innocent. Intelligence is a function of innocence. And in trying to be clever… Often we fail to check our facts. We think we know the whole situation before we check it out.I remember hearing about a young attorney whose first job was with a large railroad company. It was not long until he had his first case to try. A farmer noticed that his prize cow was missing from the field through which the railroad passed. He promptly went down and filed suit against the railroad company for the value of his cow, in the office of the justice of the peace.In due course the case came up for hearing before the local justice of the peace in the back room of the general store, and the smart young attorney came down from the big city to defend the railroad company.The first thing he did was to take the farmer, who had no attorney, over into a corner and begin talking to him about settling the case. Well, the young lawyer talked and talked and finally twisted the old farmer’s arm so that the farmer, very reluctantly, agreed to accept half of what he was claiming to settle the case.After the farmer had signed the release and taken the check, the young lawyer just could not resist gloating over the old farmer a little bit, and he said, “You know, I hate to tell you this, but actually I put one over on you this morning. I could not have won the case. The engineer was asleep, and the fireman was in the caboose when the train went through your farm that morning. I did not have one witness to put on the stand.”The old farmer smiled a bit and went on chewing his tobacco. Then he said, “Well, I will tell you, young feller, I was a little worried about winning that case myself. You know, that durned cow came home this morning.”Asti, you have been trying to be smart, you have been trying very hard. But it is good that you have asked the question. Drop this cleverness. To be with me you have to be open, you have to be utterly naked. If you don’t want to do the groups, you could have cried and said, “No, Osho, I don’t want to do them.” But there is no need to hide, there is no need to pretend. Otherwise you will become sad because you have no contact with me, and naturally sadness will arise: “What am I doing here? Everybody else is growing; what am I doing here?”You have been doing these games. Stop playing these games. You have to be sincere with me. And remember, more and more sannyasins will be coming. It will become more and more difficult for me if you are trying to be clever and cunning, you may be lost in the crowd. You have to be very open, sincere, true, authentic. These games cannot be played, we don’t have any time for them. Thousands and thousands of sannyasins are going to come, and then it will be difficult for you. If you want to hide, you can hide in the crowd; it will be difficult for me to find you.So let us decide that if you want to be here, you have to be according to me, not according to yourself. Otherwise you will remain sad. Only surrender can help you. Only surrender can give me a chance to pour my grace into you.The fourth question:Osho,What is education?Parmar, man is born as a seed. He is born as a potentiality. He is not born as an actuality. And this is very special, this is extraordinary because in the whole of existence only man is born as a potentiality, every other animal is born actual.A dog is born as a dog, he is to remain the same his whole life. The lion is born as a lion. Man is not born as a man, man is born only as a seed: he may become, he may not become. Man has a future; no other animal has a future. All animals are born instinctively perfect. Man is the only imperfect animal. Hence growth, evolution, is possible.Education is a bridge between the potential and the actual. Education is to help you to become that which you are, only in a seed form. And this is what I am doing here; this is a place of education. What is being done in the ordinary schools and colleges and universities is not education. It only prepares you to get a good job, to earn well; it is not real education. It does not give you life. Maybe it can give you a better standard of living, but a better standard of living is not a better standard of life. They are not synonymous.The so-called education that goes on in the world prepares you only to earn bread. Jesus says, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” And that’s what your universities have been doing. They prepare you to earn bread in a better way, in an easier way, in a more comfortable way, with less effort, with less hardship. But all that they do is prepare you to earn your bread and butter. It is a very, very primitive kind of education, it does not prepare you for life.Hence you see so many robots walking around. They are perfect as clerks, as stationmasters, as deputy collectors. They are perfect, they are skillful, but if you look deep down in them, they are just beggars and nothing else. They have not even tasted one bite of life. They have not known what life is, what love is, what light is. They have not known anything of godliness, they have not tasted anything of existence, they don’t know how to sing and how to dance and how to celebrate. They don’t know the grammar of life; they are utterly stupid. Yes, they earn – they earn more than others, they are very skillful and they go on rising higher and higher on the ladder of success – but deep down they remain empty, poor.Education is to give you inner richness. It is not just to make you more informed: that is a very primitive idea of education. I call it primitive because it is rooted in fear, rooted in: “If I am not well educated, I will not be able to survive.” I call it primitive because deep down it is very violent: it teaches you competition, it makes you ambitious. It is nothing but a preparation for a cut-throat, competitive world where everybody is the enemy of everybody else.Hence the world has become a madhouse. Love cannot happen. How can love happen in such a violent, ambitious, competitive world where everybody is at each other’s throat? This is very primitive because it is based in the fear: “If I am not well educated, well protected, highly informed, I may not be able to survive in the struggle of life.” It takes life only as a struggle.My vision of education is that life should not be taken as a struggle for survival, life should be taken as a celebration. Life should not be only competition, life should be joy too – singing and dancing and poetry and music and painting, and all that is available in the world. Education should prepare you to fall in tune with it – with the trees, with the birds, with the sky, with sun and moon.And education should prepare you to be yourself. Right now it prepares you to be an imitator; it teaches you how to be like others. This is miseducation. Right education will teach you how to be yourself, authentically yourself. You are unique. There is nobody like you, has never been, will never be. This is great respect that existence has showered on you. This is your glory, that you are unique. Don’t become imitative, don’t become carbon copies.But that’s what your so-called education goes on doing; it makes carbon copies, it destroys your original face. The word education has two meanings, both are beautiful. One meaning is very well known, although not practiced at all. That is: to draw something out of you. Education means: to draw out that which is within you, to make your potential actual, like you draw water from a well.But that is not being practiced. On the contrary, things are being poured into you, not drawn out of you. They go on pouring geography and history and science and mathematics into you. You become parrots. You have been treated like computers; just as they feed the computers, they feed you. Your educational institutions are places where things are crammed into your head.Real education will be to bring out what is hidden in you – what existence has put in you as a treasure – to discover it, to reveal it, to make you luminous.Another meaning of the word, which is even far deeper: education comes from the word educare: it means to lead you from darkness to light. A tremendously significant meaning: to lead you from darkness to light. The Upanishads say: “Lord, lead us from untruth to truth – asto ma sadgamay. Lord, lead us from death to deathlessness – mrityorma amritamgamaya. Lord, lead us from darkness to light – tamaso ma jyotirgamaya.” That is exactly the meaning of the word education: tamaso ma jyotirgamayma – from darkness to light.Man lives in darkness, in unconsciousness, and man is capable of becoming full of light. The flame is there, it has to be provoked. The consciousness is there, but it has to be awakened. You have been given all, you have brought it with you, but the whole idea that you have become a man just by having a human body is wrong. That idea has been of tremendous mischief down the ages.Man is born just as an opportunity, as an occasion… And very few people attain: a Jesus, a Buddha, a Mohammed, a Bahauddin. Very few people, few and far between, really become man – when they become full of light and there is no darkness left, when there is no unconsciousness lingering anywhere in their soul, when all is light, when they are just awareness.A man asked Buddha…The man was an astrologer, a very learned scholar. When he saw Buddha he was puzzled. He had never seen such beauty, such grace. Buddha was sitting under a tree. The man was just in awe; he bowed down to Buddha and he asked, “Are you a deva, an angel? Have you descended from heaven – because I have never seen such grace on the earth? Who are you? Are you a gandharva?”Gandharvas are, mythologically, the musicians of the gods. They are very graceful, obviously – they are the musicians of the gods. Their very presence is musical. Just in their presence you will start hearing melodies, just being in their presence you will fall into a totally different rhythm. Their very presence is music, celestial music. And the astrologer heard that music around Buddha.He asked, “Are you a gandharva?”Buddha said, “No, I am not a god, I am not a gandharva.”“Then who are you? Are you just a man?”And Buddha said, “No, I am not a man either.”“Then who are you?”The man went on asking, and Buddha went on saying, “No, no, no.”The astrologer became more and more puzzled, and finally he asked, “Then who are you?”And Buddha said, “I am awareness.”Awareness, just awareness, pure awareness – and only then is one fulfilled. Then life is a benediction.Education is to bring you from darkness to light. That’s what I am doing here.Parmar has asked this question because the Indian government is not ready to accept my work as education. It is natural. They cannot accept it as education because I don’t create clerks and stationmasters and deputy collectors. I am creating new human beings. For them that is dangerous. If this is education, then they cannot allow it to happen. It is rebellion.I am teaching you to be yourself. I am teaching you to be fearless; I am teaching you not to yield to social pressure; I am teaching you not to be a conformist. I am teaching you not to hanker for comfort and convenience – because if you hanker for comfort and convenience, society will give them to you, but at a cost. And the cost is great: you get convenience, but you lose your consciousness. You get comfort, but you lose your soul.You can have respectability, but then you are not true to yourself; you are a pseudo human being, you have betrayed your God and yourself. But society wants that you should betray yourself. Society wants to use you as a machine, society wants you to be obedient. Society does not need you to function as an intelligent being – because an intelligent being will behave in an intelligent way, and there may be moments when he will say, “No, I cannot do that.”For example, if you are really intelligent and aware, you cannot be part of an army. Impossible. To be part of an army you need, as a basic requirement, unintelligence. That’s why in the army they manage to destroy your intelligence in every way. Years are needed to destroy your intelligence; they call it “training.” Stupid orders have to be followed: right turn, left turn, march forward, march backward – this and that – and they go on and on every day, morning, evening. Slowly, slowly the person becomes a robot, he starts functioning like a machine.I have heard…A woman went to a psychoanalyst and said, “I am very worried, I cannot sleep. My husband is a colonel in the army. Whenever he comes home for holidays, it becomes a nightmare for me. Whenever he is sleeping on his right side he snores, and snores so loudly that not only am I disturbed, even the neighbors are disturbed. Can you suggest something to me? What should I do?”The psychoanalyst thought it over and then he said, “Do one thing. Try this tonight, maybe it will work.” He gave her a recipe, and it worked. The recipe was simple. He said to her, “When he starts snoring, just tell him, ‘Left turn.’”She could not believe it, but when she did it, it worked, even in his sleep. He snored only on his right side, so when she said in his ear, slowly, softly, not very loudly, “Left turn,” just out of old habit he turned left. The snoring stopped, even in sleep.I have heard…William James has quoted this instance, a real actual instance. After the First World War, a man who had retired from the army was carrying a bucket full of eggs on his head, and somebody just joked – a few people were standing by the side of the road and one man said loudly, “Attention!”The man simply fell to attention, and the bucket fell, and the eggs broke all over the road. He was very angry. He said, “What kind of joke is this?”They said, “We have not done anything. We have just said, ‘Attention.’ Are we not allowed to say that?”And the man had been retired from the army for at least ten years. But it persists.I have heard…An insomniac boxer went to the doctor for some medical help. The ex-pugilist had tried mild sedation, but it didn’t seem to work. The doctor, hesitating to prescribe a more addictive kind, said, “Look, before I prescribe this heavier injection I want you to try an old-fashioned remedy. You may laugh, but it actually works. Try getting yourself completely relaxed, and then start counting to a hundred.”A few days later, the old fighter came back and said, “Doctor, I can’t do it. Every time I start counting, I jump up at the count of nine.”The whole training in the army is to destroy your consciousness, is to make you an autonomous machine. Then you can go and kill. Otherwise, if you are still carrying a little bit of intelligence, you will see that the person you are killing is innocent. He has not done anything to you or to anybody. He must have a wife at home who is waiting for him to come back; he may have small children, and they will become beggars; he may have an old mother or an old father, and they may go mad. And, “Why am I killing this man – because the officer says, ‘Start killing. Fire’?”An intelligent person will not be able to fire. An intelligent person may choose to die himself rather than to kill innocent people. Because a foolish politician wants to get involved in a war, because a politician wants to have more power, because of some stupid statements of the politicians, the war has started. He will not kill.This I call education: to make people more intelligent. And that’s what I am doing here. If this fire spreads, this old, rotten society cannot survive. It survives on your unconsciousness, it lives on your unconsciousness.So it is natural that the government will not recognize this place as a place of education. For them, it is one of the most dangerous places.But as far as I am concerned, this is education. Tamaso ma jyotirgamaya – lord, lead me from darkness to light.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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It is recorded that someone said to the great philosopher Saadi, “I wish for perception, so that I shall become wise.”Saadi said, “Perception without wisdom is worse than nothing at all.”He was asked, “How can that be?”Saadi said, “As in the case of the vulture and the kite. The vulture said to the kite, ‘I have far better eyesight than you. Why, I can see a grain of wheat down there on the ground, while you see nothing at all.’“The two birds plummeted down to find the wheat, which the vulture could see and the kite could not. When they were quite near the ground the kite saw the wheat. The vulture continued his dive and swallowed the wheat. And then he collapsed: for the wheat was poisoned.”Man is a slave. He is not born as a slave, he is born free. He is born as freedom, but he is found in chains everywhere. He lives in chains, he dies in chains. This is the greatest calamity that has happened to humanity.The moment a child is born, the society starts transforming the child into a slave; it is not interested in free people. It is afraid of freedom, freedom seems to be dangerous. A slave is safe. And the society needs only slaves because they can be exploited. The priest is interested in slaves, the politician is interested in slaves, the pundit is interested in slaves.These three p’s are the most poisonous p’s. These three have been the root cause of human suffering, and man will remain chained, imprisoned, unless he gets free of the politician, the priest, and the pundit. These three have to disappear from the world. Only then can man bloom in freedom.What these people have done to humanity has to be understood – because this is your story: how you have become a prisoner. The question is not how to find God, the question is how to get out of this prison that you call your mind, that you call your culture, that you call your religion – beautiful names for ugly things. If you look deep, without prejudice, you will be surprised: your mind is not yours at all. It is a conditioning forced upon you from the outside. The mind that you call yours is not yours, it belongs to the exploiters. They have played a trick upon you: they have implanted this mind in you, and through this mind they go on controlling you. Hence they have been very much against people like Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed.Why did they crucify Jesus? Why did they poison Socrates? Why did they murder Mansoor? These were innocent people, they had not done any harm to anybody. What was their sin? This was their sin, that they were trying to make a door so that people could get out of the prison, so that slavery could be destroyed from the earth.History says slavery has been destroyed. That is all bunk! It has not been destroyed, it has only moved from the gross to the subtle. Yes, you don’t have chains on your hands and on your feet because the chains have become more subtle; they have gone into your mind, they have become more inner. On the outside you are enjoying freedom, democracy, equality, brotherhood – just empty impotent words – deep down there is no brotherhood, there cannot be.How is there any possibility of brotherhood if there are Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans? How can there be any possibility of brotherhood if there are nations: India, Germany, England? It is impossible. Man is constantly at war, each moment you are living in conflict. And how can there be equality when you have been taught from the very beginning to be ambitious?Ambition means that you have to be higher than the other. Ambition means that you have to prove your superiority, that you have to prove everybody else is inferior to you, that you have to succeed. If success remains the god, if ambition remains your education, how can there be equality? To talk about equality is utter nonsense. It does not exist even in communist countries; it cannot exist anywhere unless ambition disappears.In Russia or in China there are still classes. Their names have changed, the labels are different. Now there is no class of the poor and the rich; a new class has arisen, of the rulers and the ruled. It is the same old game, it makes no difference at all. We go on playing the same game. All that we do in the name of revolution is to change the labels.The real question is not how to find truth because you cannot find the truth unless you are free. Truth arrives in freedom. Jesus has said, “Truth liberates.” That is true. That is only half of the story, that truth will make you free. The other side, which has not been told to you, is also as important: truth happens only in freedom. In fact, truth and freedom are two aspects of the same coin, they happen together. If you are unfree you cannot attain truth, and if you have attained truth you cannot be unfree. But from where to begin? If you start with truth, you will become a victim of words, philosophies, theologies, scriptures. You will be lost in the jungle of linguistic logical speculations.Start with freedom: that’s my message to you. Come out of the prison that has been imposed upon you – and the prison cannot exist if you don’t cooperate with it. That is the only ray of hope, that it cannot exist without your cooperation. But you cooperate with it. It feels safe, it feels secure, it feels convenient and comfortable, it feels warmer, and you have decorated it well from the inside.Down the ages that’s what man has been doing, decorating his prison cell. You have made it really beautiful inside, it almost looks as if it is a temple. You have painted your chains beautifully. You have covered your chains with gold and silver, they look like ornaments. Hence you go on cooperating.Freedom is the basic requirement if you want to know godliness, if you want to know at all what this life is, and what the benediction of this life is, and what the beauty of this existence is. If you want to know it at all, you will have to come out of your prison. You will have to risk. Because the prison seems comfortable and you have lived in it so long, you have become accustomed to it. You will have to come into the open, under the sun and the moon and the sky. You will have to come into the wind. You may have lived so long in the cage that you may be afraid to open your wings again. You may have completely forgotten that you have wings.This is the situation where man exists. But before we can make a breakthrough out of the prison walls, we will have to understand how the prison is made, what the strategy is, of what it consists. The most fundamental strategy is that the priests and the politicians and the pundits have been substituting every real thing with something unreal. That is the most fundamental strategy of how this prison, this slavery, has been created.They have substituted marriage for love. Marriage is a plastic thing. It can be beautiful if it comes as a consequence of love, but the priests have managed it: they say, “First marriage, then love.” Then love never happens. They have stopped your most significant part, your heart, from functioning. After marriage you may start liking the woman or the man because you live together, just as brothers like sisters and sisters like brothers – but there can be no poetry, no thrill, no ecstasy. Love will move on plain ground. It will not know any peaks, it will not be acquainted with orgasmic peaks.And exactly like this, they have been substituting every real thing with something unreal. Marriage is synthetic, it is man-made. Love is God-made. Love happens, marriage is manufactured. Beware of all that is manufactured by man. It looks like the real thing and it is not, it is only a pretension. It only creates hypocrisy and nothing else, and you cannot pretend for long. Sooner or later the pretension wears out and then you are left in misery.I have heard…A little boy and his sister put on their parents’ clothing. They went next door and knocked. When the neighbor answered it they said, “Mr. and Mrs. Brown have come to call.”Taking it all in her stride, the neighbor lady said, “Please do come in, Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Will you join me in some refreshments?”After serving them milk and cookies, the lady asked, “Care for anymore?”“Thank you, no,” replied the little girl. “We must be going home now – Mr. Brown just wet his pants.”How long can you pretend? Sooner or later you will have to face the reality. And you are just using the clothes, you are not Mr. Brown. Sooner or later you will wet your pants – and it is going to be sooner than later.Man is living in hypocrisy, in utter hypocrisy. You are not what you think you are, you are not what others say you are, you are not what you believe you are. This is the most fundamental strategy of creating a prison.You are living in hypocrisy; that is your slavery, and for every real thing there has been a substitute. For example, character has been substituted for consciousness. Character is man-made, consciousness is divine. A conscious person has no character at all. A conscious person is utterly characterless, he need not have character. Character is a very poor thing. A conscious man lives by his consciousness, his consciousness is his character. He need not depend on any outer discipline, he has an inner light to live by. He responds moment to moment, not out of a certain dead habit which is called character. He responds moment to moment as the situation demands. He is conscious, he has not decided beforehand what to do and what not to do. That’s what character is: deciding beforehand what to do, what not to do, creating an automatic reaction in yourself, becoming mechanical. That’s what character is all about.If somebody insults him, the man of character has a ready-made answer. The man of consciousness has no ready-made answers. He need not be bothered. He has consciousness, he has a mirrorlike quality. He will reflect the situation, and he will respond to the situation. His act will be out of that moment’s awareness. His act will not be out of the past, out of memory, out of the mind. His act will be born anew in the present. His act will be fresh, as fresh as dewdrops in the morning. His act will have beauty, his act will have splendor, his very act will be that of grace.The man of character is ugly. He is dull, stupid; he lives in the past, he lives in habits. He has created what are called “good habits” – but why do you need habits? You need habits because you can’t depend on your awareness, otherwise there is no need to have any habits. You can always rely on your awareness, you know you will be there, fully aware – so why prepare beforehand? There is no need. Whatever is required by the moment will arise in you.The society has substituted character for consciousness. Children are very conscious, more alert than they will ever be. You can watch children; that’s why they look so alive, so fresh, such a bubbling cheerfulness. Where does all that disappear to? And look at people who have character: you will always see a kind of dullness in their eyes. You will not find any spark, you will not see intelligence. Children are intelligent. They are not yet covered by layers of dust, they have not yet gone through the factory called education, they have not yet been cultured. They are yet wild, and they still have the freedom of wild animals, and the innocence and the joy. They act moment to moment.But we start cultivating them, we start curbing their freedom. We start imposing, “Do this, don’t do that.” We start imposing do’s and don’ts on them. Soon they will forget all about freedom, soon they will start acting out of the past, pretending. Soon they will no longer be alive.A small girl was getting ready for her first dance. She was very ecstatically thrilled. Her mother was dressing her and combing her hair. The small girl looked in the mirror – and she looked so beautiful. She asked, “Mummy, were there dances arranged in the old days also, when you were alive?”Yes, people die long before they actually die. A person is dead by the age of four. Then he simply repeats, then he moves in a groove, in a rut. Then his whole life is just a long story of unconsciousness.Character is the cause of your unconsciousness. If you are not forced to have a character, you will grow more and more brilliant, luminous. You will have to – because you will not have anything else to lean upon except your consciousness. Because of these substitutes – marriage for love, character for consciousness, morality for religion, logic for truth, philosophy for existential experience – because of these substitutes, you are lost in a kind of desert. You have become unconscious.Whenever the question of truth arises, you start thinking immediately: that’s your response. How can you think about truth? You can think only about something you already know. Thinking can exist only within the boundary of the known. Truth is not known yet; how can you think about the unknown? The unknown cannot be thought about, the unknown has to be experienced.But people go on thinking about truth, about God, about love. People go on thinking about things which have to be experienced and not thought about. But you have been told, “Become great thinkers and you will attain truth.” And a thinker is just a biocomputer, a thinker is never original. You must have heard about original thinkers: there have never been any original thinkers. Thinking is not original, so how can the thinker be original?Experience is original. Yes, it is from the origins, it is original. Thinking is never original, it is always borrowed – but you can believe that you have come across an original thought. You may have simply forgotten where you read it, you may have forgotten from where you got it. If you search a little more deeply, you will find from where it came into you.All thoughts have come from without. Experience arises within. The without has replaced the within, thinking has replaced experiencing. But one can pretend: one can mix one thought with another, can create a composition, and can think it is original. It is not.I have heard…A man was sitting on his porch rocking back and forth. He seemed to be having a long discussion with himself. Every once in a while he broke into loud laughter. At other times he shouted, “Phooey!” in disgust.A policeman passing by stopped to watch the man and asked him what was going on. “I’m telling myself jokes,” the man told him. “And if I say so myself, most of them are very funny.”“Then why do you keep saying ‘phooey’?” the policeman asked.“I only say that when I’ve heard them before.”That’s what you are doing, that’s what everyone is doing. All so-called original thinking is just nonsense. Thinking is never original, thought is always borrowed. It comes from the outside, no thought is yours.But people start fighting – because they say, “I have to fight for my thought, for my ideology, for my religion, for my philosophy.” The Christian fights, the communist fights, the Hindu fights – for what? They have been persuaded to believe: “This thinking is yours, this philosophy is yours.” No thinking is yours and no ideology is yours. You have been deceived – but you can remain in this deception because you are unconscious. And you have become unconscious because consciousness grows only with the real.With the unreal there is no growth. It is as if you have a real tree in the garden, it grows; but if you have a plastic tree, it will not grow. It can deceive the passersby, it can deceive the neighbors, but it will not grow. The unreal cannot grow.Character is unreal, so it never grows. Knowledge is unreal, so it never grows. Morality is unreal, so it never grows. And because you become too attached to these ungrowing things, you stop growing. That’s what I mean when I say you become unconscious. Consciousness has to be a constant flow; only then do you remain conscious. Consciousness is riverlike. The moment you become stagnant you lose consciousness.People are living unconsciously. It hurts to feel, “I am living unconsciously,” it goes against the ego. But this has to be understood – at least by seekers this has to be understood: you have lived an unconscious life. This very understanding is the beginning of consciousness.A city-dweller came to a farm and saw a beautiful horse. He decided he had to have the animal. He bargained with the farmer and the farmer finally sold him the horse.The city man jumped on the horse and said, “Giddyup!” The horse did not budge.The farmer explained, “This is a special kind of horse. He will only move if you say, ‘Praise the Lord’” – he was really a very religious horse. “To stop him, you have to say ‘Amen.’”Keeping this in mind the new owner yelled, “Praise the Lord” whereupon the horse took off with great speed. Soon horse and rider were headed for a cliff. Just in time, the rider remembered to say, “Amen!” The horse came to a screeching halt right at the edge of the cliff.Relieved, the rider raised his eyes to heaven and exclaimed, “Praise the Lord!”Watch man, watch yourself, watch and you will see: everybody is functioning unconsciously.To become conscious is the whole secret of being religious. To become conscious is to get out of the prison. All that is needed is to become more and more conscious. More knowledge is not needed, more consciousness is needed. You already have too much knowledge, you are burdened with it. The load is heavy, you cannot move because of it. You have to unburden yourself, and you have to start finding the real and dropping the unreal.Always search for the real and don’t be deceived by the society. Of course, people will be angry with you because the moment you become conscious, you are no longer under their control. They want you to be obedient, they want you to be disciplined – disciplined according to them, obedient to them. They go on talking as if there would be chaos if people stopped obeying. And they go on saying that if people stopped being disciplined, the society would be shattered.That is not true. The society is shattered, it is a chaos, it is already a chaos. What more chaos can there be? You are living in a chaotic society, in a neurotic society. It is already hell.When I say to stop obeying, what I am saying is: become your own self. The man who has become his own self will know when to obey, and when not to obey. He will not be obedient, he will not have a character of obedience. He will decide according to each case when to obey, and when not to obey. When he sees the truth he will obey, when he sees untruth he will not obey. He will remain free to obey or not to obey.It is good to be free because you have obeyed stupid politicians for too long, and they have been creating violence, war, bloodshed, and nothing else. You have obeyed the priests too long and they have given you churches and temples and mosques, and they have taken the real temple of God away from you. They have talked about the other world but they have destroyed this world – and this is the only world there is.So when I say don’t be disciplined by anybody, I don’t mean that you become a chaos; I mean you become an inner discipline. Be disciplined according to your own awareness. Follow your own awareness, be a light unto yourself. This is freedom – to become a light unto oneself.But the society does not want you to become a light unto yourself – because if you become a light unto yourself, you will not follow all kinds of nonsense that you have been following up to now. And there are people who have a great vested interest in your unconsciousness. Hence your schools, colleges, and universities create unconsciousness, they don’t create consciousness. They create efficient robots. They give you knowledge but not wisdom, and wisdom is the real thing. Knowledge is a false, synthetic, man-manufactured thing, but knowledge looks like wisdom, and there is the danger. The plastic flower looks like the real rose, and that is where the danger is. If you have not seen a real rose for a long time, you may start thinking that it is a real rose – because all that you have come across again and again has been a plastic flower.Hence Jesus is crucified. Jesus is a real rose, he had to be crucified. Otherwise others would have started comparing, and they would have come to know that what they had been carrying as a real rose was not a real rose, it was a synthetic, plastic flower. They would have thrown it away. Socrates had to be poisoned because he was trying to make people more aware.When a person is aware he does not become disorderly, but his order comes from his own being. He is nobody’s slave, he is his own master. And that’s what sannyas is all about: becoming your own master. That is the meaning of the word swami: to become a master of one’s own, to be a light unto oneself. And there arises a different kind of order – real order.Buddha lives in that order, and you can see the grace. He lives according to his own light. He has his own way, his own authentic individuality. He is a free man – but remember: a free man is going to be in constant conflict because a free man has to be in rebellion. That is the price one has to pay.There are three more things which have been used as a strategy to destroy your freedom. They are secondary. The most basic is substituting the false for the real, but these three are also there.The second is: creating a division in man, making man split – because whenever you are divided you become weak. Naturally, you start fighting with yourself. Then you cannot fight with the society, then you cannot fight with the prison. The prisoner is constantly in such inner conflict; from where will he gather enough energy to break through the wall? It will not be possible. So another trick has been played upon you: you have been divided. You have been told your body is separate from your soul; you have been told God is separate from the world; you have been told the other world is the real world, and this world is a false world, maya, illusion.For at least ten thousand years a deep schizophrenic philosophy has been taught: divide. The moment you become divided, split, you are lost – because your right hand starts fighting with your left hand. Then both your hands are engaged, and the politician can exploit you, the priest can exploit you, the pundit can exploit you. Both your hands are engaged; you cannot defend, you cannot rebel.My message to you is that there is only one world, this is the only world. This earth, this very earth, is paradise. I teach you to be earthy because there is nothing else, there is no other world. The other world is an invention of the priest. Your body and soul are one unity, it is all one. Don’t fight with your body, don’t try to be separate from your body, otherwise you will remain a victim. You will never become powerful, and power is needed to rebel, your energy is needed to rebel. Only when you are overflowing with energy can you be free. Otherwise you cannot be free.And the third thing that has been used is fear. You have been made afraid – of hell, of punishment. And the other side of it is, you have been made very greedy for paradise, heaven, and the joys and the pleasures there: “You will be awarded greatly if you follow the priest; if you don’t follow the priest you will be punished very badly, horribly.”Man has become fear-oriented. No child is born fear-oriented. You can watch any child: he can even play with a snake, he has no fear. He can even play with fire, he has no fear. The child comes into the world as fearlessness, but we impose fear. The child, every child, is love-oriented, and every so-called grown-up is fear-oriented.I would like you to again become love-oriented. Drop all fears, there is nothing to be afraid of. There is no hell, don’t be worried about it; and there is no heaven, so don’t become greedy for it. All that is, is herenow. This moment contains all hell, all heaven. And it depends on you: if you enjoy, rejoice. If you are in deep love with life, if you can celebrate, you are in paradise. If you cannot enjoy, if your sources of celebration have been poisoned, if you have such heavy chains on your feet and your hands and you cannot dance with life, then you are in hell.A parish priest saw Muldoon, who had recently got married, in church after a long absence. Speaking to him later, the priest said,“I believe your wife has brought you back to your religion.”“That’s right,” said Muldoon. “I did not believe in hell till I married her.”The priest, the politician, the pundit have created a hell here, and because they have created a hell you have started believing in hell. And the more you believe in hell, the more you participate in creating it.This life has to be lived with as much joy as the birds are living it. Have you seen a bird on the wing? Just joy on the wing! Or have you seen a rose opening its petals? Joy opening its petals. Have you seen a river rushing to the ocean? Joy rushing to the ocean. Except for man, have you ever seen misery anywhere? The trees are blessed because they don’t have these three poisoners; the birds are blessed. The snake in the Garden of Eden who poisoned Eve and Adam’s consciousness must have been all these three together: he must have been a politician, a priest, and a pundit. Beware of the snakes! And the problem is that they have dominated your mind so long that you don’t think they are enemies. In fact, on the contrary, people like me look like enemies – because they go against your conditioning.The Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai, goes on saying almost every day that if people follow me, society will be destroyed. Just the other day, the Education Minister of Maharashtra gave a statement to the newspapers that I cannot be allowed to remain in Pune – because if people listen to me and follow me, this society is going to be shattered. In a way they are right.This society, this rotten society, needs to be destroyed. Only on the ruins of this society can another society arrive. Only on the ruins of this imprisoned consciousness can freedom be born. Man has to live in a new way. We have lived too long with these poisoners, and they have destroyed all that is beautiful, all that is valuable. They have destroyed the whole poetry of life. They have given you only toys and they have taken real things, all real things, away from you. They have given you words: you can go on chewing on words like God, love, but you don’t know what God is, you don’t know what love is. All that you know is fear, all that you know is money, power-politics, and you go on talking about prayer. That is mere talk.In a way they are right: if people listen to me, this society is going to be destroyed. But this destruction is just an introduction to a new creation. Before something can be created, the old has to be destroyed.Just the other day I was reading the Poona Herald. They had written an editorial against me. The main thing was that I am teaching an earthly religion, earthy. That is true, but that is not something against me, that is really a compliment. Yes, that’s exactly what I am teaching – this very earth the paradise, and this very body the buddha. I am teaching you that there is nowhere else to go. Don’t sacrifice the present moment for anything, for any philosophy, theology, for any politics, ideology. Don’t sacrifice your present moment for any nation, for any church, for any race. Don’t sacrifice your present moment, don’t sacrifice at all. Celebrate, and if you celebrate this moment, the next moment will become one of more celebration. And when slowly, slowly your whole life is a song, that is the transformation.These ten thousand years, humanity has lived in a kind of nightmare, but now things have come to a climax and something is going to happen, something tremendously important is going to happen. Either man is going to die utterly… If you go on following the past, then you are doomed, or – and there is every possibility that humanity will not decide to commit suicide – there is every possibility that now things have come to such an end that humanity will decide to take a new route.We have moved horizontally for too long. Now we have to move vertically. We have moved in time for too long, now we have to move in eternity. We have desired and been ambitious for too long, now we have to drop all desiring and ambition and we have to put our whole energy into the present moment, to make it a celebration.A newly ordained priest was going to do missionary work in South America. When he was leaving home, the local parish priest offered to drive him to the airport.The young priest was reluctant to accept the offer because the old parish priest was a notoriously bad driver. But he didn’t want to offend the old man and he agreed to go with him.After a hair-raising journey, they arrived at Dublin airport.“It is a long way to South America,” said the old priest.“It is,” said his friend. “But the worst part of the journey is sure over.”I can see a new dawn which is very close by. The night is so dark, true, but when the night is so dark, the dawn is very close by. I am preparing you for that dawn. The worst part of the journey is over.But you cannot see that far. The moment you start seeing, you will be thrilled. Humanity is coming closer and closer every moment to a great revolution, a revolution of consciousness, a revolution from all old concepts into a new way of living.Sufism can be immensely helpful because there have been people – they have always been there… Once in a while a person has escaped from the prison, has gone out of the prison and seen the open skies and the stars, and the joy of the sun and the wind and the rain, and has declared to the prison inmates, “Come out also!”A Buddha came out, a Jesus, a Bahauddin, a Rumi. And Sufis have great messages for the future of man.These stories are just ways of saying something in such a way that even a child can understand. Truth is always very simple. If you are not complicated, it is just like a small story told to a child. These stories are simple, but their significance is immense:It is recorded that someone said to the great philosopher Saadi, “I wish for perception, so that I shall become wise.”Saadi said, “Perception without wisdom is worse than nothing at all.”First: Sufis use the word philosopher in a totally different sense than it has in the West. They use it literally. The literal meaning of philosophy is lover of wisdom. In fact, the word sophy and the word sufi come from the same root: sophia, wisdom.In the West, the philosopher has become a totally different phenomenon. Due to the Greek influence, the philosopher lost his roots in existence and became more and more rational, became more and more speculative. And Western philosophy has grown out of the Greek experiment. Hence, Western philosophy has gone in almost the opposite direction from Sufism. It has become logic-chopping, great arguments about nothing, just hair-splitting.And slowly, slowly Western philosophy has come to a dead end. Now it is nothing but linguistic analysis. It no longer thinks of great things, it is no longer concerned with God or truth or freedom or love, no, not at all. Its whole concern has become the meaning of words. When the Western philosopher thinks about God, he means that he will think about what the word God means. He is not concerned with the reality of God, he is concerned only with the word God – as if by analyzing the word fire you will come to know fire, or by analyzing the word bread your hunger will be satisfied. Western philosophy goes on thinking about the word – bread, God, love – and has completely forgotten that love is only a word, it is not the reality. It is only a symbol, it is a finger pointing to the moon.Western philosophy goes on thinking about the finger – how long it is, how beautiful or not beautiful it is, black or white, and has completely forgotten that it simply points to the moon. You need not be concerned with the finger, you can forget about it. Look at the moon and forget the finger. But Western philosophy has become greatly skilled in thinking about the finger.If you read the works of the greatest philosophers in the West – Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore – you will be surprised: just linguistic analysis. The reality is no longer any concern of philosophy.So when this story says …the great philosopher Saadi… remember, it is not said in the same sense as when we say, “the great philosopher G. E. Moore,” no. It is in the same sense as when we say, “the great philosopher Jesus,” “the great philosopher Buddha,” “the great philosopher Lao Tzu.” It has the meaning of a wise man, and that is really the meaning of the word sophia: one who loves wisdom.Saadi is also a great poet. That’s how it should be, it has always been so. Wherever wisdom has happened, poetry has also happened by the side, of its own accord. Poetry is a by-product of wisdom. I don’t mean that every wise man is going to write poetry. No, that is not needed – he lives poetry, his whole being is poetry. If you taste Buddha you will know what I mean; if you taste Jesus you know what I mean. Not that Jesus writes poetry – he is not a poet in that sense – but he lives poetry, each of his movements is poetic. Even on the cross, his last statement praying to God, “Father, forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing,” is pure poetry. Only a poet can have that much heart.Saadi is a great poet and a great philosopher, he is a wise man. And remember, by “wise man” I don’t mean a man who knows much, no. Knowledge has nothing to do with wisdom. Remember knowledge is a substitute, a false substitute for wisdom. Wisdom grows in your consciousness; knowledge is implanted in you, imposed on you. Knowledge you get from the universities, wisdom you get from life itself; no university can give it to you. You have to live life. Knowledge you can get from books, scriptures, teachers, experienced people, by your own life’s experiences; wisdom is a totally different phenomenon. Wisdom you get only if you are open, vulnerable to existence, in deep love with existence. Then an old, dead leaf falling from a tree will give you wisdom. It will show you the momentariness of life, it will give you a message of death. And the way it falls – so gracefully, so fearlessly – will also give you wisdom, that this is the way to die. In the morning the rose blooms and by the evening it has gone. Coming, it was joy, going, it is joy.Wisdom comes from watchfulness – not by study but by awareness, not by concentration but by meditation. One has to be just open to this infinite splendor called life. One has to be open to the earth and to the sky. One has to be open to everything, each and everything. Without judgment, one has to be open; then wisdom comes.If you judge, you prevent; if you choose, you prevent; if you condemn, you prevent; if you evaluate, you prevent. The man who wants wisdom to shower on him remains just a pure witness. Thoughtless, he looks; he is just a mirror, he reflects. He does not conclude, he is not in a hurry. He never gathers knowledge; he goes on learning. He goes on learning, but never gathers knowledge.The knowledgeable person lives in his memory, in the past. The wise man lives in the present – not in his memory but in his awareness this very moment. Saadi is a wise man.A man came to Saadi and said: “I wish for perception, so that I shall become wise.” Now, no one can become wise. It is not an effort. One can become knowledgeable; it is an endeavor, an enterprise. One can cultivate knowledge, one cannot become wise. Wisdom is not becoming, it is being. That has to be understood.Becoming is a process of time: today you have this much knowledge, tomorrow you can have more, and the day after tomorrow, more and more and more. Wisdom is not a quantity. Knowledge is a quantity, so the quantity can be more or less. The student has less, the professor has more. But wisdom is never less or more; it is a quality. Buddha is wise, so is Mahavira, and so is Bahauddin, and so is Zarathustra. Now, you cannot say who is wiser, that is not possible. It is not a quantity, you cannot compare. They are all wise. Wisdom knows nothing of more or less.But about knowledge that is possible. You can say, “This professor is more knowledgeable – he has three PhD’s. That professor is not so knowledgeable – he has only one PhD. This professor is more knowledgeable – he has published in many academic journals. He has written so much, so many books have been published. That man, the other man, is not so knowledgeable.”Knowledge is a quantity, it can be compared. Wisdom is not a quantity, it is a quality. You cannot become wise. It is a sudden happening, it is not gradual. It is not that one moment you are wise, and another moment a little more, and a little more, and gradually one day you become perfectly wise. No, it happens instantly: it is a sudden enlightenment, it is a state of being. When you have dropped all knowledge, it happens. When you have come out of the prison that the society has created for you, it happens. When you are again a child, it happens.Remember the words of Jesus: “Unless you are like a small child, you will not enter my Kingdom of God.” What does he mean? Unless you attain the same freedom that you were born with, “…you will not enter my Kingdom of God.” Drop all that the society has given to you: character, morality, the idea of good and bad, the division of body and soul, the split between the earth and heaven. Drop all that the society has imposed on you. Become innocent again, a clean slate, and suddenly you are wise.Wisdom is something that happens like a sudden lightning. That is the meaning of enlightenment, satori, samadhi.The man said to Saadi: “…I wish for perception, so that I shall become wise.” Now, he is asking a wrong question. But people are not aware of what they are saying, they go on using words. He has heard, he is using words. He does not know with whom he is talking. He is not even aware that he is facing a buddha. Saadi is an enlightened man, but the man is talking in the same way, in the same gibberish, that he has been speaking to other people. He is perfectly unaware of whom he is talking with.I have heard…A lady went into a pet shop to buy a bird. She saw one that interested her. “What kind of bird is that?” she asked the salesman.“That is a crunch-bird,” he replied. “Let me show you what he can do.”“Crunch-bird, my paper!” the man ordered. The bird flew down and in one gulp ate the sheet of paper.“Crunch-bird, my pencil!” The crunch-bird swooped down and swallowed the pencil.“He is wonderful!” said the lady. “I will buy him.”The lady brought the bird home. Her husband looked at the bird and wondered what kind of bird it was. He had never seen a bird quite like it before.“That, my dear,” the wife boasted, “is a crunch-bird.”The husband scratched his head, “Crunch-bird?” he said. “Crunch-bird, my foot!”Talking to a Buddha, or to a Saadi, or to a Bahauddin, you should be a little more alert about what you are saying. You should be very careful of what words you are using. And if you are really careful and alert you may not use any words. You may simply bow down, you may simply put your head at the feet of Saadi and wait there for him to say something to you – because what can you ask? Out of your confusion only a confused question will arise. What can you ask out of your unclarity, out of your ignorance, darkness? What can you ask?It is said, when a disciple of Buddha went to see Buddha for the first time…He was a great scholar, one of the very well-known in India in those days; his name was Sariputra. When he went to Buddha for the first time, he went with five hundred disciples, his own disciples; they were all great scholars. He was a well-known Brahmin and he was much known for his debates. He had the capacity to defeat anybody. He used to roam around the country with his disciples, quarreling, debating, discussing, defeating other scholars. He was victorious in his art, nobody had yet been able to defeat him.His disciples were very thrilled that now they were going to defeat Buddha. Sariputra could defeat anybody. They knew it, they had seen it happen again and again, but they were not aware of what was going to happen. The moment Sariputra saw Buddha he started crying, tears came into his eyes. The disciples were bewildered: they could not believe it, they had never seen such a thing. Sariputra was a very arrogant scholar, roaming around the country defeating every kind of philosopher, imposing his philosophy. Crying? A great silence descended. Even Buddha’s disciples could not believe it. They were also waiting: “There is going to be a great debate and discussion.”Sariputra bowed down, put his head at Buddha’s feet and remained there. Buddha asked him, “Do you want to ask anything, Sariputra?”He said, “No. Seeing you, all questions have disappeared. I want to be here with you. If some day you feel that I am worthy and you would like to say something to me, you can say it. But if you don’t say anything, then too I will be contented. I am contented. Seeing you, I have seen all that is worth seeing.” This is the way to approach a man who is wise.The man said to Saadi: “…I wish for perception so that I shall become wise.” Saadi said, “Perception without wisdom is worse than nothing at all.” What is he asking for in the name of perception? He is asking for knowledge, he is asking for the capacity to see more, to know more. He thinks that wisdom can be caused by something – by perception, by knowledge, by the capacity to see.Wisdom is not caused by anything, wisdom is already the case. You were born wise, wisdom is your nature. All that is needed is to drop the pretensions that you have cultivated. All that is needed is to rediscover. It is already there, somewhere deep down, hidden behind all kinds of rubbish that has continuously been poured into you by the parents, by the teachers, by the professors, by everybody around you.All kinds of nonsense are being poured into every child; it becomes piled up. You call it your ideology, your philosophy, your religion – your communism, your Christianity, your Hinduism. It is just junk! And deep down, hidden behind it, is the real treasure. It has only to be rediscovered.Saadi said, “Perception without wisdom is worse than nothing at all.” Knowledge can be dangerous if you are not wise. That’s what is happening in the world: people become knowledgeable, and their life loses all meaning. Just go and see the knowledgeable people – they are the most lost, they feel life to be absolutely meaningless. They cannot feel any joy. They are continuously wondering why they are alive at all: “Why not commit suicide?” Maybe they are cowardly and cannot commit suicide, but they are not able to answer why they are living, for what. They don’t feel any purpose anywhere. Life seems to be accidental, unnecessary. They can’t see the point where they are needed in any way. They are feeling uprooted. The more knowledgeable a person is, the more he feels uprooted.Knowledge does not lead to wisdom, knowledge leads to madness. Knowledge does not lead to enlightenment, it leads to deeper and darker unconscious realms of your being. Knowledge takes all celebration away from your life – it destroys all poetry, all song, all dance. It makes you serious.Wisdom knows how to laugh, knowledge cannot laugh. Knowledge is always serious, wisdom is playful. Wisdom knows how to live, how to love, how to laugh. Wisdom is light, knowledge is heavy. You cannot attain wisdom through knowledge.That’s what the person is asking, and that’s what everybody is thinking: “If I gather a little more knowledge I will be wiser.” You will not be; you will be less wise. The more you know, the less you will know. Socrates was right when, at the end of his long life, he said, “I know only one thing – that I know nothing.” This is wisdom.Knowledge creates specialists who know more and more about less and less, and finally end up by knowing all about nothing. Wisdom is a totally different dimension: it is the dimension of being, not of becoming.The man asked Saadi:“How can that be?”You say ignorance is better than knowledge without wisdom.“How can that be?”Saadi said, “As in the case of the vulture and the kite. The vulture said to the kite, ‘I have far better eyesight than you. Why, I can see a grain of wheat down there on the ground, while you see nothing at all.’“The two birds plummeted down to find the wheat, which the vulture could see and the kite could not. When they were quite near the ground the kite saw the wheat. The vulture continued his dive and swallowed the wheat. And then he collapsed: for the wheat was poisoned.”That’s how it has happened: man has collapsed because of his knowledge. First his inner world was destroyed by knowledge and knowledgeability, and now scientific knowledge is destroying nature. First we have destroyed the inner by so-called religious knowledge, now we are destroying the outer by so-called scientific knowledge. The inner ecology has been destroyed by the priests, and the outer ecology is being destroyed by the technologists. Man is collapsing.We are living in the most significant time ever – because it is a time of great collapse. Either humanity disappears or a totally new way of life arrives. These moments are very critical, it is the greatest crisis man has ever encountered. Religion has destroyed half of the world, the inner world, and science is destroying the other half.We need a totally different kind of religion and a totally different kind of science – a science which helps ecology. And we need a totally different kind of religion – a religion which gives you freedom, not slavery, which helps you to be yourself, which is not an imposition.Science is a rape on nature, and religion has been a rape on your inner consciousness. Both have failed, both have been destructive.A new vision is needed. It was never needed as much as it is needed now – because the time is very limited. We are sitting on a pile of atomic weapons. The capacity to destroy this earth is so vast that you cannot even imagine for what we have gathered such a capacity to destroy. It is a thousandfold: every man, every single man, can be killed one thousand times, one thousand earths can be destroyed. We have piled up that much capacity to destroy, and we go on piling more up every day. It may be a communist country or a capitalist country, it makes no difference; each country is trying to put all its energy into war, into destruction.Even a country like India, which boasts of being nonviolent and all that jazz, is greatly desirous of having atomic weapons. Even a country like India, which thinks and claims and boasts that it is a religious country, puts seventy percent of its energy into war efforts. People are dying, starving, and the Gandhians, who have been the rulers of this country for three decades, go on piling up more and more weapons – and they go on talking about nonviolence. It is such an absurd world. It is so ridiculous! You have to be aware of it, you have to be very, very alert to it. We are sitting on a volcano, our own, manufactured, made by ourselves; it can erupt at any moment. Before it erupts we have to find a new science and a new religion.In fact, the new science and the new religion will not be two separate things. They are separate because of the division created in you: the body and the soul, this world and that, inner and outer, man and woman, day and night. Because of these divisions, science and religion have been in conflict – because your body and your soul have been in conflict. The new religion and the new science will not be two separate things, it will be one thing. You can call it religio-science or anything you wish, but it will be one thing. It has to be one because man is one. The outer and the inner are not in conflict, they are aspects of the same coin.If man is wise, he will have a different kind of world, more natural in every way, more harmonious, more poetic. Both the outer and the inner need great change. Both have suffered much, but they can be revived because they are eternal. Even though much poisoning has been going on, that poison can be dropped out of the system, the system can still be purified. Still there is hope.It is out of my hope that I am creating you, my sannyasins. It is out of my hope that I am creating a new kind of consciousness, where religion and science can meet, where East and West can meet – there should be no East and no West in the future – where all dualities disappear and the nondual is felt. That nondual is God.But you can know that nondual, that God, only if you come out of your prison. Come out, wake up: you can. Nobody can hinder you except yourself. You will have to drop a few comforts, a few conveniences, but it is worth it – because once you have known the real joys of life, you will never regret that you had to drop those false toys.But before you have known the real, it is really difficult. Trust is needed. And that is the function of a master, to create trust in you. I cannot give you freedom because freedom cannot be given by its very nature. And a freedom that is given can be taken away at any moment, so it is not of any worth. I cannot give you freedom. In fact, you don’t need it, you have it deep inside. It is still alive, it just has to be searched for, found. I can give you trust, I can help you to gain confidence.Your confidence has been taken away. You have been made afraid, you have been forced to tremble in fear. In your temples you are doing nothing but trembling, and you call it prayer. You are simply afraid, and out of fear you create gods. They are not gods, they are just shadows of your fear. And out of your misery you create paradise. That is just a consolation.The real God cannot be attained through fear. The real God is attained only through love, but love is possible only in one way: love is possible only in freedom. The slave cannot love, and the slave cannot be wise either. Drop your slavery. You have nothing to lose except your chains, and you have everything to gain, the whole world to gain.You don’t know how much you are missing. You don’t know what compassion arises in buddhas when they look at you – because they can see what you can be, and what you have become. They can see a great dance that can happen in you, they can see a golden flower that can bloom in you.But you don’t have any idea of a golden flower. You don’t have any idea of your being a god. You don’t have any idea that the kingdom of God is within you. You are an emperor who has fallen asleep and dreams that he is a beggar. Wake up. You can go on accumulating knowledge in your dream; that is not going to help. Wake up. Wake up! Only then will you be wise.Wisdom is nothing but wakefulness. Wisdom is an awakening.I can give you trust. I can allow you to fall in tune with me and to have a little taste of what is possible. And that taste is satsang, that taste is communion between the master and the disciple. And once even a single drop of that nectar has fallen on your tongue you will never be the same: you will be in constant rebellion, you will destroy all prisons. You will have to come out under the sky. And the benediction is great; you cannot even imagine. It is sat chit anand – it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss.God is not a person, but the experience of bliss, truth, and consciousness. God is this whole existence in utter celebration. You have only fallen out of line. Fall in step.So what can you do? Saadi says that by attaining more knowledge or perception, nothing is going to happen. I say the same to you. I am not here to impart more knowledge to you. I am here to make you alert, to shock you into wakefulness.When the heart is awake and becomes a flame of light, you know the meaning of life and the significance of it – and it is great. Then gratefulness arises. Then the sheer gift of life is enough to be contented with forever and forever.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,The Navabharat Times of October 13th carried a news item from Surat, Gujarat, according to which, the Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, said that he had read your book From Sex to Superconsciousness and found it indecent and distasteful. He also objected to you being called Bhagwan. Would you please comment?Anand Maitreya, sex is a natural phenomenon, as natural as a roseflower, or dewdrops on the grass leaves in the early morning. And it is the most beautiful phenomenon too, as beautiful as the calling of a cuckoo, as beautiful as the stars in the sky. But down the ages it has been condemned.Condemning sex has been one of the most important strategies to dominate man. The moment you condemn sex, you have condemned life itself. Life arises out of sex, life is an expression of sex. If you can find God anywhere, utterly present, it is the moment of sexual orgasm. But to condemn sex is a great strategy. Through it you indirectly condemn man, you poison his very source of being. Then he feels guilty, a sinner, worthless, and it is easy to dominate him, it is easy to manipulate him, it is easy to exploit him – and that’s what the politicians and the priests have been doing.They don’t want man to have freedom, they don’t want man to enjoy life because a man who is blissful is rebellious. A man who is enjoying his life cannot easily be dominated – it is very difficult to dominate him – and cannot easily be deceived because he has clarity.Shree Morarji Desai is a very repressed person as far as sex is concerned. Now, this seems very strange. My discourses have been collected in two hundred books – books on Vedanta, books on Tao, books on Yoga, books on Sufism, books on the Upanishads, books on the Gita, the Bible, the Tao Te Ching – but he has been reading only one book: From Sex to Superconsciousness. An eighty-three-year-old man who has remained celibate for almost fifty years, why should he be interested in the book, From Sex to Superconsciousness? Certainly he is not interested in superconsciousness because I have written two hundred books on superconsciousness. His interest seems to be sex. That’s how it happens.I have read his autobiography. In his autobiography he remembers that when he was young he went to see the Mother of Shree Aurobindo’s ashram. She was a beautiful woman. Before she went to Shree Aurobindo, she was an actress; she had grace and a charisma of her own. And she was moving deep into spirituality. But what did Morarji Desai see in her? What he saw shows much about him, not about the Mother.The Mother’s disciples were coming to touch her feet, and sometimes a disciple would get so ecstatic just by touching her feet that he would start rolling, and sometimes his head would fall into the Mother’s lap. And Morarji was horrified. He thought in his mind, “So that’s why they are looking so ecstatic, just rolling in her lap. Her shapely, beautiful thighs…” That’s what he saw. He went away: “This is not spirituality. These people are sex-obsessed. This is a vulgar expression of sexuality.” That’s all that he saw in the Mother and the disciples, he could not see anything more.And that was when he was young. Now fifty years have passed, and fifty years’ constant repression of sex has become a wound in him. He is boiling within with sexuality.When I read this question from Anand Maitreya, I was reminded of a few stories I would like to tell you…“It is an outrage the way those nudists are carrying on in that apartment,” the old woman told the policeman when he answered her call. “I am ashamed.”The cop looked out of the window and could see nothing but a vast courtyard, a road, and an apartment building in the distance. “I can’t see a thing,” he shrugged.“Of course you can’t,” the old woman replied. “But just have a look through these binoculars and you will see plenty.”What he has seen in the book From Sex to Superconsciousness is nothing but his own mind reflected in it. There is nothing indecent, but the very idea of sex creates the feeling of indecency in his mind. Maybe the very word sex revives something in him that has been repressed, that he has been sitting upon. The very word must be creating a ripple. All those repressed feelings and instincts must be surfacing. That’s why he thinks it is indecent. It depends on him.There are people who go to Khajuraho and think it is indecent. It is not. It is one of the most beautiful and one of the most spiritual temples in the world. If you look into those stone statues, yes, both things are present. Those statues represent the lowest and the highest: they go from sex to superconsciousness. But the person who is obsessed with sex – and all repressive persons are obsessed – will not be able to see anything other than sex. He will miss the real point. The real point is in the faces, in the eyes turned upward, in those beautiful faces in which orgasmic ecstasy has been sculptured. The stones have become sermons.It depends on how you have lived. Have you lived a life of affirmation? Then you will be able to see. If you have lived a life of negation, it will be impossible for you to see.An ancient Sufi parable…Jalal, an old friend of Mulla Nasruddin’s, called one day. The Mulla said, “I am delighted to see you after such a long time. I am just about to start on a round of visits, however. Come, walk with me and we can talk.”“Lend me a decent robe,” said Jalal, “because, as you see, I am not dressed for visiting.” Nasruddin lent him a very fine robe.At the first house Nasruddin presented his friend. “This is my old companion, Jalal. But the robe he is wearing, that is mine!”On their way to the next village, Jalal said, “What a stupid thing to say: ‘The robe is mine.’ Indeed! Don’t do it again.”Nasruddin promised.When they were comfortably seated at the next house, Nasruddin said, “This is Jalal, an old friend, who has come to visit me. But the robe, the robe is his!”As they left, Jalal was just as annoyed as before. “Why did you say that? Are you crazy?”“I only wanted to make amends. Now we are quits.”“If you do not mind,” said Jalal, slowly and carefully, “we shall not say any more about the robe.” Nasruddin promised.At the third and final place of call, Nasruddin said, “May I present Jalal, my friend. And the robe, the robe he is wearing… But we must not say anything about the robe, must we?”Once you are trying to repress a thought, it comes up again and again and again. Morarji Desai is not only obsessed with sex in this life, he will remain obsessed even in coming lives. His whole approach is unscientific, unnatural. He has not been able to understand what he is doing. He has not been able to see – how can sex be indecent? Certainly he is not born out of a virgin mother. Certainly his children are born out of his sexual relationship with his wife. But because of his obsession he has even been very hard with his children.One of his daughters committed suicide, and it is just because of his obsessively puritan mind. He has been hard upon himself and hard upon his children too.The person who is obsessed with something unnatural is perverted. And through this obsession he loses all intelligence. Intelligence grows out of being natural. Intelligence is a shadow of being natural and spontaneous. The perverted person is bound to become stupid because he is constantly fighting within himself. His whole energy becomes a kind of civil war. The person who is fighting nature is indecent, and the total outcome is stupidity.I don’t see any indecency in sex – because this is how God has chosen to create life. Sex is his method. Just as a painter paints with his brush, God has been creating this existence with sexual energy. To deny sex, to condemn sex, is to condemn God. If you call sex indecent, you are calling God indecent because this whole existence is nothing but an expression of sexual energy.These birds chirping, singing: do you think they are praising Prime Minister Morarji Desai? This is sexual expression. The whole poetry of life consists of sexual energy. The whole beauty… What is beauty? The very feeling that something is beautiful comes out of sexual energy.A woman looks beautiful to you. Why? Why does the call of the cuckoo from the mango grove sound beautiful to you? Why? It is, deep down, an expression of sex, love.But people like Morarji Desai live without love. In fact, a politician cannot afford to be loving. He cannot live, he cannot love, he cannot laugh.I have heard a story about him. I don’t know how far it is correct. It is a joke – and jokes need not be correct, but they are always true…Morarji Desai was having his photograph taken by a press cameraman. The photographer had a lot of trouble trying to get his subject to pose properly. Eventually, after much bickering, he was about to take the picture.“Look pleasant for a moment,” said the photographer. “Then you can resume your normal expression.”He cannot laugh, laughter must be indecent. He cannot take life playfully, playfulness must be indecent.And this man has written a story on Krishna. Now the story is going to be filmed – not that he is a great author, but just because he is the Prime Minister. So now the story is going to be filmed. I am puzzled, surprised, at what he must be thinking about Krishna. His whole life must be looking indecent to him – because Krishna’s whole life is love, playfulness, joy, celebration.What does Morarji Desai think about this incident in Krishna’s life…?A few beautiful women were taking their bath in the Yamuna River – and this is not a story of today, it is a story from when India was alive. Five thousand years ago, when India was really vibrant, when people were courageous enough to love and laugh and dance, when people were not life negative, but when life was thought to be God and divine, and people were not talking about life as if it were indecent…Krishna passed by. The women were taking their bath naked in the Yamuna River. Now no Indian woman would do that. Those days were beautiful, people were more open. Now this can happen only in my ashram, nowhere else. Krishna is still alive here.Krishna saw those beautiful women swimming and floating in the water and enjoying, and they were completely unaware of his presence. He gathered their clothes, which were on the bank, and climbed a tree and sat there. When they were finished, those women looked around; their clothes were gone. They started searching. Then they saw Krishna sitting on the tree and all the clothes with him.Now what does Morarji Desai think about this? Certainly I have never done anything like that! Krishna must look very indecent. It is not that Krishna is indecent. It is just Morarji Desai’s sexual perversion.And he says that he found it distasteful. That too is strange. A man who goes on drinking his own urine, and has not yet found that distasteful… And I am certainly certain that he does not suffer from diabetes, otherwise the urine could have a little sweetness.He found the book distasteful? What taste does he have? What is he talking about? What aesthetic sense does he have? He is the most unpoetic person alive in this country.I have heard…A gypsy and a hippie had an argument as to who could withstand foul smell longer. They decided to remain with a skunk in a small pen. First the gypsy went in. He ran out in desperation after a couple of minutes.Then the hippie took his turn. After a minute, the skunk bolted!The gypsy was puzzled. He asked, “How did you manage?”The hippie said, “I am a follower of Morarji Desai. I live only on garlic and water of life.”“The water of life” is a euphemism for your own urine. This man thinks that my book is distasteful? He is simply saying something about himself, not about the book.It always depends on you, how you interpret what you read. He must have read my book, but he must have understood in his own way, he must have interpreted it in his own way. The interpretation is indecent. What he has read into it is his own mind. If an ugly man faces a mirror, the mirror cannot be blamed for his ugliness. And calling the mirror ugly won’t do.The book From Sex to Superconsciousness must have functioned as a mirror. He must have become agitated because if that book is right, his whole life has been stupid, and stupidly wasted. He must have felt very antagonistic, hurt in his ego. He has been struggling with sex, fighting with sex, his whole life – and now here I am, saying that without a deep experience of sex you will never know love, and without a deep experience of love you will never know prayer. And here I am, saying that sex is the first experience of God. And here I am, saying that without moving into life with totality, you will never come to know the innermost core of it.Nothing has to be denied because whatever is denied will take its revenge. That’s what is happening to him. He is not angry at me, he is angry at a mirror because the mirror is showing his face.I have heard…A very rich woman, but very ugly too, asked a great painter, Picasso, to make a portrait of her. Picasso was hesitant. He wanted to say no, but it was difficult. The woman was ready to pay any price. He asked a fantastic price, thinking she would say no and he could get out of it, that there would be no need to paint the woman’s face.But she said, “Yes, start.”So he painted the portrait. It was just a blob of colors.When the woman came, she said, “What? You have not done a good job. Is this my portrait?”He said, “What can I do, madam? I wanted to get out of it. Nature has not done a good job. What can I do? I cannot improve upon nature. I am here to paint you just as you are. That’s why I was very reluctant. I am just a mirror.”I have received thousands of letters, from all kinds of people, saying that they have been immensely benefited by the same book that Morarji Desai says is indecent. But sex is too much on his mind.A monk consulted a psychiatrist for help with various problems.The analyst said, “Stretch out here on the couch. Just relax and tell me about your early life. Just keep on talking. Say anything that comes to mind.”The monk proceeded to spill out his life story.Suddenly the analyst took out a big balloon and sitting behind the patient, blew it up to full size. Then he stuck a pin in it. The balloon burst with a loud crash.The patient was startled.The doctor said sharply, “Now tell me, quick, what did you think about when you heard the loud explosion?”“I thought of sex.”“Sex? At such a moment? You thought about sex?”“Well,” said the patient, “what is so surprising about that? It is all I ever think about.”A monk is a monk, and a monk always thinks about sex. The more he escapes from the world and its reality, the more he fantasizes about it. Morarji Desai has remained a monk. He has not known the beauties of existence, and he is angry with me because my very presence makes him aware that his life has been a wastage.And the second thing you say, “He also objected to you being called Bhagwan.” I am Bhagwan, just as you are Bhagwan. Even Morarji Desai is a bhagwan. Bhagwan does not mean somebody sitting there high in the heavens. Bhagwan simply means that which is hidden behind you, within you, that which you are. I am Bhagwan because I have recognized it. I am not calling myself Bhagwan – I am.You are also, but you have not yet gathered courage to recognize the fact. It needs guts to recognize your reality. It needs utter humbleness to see things as they are. It needs simplicity of the heart to call things what they are.Morarji Desai is also a bhagwan, just as everything else is, trees and rocks and animals. God is not separate from existence, God is immanent in it. Only God is. If only God is, then I am God, then you are God, then everything is divine. But God can be fast asleep. That’s what Morarji Desai is: a God fast asleep, dreaming that he has become the Prime Minister, snoring.Wake up! But it is very difficult to wake up when you are a prime minister because then you are afraid – if you wake up and find that it was only a dream… You have invested too much in the dream.I have heard…A man was telling to his friend, “Last night I dreamed such a beautiful dream.”The man to whom he told it said, “But you look very sad. If you have dreamed a beautiful dream, why you are looking so sad, so gloomy?”The first man said, “There is a reason. In the dream I saw the Pope, and I was surprised when he asked me, ‘What would you like? A little whiskey?’ I was taken aback. But I said, ‘Yes sir.’ ‘I love whiskey, you know,’ he said. He asked, ‘Hot or cold?’ I said, ‘Hot.’“So he went in his kitchen and started to make the whiskey hot. I waited and waited, and by the time the whiskey was hot, the dream was finished. That’s why I am feeling sad. Next time I will say, ‘Cold, as it is, immediately, give it to me. Do nothing, no need to do anything, just give it to me as it is.’”When you have a dream, a sweet dream, it is very difficult to listen to people who are shouting, “Wake up!” That’s why it is very difficult for people who have succeeded in life to wake up. Their very success becomes their curse. They think they are doing perfectly well.Have you not watched it in your dreams? If you are having a sweet dream it continues, if you are having a nightmare it wakes you up. If somebody is going to kill you and is just chasing you with a bayonet, a moment comes when you simply wake up, perspiring of course, but you wake up. A nightmare is good in that sense, that it wakes you up. But if you are having a beautiful dream – you are Krishna, and all the beautiful women of the world are dancing around you like your gopis, girlfriends – who wants to wake up? One only hopes that this dream continues.Morarji Desai is as divine as I am, but God is fast asleep and snoring. Why should he be angry if I am being called Bhagwan? What has that to do with him? But many people are angry, and the anger has some rationale in it. The rationale is that if somebody is awakened, his very presence disturbs your sleep. You cannot sleep as comfortably as before. Somebody is awakened – so is all that you are going into a dream? You start feeling annoyed with the person who is awake. You start finding reasons why he must be wrong: “Why does he call himself God?”And that too from an Indian! It looks very absurd. It’s okay if Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews raise the question of why I call myself God – because they have no insight into the phenomenon as deeply as it has happened in this country. Buddha never believed in God, never, but we have still called him Bhagwan. Mahavira never believed in God; we have still called him Bhagwan. So bhagwan cannot be translated as God.God is the creator of the world – and certainly I have not created this world. I cannot take that responsibility, excuse me! I am not God in the Christian sense.But Morarji Desai is not a Christian. One can expect that he should understand that bhagwan in the East does not mean God. It means “the blessed one” – and I declare myself the blessed one. It simply means that I have been blessed; that I have come to a point where I am utterly content; that I have come to a state where I don’t desire anything anymore, there is nothing to be desired, all is available; that I have come to a state where the mind is dissolved and I am one with existence. This is the state of the blessed one.Bhagwan simply means one who has disappeared as a person and has become a presence. That’s why we could call Buddha Bhagwan, although he never believed in God the Creator.And there are people, like Morarji Desai, whose anger is that I have declared it myself, that I am a self-appointed Bhagwan. But how else can it be? How can it be otherwise? Who can appoint me Bhagwan? Buddha declared himself; he was self-appointed, not that there was a committee or a university senate, or there was a vote in the country. Politicians can’t think of anything else other than votes. He must be thinking about who has voted for me, how am I Bhagwan, how many people have voted for, and how many against?Who voted for Krishna? Who voted for Mahavira and Buddha? Who voted for Christ? If Christ’s godhood depended on votes, he would have lost his deposit! He had not more than a hundred disciples, not more than that. And the real disciples were only twelve, the others were just sympathizers. How did Jesus become Christ? Who appointed him? How did Krishna declare, “I am that”? How did Buddha declare, “I have arrived”? They were all self-appointed. There is no other way.I have declared myself God. This is the only possible way because when I have become blessed, when I have known the ultimate joy of experience, of existence, when I have seen truth, who else is needed to certify it? Do I need a character certificate from the politicians? I have declared it. There is nothing wrong because that is the only way. If you have known love, only you can say you have known love.I have known the ultimate samadhi, and only I can say it. Only a few people, those who have attained it, will be able to recognize it.Morarji Desai is simply saying he cannot recognize it. But who is expecting him to recognize it? He has not known anything of meditation.Just on the day he became Prime Minister, somebody asked him, “Are all your desires fulfilled?” He said, “No, one desire is still there. I want to know God.” The man said, “Then have you ever meditated?” – a journalist must have asked. And Morarji Desai said, “I have not done anything like meditation, although Osho has given me a meditation. But I could not do it – because I am too old and I cannot do such a vigorous meditation as he suggested.”Now, he is not too old to become the prime minister of a country like India, which has only problems and problems and problems, and nothing else. And he is ten years older now than when I had talked to him and given him a meditation. Then he was only seventy-three, now he is eighty-three, but he says he is too old to meditate. But he is not too old to become the prime minister of a country and to take the whole burden of it.Rationalization and nothing else. If you don’t want to meditate, you can always find reasons. Whatever you want to do, you are ready to do it.He goes on running from one country to another country; he goes on traveling all over the country; he goes on fighting with other politicians, quarreling – and everything is done perfectly well. He has enough energy for all that. Just for meditation…? It is a twenty-four-hour job that he is doing, and meditation is to be done only for one hour. But he says he is too old for meditation.He has not known anything of meditation; how can he know anything of what has happened in me, to me? Yes, I declare myself Bhagwan – because I declare this whole world is bhagwan. This whole world is blessed. If you don’t recognize the blessings that are being showered on you by existence, that is your responsibility; nobody else is responsible for it. I am open to all the blessings. That’s all I mean when I say I am Bhagwan: that I have no barriers, that I am in a state of let-go, that I am utterly open. Whatever existence wants me to do I will do, and whatever existence does not want me to do, I will not do. I am utterly annihilated. Fana fi’llah: I am absorbed in God, in this totality. That’s what I mean by the word God. And the moment this happened, fana fi’llah, I became baqa bi’llah, I became suddenly all. I am in the shape of the tree, I am in the rays of the sun. Just as I am in this body, I am in you too.Now, this is my experience. I don’t need any witnesses for it. Even if the whole world says it is not so, it is still so. It does not depend on you or your votes. But the politicians can’t think of anything else, they only think of votes.Why should he be puzzled, worried about me? He goes on constantly talking about me, as if I am haunting him. He does not know what has happened to me, and what can happen to him. He has read the scriptures, he can quote the scriptures; but all that that he quotes is utterly borrowed. It is not his own.One day, a lady who owned a very intelligent parrot discovered a leaky pipe in her kitchen. She called the plumber, but before he arrived she had to leave the house momentarily on an errand. During her absence the plumber came along and rang the doorbell.“Who is it?” called the parrot.“It is the plumber,” he said.“Who is it?” repeated the parrot.“It is the plumber!” he shouted.“Who is it?” said the parrot.“It is the plumber! It is the plumber!” he screamed, and in his frustration he collapsed right on the doorstep with a heart attack.On returning home, the lady found him lying there. “Good heavens,” she said. “Who is it?”“It is the plumber,” said the parrot.What Morarji Desai knows about scriptures is just parrotlike. What I am saying to you has arisen in me. I am a witness to Buddha and to Krishna and to Christ and to Zarathustra and to Lao Tzu and to all those who have become awakened.But deep down his anger has another reason too. Indira Gandhi has always liked my thoughts; she has always been in a kind of love toward my way of thinking. That is the deep root of why he is angry with me. Indira has the intelligence to understand me, more than he has, and Indira has a kind of receptivity and grace, and Indira also has guts and the courage to take some revolutionary steps – which are utterly needed.It is because of her revolutionary steps that she lost the last elections. The masses behave in a very suicidal way. The logic has to be understood. The masses are suffering because of a certain conditioning. India has suffered in the past and is suffering now because of a certain mind. Now, anything to change the situation, to change this suffering, will basically need a change in the conditioning of the masses. That is the problem. Everybody wants to get out of this suffering state, this continuous starvation. People are ill, hungry, dying, but if anything can change this situation, the first requirement will be that we change our ways of thinking. And that is difficult for the masses.They have lived with a certain kind of mind, they have cherished that mind for centuries, and they are utterly unaware that their mind is the cause of their suffering. They want to change the outer situation, but they are unaware that the outer situation exists in a certain collaboration with their inner mind. So whenever somebody wants to change the outer situation of the masses, their inner mind is going to be hurt and wounded, and they will not be able to forgive such a person. That’s what happened to Indira.She really tried. She has been the most courageous Prime Minister that India has had in the past three or four decades. That was the problem: she started doing something really significant. But then the masses were angry; their traditions were broken, their conditionings were broken.The masses were angry, and the politicians, the opportunists of this country, exploited the situation. But they have not been able to do anything – they cannot – because if they want to keep the masses satisfied they have to agree with the mind, and if you agree with the mind you cannot change the situation. This is the dilemma. The masses will vote only for those people who follow the mind of the masses, but then those people cannot do a thing. They will be utterly impotent.That’s what has happened to Morarji Desai and his government. It is utterly impotent. It has not been able to do a single thing. It cannot. And the reason is, the next election is coming closer every day and if you do something that goes against the grain, you will be defeated. They know perfectly well how they have come into power; they have come into power because Indira tried to do something really revolutionary.She was trying to impose compulsory birth control on the country. That is the only way it can be done. You cannot persuade the people, and if you persuade, it will take thousands of years to persuade them, and by that time there will be no point. In fact, this country has to have birth control within twenty-five years, otherwise it is doomed; by the end of this century it will not be possible for this country to exist at all. Everybody will be hungry and starving and ill; there will be no space left.Things are in such a state that they can only be done compulsorily. Birth control is the only way to prevent this population from growing. If you wait for the masses to understand, and if you wait for them to be educated, it is not going to happen, ever. That’s what angered Indians. Hindus, Mohammedans, everybody was angered. They thought their freedom was being taken away.It is not a question of freedom or no freedom now. It is a question of life and death! The country is moving every day toward the abyss. Things are becoming more and more ugly every day.Indira tried in every possible way to speed up things. In India a bureaucracy exists which is only skillful in delaying things. In no other country does red-tapeism exist as much as it does in India. If you want to do a small thing, it will take years. The bureaucracy is so long and it moves so slowly, at an ant’s pace. Indira was capable of seeing that if this goes on, nothing is possible. Hence the bureaucracy became angry. Nobody wants to work, and Indira was forcing them to work.The masses became angry because things were going against their mind. They have always enjoyed many children, and they think it is a gift of God. Now it is a curse, no longer a gift! Everybody boasts: “How many children I have!” It is thought to be very manly to have many children – you are very productive. India knows only one kind of creativity. Nobody asks how many poems you have written, nobody asks how many paintings you have done, nobody asks such things. Everybody asks, “How many children?” And when you can say, “Two dozen,” you are simply fantastic, great. That has been the only boast of the Indian male chauvinist. Now, he was very hurt.And then, the bureaucracy was angry. They all joined together, with all kinds of opportunists. All the Indian political parties dropped their differences. Their differences are vast. They all dropped their differences because the real point is always how to attain power. Who bothers about ideologies? They dropped all their ideologies. They all gathered under the wing of Morarji Desai. Now, this Morarji Desai and his party have no ideology, no plan. They simply want to be in power.If you simply want to be in power, you have to satisfy the masses the way they want to be satisfied – although their satisfactions are going to be suicidal. But who cares? Morarji Desai can remain the Prime Minister for at least five years: that is the real thing. Who bothers what is going to happen in the next century? That is not their business. Morarji Desai is certainly not going to survive that long, even if he goes on drinking the water of life. That is not his business. His whole business is how to remain in power.He knows my attitude. I need this country to go through a great revolution. Indira is capable of it, Indira has all my blessings. That is the deep cause of why he is angry.I am really happy that Indira Gandhi is trying to contest again, to enter the Parliament. Once she is in the Parliament, she will not remain too long out of power. It will be good that she is back in the Parliament. She is the only ray of hope – because she has guts. She can do things; she can risk. That’s what has happened: she risked all in trying to solve the problems that India is facing. She risked her Prime Ministership, she risked her life.Because Morarji Desai knows this, he is, deep down, angry with me. His anger can be understood. But he should say it directly. No need to beat around the bush. Say it directly. For that, you need not bring sex in. That is an indirect way, a cunning way – because he knows the Indian mind is very repressive. Bring sex in, and the Indian masses are always with you; condemn sex and they are with you. Condemn life and they are with you – because that’s how they have been conditioned for centuries.And the Indian masses are very much against anybody declaring himself Bhagwan because then a great competition arises. This has always been so. Mohammedans don’t want anybody to declare that he is a prophet of God. Why? – because if he is a prophet of God, then he is the latest prophet of God. Then Mohammed is just an antique model. Then Mohammed can be discarded. So they have decided that there will no longer be a prophet of God: Mohammed is the last.Why? Has God gone bankrupt since then? Has he abandoned humanity since then? Has he nothing more to say to humanity? He stopped with Mohammed? Why? Why didn’t he stop before?For Christians he stopped before, with Christ: he is the only begotten son. But why didn’t he stop before Christ? He stopped for the Jainas: he stopped with Mahavira, he is the last tirthankara. And so on, so forth. Each religion wants their prophet, their tirthankara, their messiah, their godman, to be the last. So whenever somebody becomes the blessed one and declares it, all other religions will be against him.Now, Christians are angry with me: I must be a false prophet, the Devil incarnate, because Christ is the true master. Jainas are against me because there is no possibility of anybody else becoming a tirthankara.I was born as a Jaina. The day I said I am the twenty-fifth tirthankara, they became angry. They said, “Twenty-fifth? But there is no mention of the twenty-fifth in the scriptures.” So I said, “We will write the scriptures again. How can they mention the twenty-fifth? The scriptures were written when the twenty-fourth was alive. Now we will write about the twenty-fifth – and I will make it a point that the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh and so on, so forth, will be coming. God is not finished with me.”How can God be finished? God is creativity. He will go on creating more and more buddhas. They will be coming, they will be coming forever and ever.So Morarji Desai brings in two things. The real thing he hides – that is the way of a politician. But he brings in two other things, an indirect attack on me. First, he brings in sex. That is very easy to influence the Indian masses with. Just to tell them that this man supports sex, is not against sex, is enough, enough condemnation. Then he is against God, then he is irreligious, then he is materialist, he is earthy, and he is dangerous. Just mention one thing, that he is not unfavorable to the phenomenon of sex, and you have condemned him. Now no other proof is needed.And then he brings in the second thing: why does this man call himself God, or is called God by his disciples? Don’t blame my disciples. I call myself God. How can they call me God? What do they know about God? I take the total responsibility on my own.That will anger Hindus because they will think, “So this man is trying to compete with our Rama and Krishna.” And that will anger Jainas because they will think, “He is trying to compete with our Mahavira and Adinatha.” And it will anger Mohammedans and Christians and Parsis and Sikhs – and it will anger almost everybody in India! But I don’t care.The second question:Osho,I want to know the meaning of aum.This is a very significant question. First, aum is not a word, it is a pure sound, so it has no meaning as such. It is a pure sound, like the sound of a waterfall. What meaning does it have? – no meaning at all. Or the sound of this airplane passing by. What meaning does it have? – no meaning at all. A sound becomes a word when meaning becomes attached to it. A meaningful sound is a word, a meaningless word is a sound. So the first thing to be understood: aum is not a word, it is pure sound. All other words have arisen out of it, but it itself is not a word. It is the source of all sounds, it cannot have any meaning whatever.The sound aum consists of three sounds: a, u, m. These are the seed sounds: all other sounds are created by a, u, m. All our words, the whole alphabet, is created by these three seed sounds: a, u, m. Aum is the source of all three.That’s why aum is not written alphabetically in India. It has a symbol of its own. That is simply to designate: don’t be confused and don’t try to think about aum as a word. Aum is the only sound in India which is not written alphabetically. It is written pictorially, it has a picture, a symbol, which is outside the alphabet. These are symbolic things. It has been kept outside the alphabet because it is the source. The source is always out, beyond, transcendental.Aum consists of three sounds and one anusvara. An anusvara is a very subtle sound; it represents a kind of humming. When you say, “au” and the prolonged “m,” the humming sound that goes on reverberating is the anusvara. An anusvara means just a dot; that too represents something. So aum consists of four things: three visible, a, u, m, and the fourth invisible, the rhythmic, humming shadow.These four represent the whole of Indian metaphysics. A represents one state of the mind, when you are awake, the waking consciousness. U represents when you are dreaming, the dreaming consciousness. M represents when you are fast asleep, dreamlessly asleep – sushupti – deep, profound dreamless sleep. These are the three states of the human mind, human consciousness.And the anusvara, the dot – that humming sound that goes on reverberating – represents the fourth, turiya, the transcendental state when you are neither asleep nor awake nor dreaming, when you are just a witness to all that is happening: the state of a Buddha or a Christ, the state where I am, where one can declare oneself Bhagwan.Turiya… The word turiya means “the fourth,” simply “the fourth.” It has no other name because it cannot be named. It is beyond names. This has to be understood first.Then the second thing: when you have reached the fourth state, turiya, when nothing is heard but a melody, the celestial music – what Pythagoras has called the music of the heavens, the music of the stars, the music that is the very undercurrent of existence… When you have reached the fourth state of awakening, awareness, buddhahood, you hear a music, a music which is not produced by any instrument.Let me remind you of the Zen masters who tell their disciples to find the sound of one hand clapping. That is the music: one hand clapping. That is found only in the fourth. Why one hand clapping? You cannot produce music by one hand clapping; clapping needs the other. Two are needed to tang, two are needed to clash, two are needed to create something. If a child is born, two are needed, man and woman. Two are needed everywhere. Electricity needs the positive and the negative. Even life needs death as the opposite. So if you look into life, everything is dual; two are needed.But beyond the two there is also a state, the transcendental, where two are not needed. It is called anahat nad: unstruck sound, one hand clapping. That sound is the very nature of existence. Existence is a subtle music – but it is heard only when you have reached the fourth state, when all thoughts have disappeared, where all unconsciousness has disappeared, where you are nothing but a pure mirror, mirroring nothing. Then suddenly a melody explodes.That melody is called aum. It is not a mantra, as you have been told. Please never use aum as a mantra; don’t go on repeating, “aum, aum, aum.” If you repeat it you will miss something, you will become habituated.A man fell from a ten-story building. A professor was passing by with his student. Of course he must have been a professor of philosophy.He told the student, “Look at the situation. The man has fallen from ten stories and he has not been hurt. What do you call that?”The student said, “It is coincidence.”The professor said, “Now, if he goes back again to the tenth story and falls and is not hurt, then what will you call it?”The student said, “That will be fate. Once, it is coincidence, but if he goes again and falls, that will be fate.”And the professor said, “Okay. If he goes again, the third time, and falls from the tenth story, what will you call it?”The student said, “Sir, then it will be habit. What else can it be?”If you repeat aum continuously, year in and year out, it will become your habit. It will become a subtle layer around you; it will prevent you from hearing the real aum. The real aum cannot be produced by you.That’s why I am against the so-called Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It is very destructive. It is a lullaby; it only gives you good sleep, at the most. It can’t awaken you. It can cool you, it can give you a little calmness. It is good for people who are suffering from nervousness, tension, anxiety. It is a psychological device; it is a psychological drug, a nonmedicinal tranquilizer. But it is not meditation, no. It is neither meditation nor transcendental – it is not at all. It simply soothes you, consoles you, helps you to fall into good sleep.And it is not accidental that America has become very interested in the so-called Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – because America is suffering tremendously from insomnia. People have lost their sleep. They want sleep at any cost, they are ready to try anything. And Transcendental Meditation can help you to have a good sleep.But meditation is just the opposite. Meditation is waking up. It is not a lullaby, it is diametrically the opposite. It is a shock, it shatters your sleep and your dreams. If you are a beggar, you are no longer a beggar; it shatters the idea of your beggarhood. If you are a prime minister, you are no longer a prime minister; it shatters your illusion of being a prime minister. It shatters all identities. It simply reveals one fact, that you are God. It only reveals your reality and takes all illusions away.Aum is not a mantra. Don’t use it as a mantra. It is a scientific formula, just like H2O. H2O is not water. You can go on repeating… When you are feeling thirsty you can sit and go on repeating, “H2O, H2O.” You can make a mantra out of it, and it may help you to fall asleep. Try it, and you will be surprised: H2O can do the same as any mantra. Just try, “H2O, H2O,” sway with it, “H2O, H2O” – go on, go on, faster and faster and faster – and soon you will be transported into deep sleep.And when you awake, you will feel fresh, certainly fresh, but you will still be thirsty. It can’t help your thirst, it can’t quench it. Not that the formula is wrong, but a formula is not a mantra.Aum is the H2O of spiritual transformation. It has all the secrets in it, but it is not something to be repeated. It has to be understood; so understand these things. First, aum is not a word; it is a pure sound, the purest, the ultimate sound of existence. When all is gone, that sound remains. That is the sound of soundlessness, the sound of silence.And symbolically, aum represents your waking consciousness, your dreaming consciousness, your sleeping consciousness, and the beyond – the turiya – the fourth state, where one becomes Bhagwan, where one becomes Christ, Buddha, where one is one with the totality. It is a tremendously important formula; it contains the whole metaphysics of the East. But it is not a mantra. Please never repeat it. Repeating won’t help, it will deceive you. Try to understand it, and then start becoming more and more aware of your waking consciousness. Walking on the road, walk with full awareness, knowing that you are walking. Then slowly, slowly transform every act into awareness. De-automatize every act.A man came to me. He had been suffering from chain-smoking for thirty years. He was ill and the doctors said, “You will never be healthy if you don’t stop smoking.”But he was a chronic smoker; he could not help it. He had tried – not that he had not tried – he had tried hard, and he had suffered much in trying. But after one day or two days, again the urge would come so tremendously, it would simply take him away. Again he would fall into the same pattern.Because of this smoking he had lost all self-confidence: he knew he could not do a small thing, he could not stop smoking. He had become worthless in his own eyes, he thought himself just about the most worthless person in the world. He had no respect for himself.He came to me. He asked, “What can I do? How can I stop smoking?”I said, “Nobody can stop smoking. You have to understand. Now smoking is not only a question of your decision. It has entered into your world of habits, it has taken roots. Thirty years is a long time. It has taken roots in your body, in your chemistry, it has spread all over. It is not just a question of your head deciding, your head cannot do anything. The head is impotent; it can start things, but it cannot stop so easily. Once you have started and once you have practiced so long, you are a great yogi: thirty years’ practice of smoking. It has become autonomous; you will have to de-automatize it.”He asked, “What do you mean by ‘de-automatization’?”That’s what meditation is all about: de-automatization.I said, “Do one thing: forget about stopping. There is no need either. For thirty years you have smoked and lived; of course it was a suffering, but you have become accustomed to that, too. And what does it matter if you die a few hours earlier than you would have died without smoking? What are you going to do here? What have you done? So what is the point? Whether you die Monday or Tuesday or Sunday, this year, that year, what does it matter?”He said, “Yes, that is true, it doesn’t matter.”Then I said, “Forget about it; we are not going to stop it at all. Rather, we are going to understand it. So next time, make it a meditation.”He asked, “A meditation out of smoking…?”I said, “Yes. If Zen people can make a meditation out of drinking tea, and can make it a ceremony, why not? Smoking can be as beautiful a meditation.”He looked thrilled. He asked, “What are you saying?” He became alive! He said, “Meditation? Just tell me – I cannot wait!”I gave him the meditation. I said, “Do one thing. When you take the packet out of your pocket, go slowly for a moment. When you are taking the packet of cigarettes out of your pocket, move slowly. Enjoy it, there is no hurry. Be conscious, alert, aware. Take it out slowly, with full awareness. Then take the cigarette out of the packet with full awareness, slowly – not in the old hurried way, unconscious way, mechanical way. Then start tapping the cigarette on your packet – but very alertly. Listen to the sound, just as Zen people do when the samovar starts singing and the tea starts boiling, and the aroma. Then smell the cigarette and the beauty of it.”He asked, “What are you saying? The beauty?”“Yes, it is beautiful. Tobacco is as divine as anything. Even Morarji Desai is divine, so why not tobacco? Smell it; it is God’s smell.”He looked a little surprised. He asked, “What, are you joking?”“No, I am not joking.”Even when I joke, I don’t joke. I am very serious.“Then put it in your mouth, with full awareness, light it with full awareness. Enjoy every act, small act, and divide it into as many small acts as possible, so you can become more and more aware.“Then have the first puff: God in the form of smoke. Hindus say, “Annam brahman – food is God.” Why not smoke? All is God. Fill your lungs deeply: this is a pranayam. I am giving you the new Yoga for the new age! Then release the smoke, relax, another puff… And go very slowly.“If you can do it, you will be surprised: soon you will see the whole stupidity of it. Not because others have said that it is stupid, not because others have said that it is bad – you will see it. And the seeing will not be just intellectual. It will be from your total being, it will be a vision of your totality. And then, one day, if it drops, it drops; if it continues, it continues. You need not worry about it.”After three months he came, and he said, “It dropped.”“Now,” I said, “try it on other things too.”This is the secret, the secret: de-automatize. Walking, walk slowly, watchfully. Looking, look watchfully, and you will see trees are greener than they have ever been and roses are rosier than they have ever been. Listen, somebody is talking, gossiping; listen, listen attentively. When you are talking, talk attentively. Let your whole waking activity become de-automatized and then you will be surprised. The moment it happens, your dream activity will have a new perspective. You will start becoming aware in your dreams.Then start watching your dreams. That is a miracle when it happens. When you start watching your dreams, you are really a totally different person. Then the dreams have no impact on you. Watching your dreams, one day they disappear; you have de-automatized your dreaming process. Then you will be able to watch your dreamless sleep: you are asleep, and you are still awake. The whole body sleeping, every cell of it relaxed, the whole mechanism silent – and you are watching there, a silent witness.When this third has happened, the fourth arises on its own: the humming sound. You are full of a new music. That music is God.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Bahauddin el-Shah, the great teacher of the Naqshbandi dervishes, one day met a confrere in the great square of Bukhara.The newcomer was a wandering Kalandar of the Malamati: “The Blameworthy.” Bahauddin was surrounded by disciples.“From where do you come?” he asked the traveler, in the usual Sufi phrase.“I have no idea,” said the other, grinning foolishly.Some of Bahauddin’s disciples murmured their disapproval of this disrespect.“Where are you going?” persisted Bahauddin.“I do not know,” shouted the dervish.”What is good?”By now a large crowd had gathered.“I do not know.”“What is evil?”“I have no idea.”“What is right?”“Whatever is good for me.”“What is wrong?”“Whatever is bad for me.”The crowd, irritated beyond its patience by this dervish, drove him away. He went off, striding purposefully in a direction which led nowhere, as far as anyone knew.“Fools” said Bahauddin Naqshband. “This man is acting the part of humanity. While you were despising him, he was deliberately demonstrating heedlessness as each of you does, all unaware, every day of your lives.”Man is unconscious, although he believes he is conscious. That very belief protects his unconsciousness. Man is ignorant, although he believes he knows. That very belief keeps the ignorance intact. Man is just the opposite of what he thinks he is. To understand this is the beginning of a great revolution.To see where you are, what you are in actuality, needs courage. It is nice to believe in beautiful ideals. All ideals function only for one thing: they hide your reality. That’s why we go on creating beautiful ideals. Not that we are really interested in those great ideals; our real interest is how to hide the ugly facts.People go on talking about nonviolence, and all that they do in their lives is violence, sheer violence and nothing else. The more violent they are, the more they talk about nonviolence. The talk about nonviolence becomes a camouflage.This country has talked about nonviolence for centuries and it has not happened, and it is not going to happen because the very talk creates an illusion. And slowly, slowly you are not only capable of deceiving others, you start deceiving yourself. When you have talked for centuries about nonviolence you start thinking that you have become nonviolent. That is really the purpose of talking about nonviolence.Just a few days ago the president of India stayed in a circuit house in Madras, and because he could not get nonvegetarian food there – meat, eggs, etcetera – he was very annoyed. If he had not been annoyed, the country may not have come to know that he is a meat-eater: a Gandhian and a meat-eater. And these are the people who go on talking about nonviolence.They go to the samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi every year, ceremoniously, ritualistically. These are the people who have taken vows on the samadhi of Mahatma Gandhi, and they continue to eat meat, they continue to kill animals. What kind of nonviolence is this? But this is how man is: very deceptive, very cunning.Those who are moving on the path have to be aware of this stupid ideological camouflage. It is very easy to have beautiful ideals. And you will be surprised if you watch people: if you know their ideals, you can be certain that they will be just the opposite of their ideals. Knowing their ideals, you can deduce logically that their life must be the very opposite of them. An ideal only proves that there is something they are hiding behind it.A conscious person has no ideals at all. A conscious person lives through his consciousness. He is one, his inner and outer are not divided.But all kinds of idealism divide the outer and the inner. They do not allow you to be natural, spontaneous; they force you to be something other than you are. They give you “shoulds” – you should do this, you should do that. Because of those shoulds you start believing that you are aspiring very high, that you are soaring very high – “Look at what beautiful ideals I have” – and behind that empty talk your reality is just the opposite.The greedy person wants to become non-greedy. The angry person wants to become compassionate. The unloving person has the ideal of love. All the religions talk about love, and all that they do on the earth is create hate. All the nations of the world talk about peace, and all that they do is prepare for war. See it. This is what we have become: pseudo, hypocrites.No nation prepares for peace – not even India, which is a nonviolent country, the great religious country. All nations talk about peace and prepare for war. War remains the reality and peace remains just smoke around it, to hide it.Unless we see it through and through, there is no way to get out of it. Whenever you want some ideal to be fulfilled in your life, watch why. How can an angry person practice compassion? How? It is impossible. If the angry person practices compassion he will be, at the most, repressing his anger, that’s all. What else can he do? He has been angry with others, now he will be angry with his own anger, that’s all. The anger has taken a new form, a new shape.The violent person wants to become nonviolent. What is he going to do? He has been violent with others, now he will become violent with himself. That’s what you call asceticism. Asceticism is basically masochism, it is the joy of torturing yourself. These people become great mahatmas, they are worshipped, but all that has happened is that their violence has turned inward. You torture others, they torture themselves – but the torture continues, and the pleasure in torturing continues.Do you think a man who lies on the bed of thorns is religious? What is religious in it? He is simply torturing his body, but you will find people worshipping him. He is neurotic, but he will be thought of as a mahatma.If it is cold and snow is falling and somebody is standing naked under the skies, what is he doing? He is simply torturing his body, but people will think, “What a great soul.” He simply needs a few electric shocks; he is psychiatrically ill, he is mad, he is suicidal.It is very easy to catch hold of a murderer, it is very difficult to catch hold of a person who is suicidal. But both are murderers. They both enjoy violence.That’s why Mahatma Gandhi’s violence is not visible. He is as violent as Adolf Hitler, the only difference is of direction. Mahatma Gandhi’s violence is invisible, he tortures himself.If you keep somebody else hungry for many days, that will be violence, but if you keep yourself hungry and call it upavas, fasting, then it is something religious. It is not. It is the same game, and more dangerous – because when you keep somebody else in a state of torture he at least can defend himself, but when you start torturing your own innocent body, the body cannot defend itself. There is no defense possible, your own body is utterly helpless.If you are violent with others the law can defend them, the police can defend them, but if you are violent with yourself there is no law against it. In fact, even the magistrate and the lawyer and the policeman will come and worship you: you are doing something beautiful. Man has remained in darkness because of such stupid ideas.The first thing to be remembered is: a violent man cannot become nonviolent by effort. Is there no possibility then? Yes, there is a possibility, but it is not through effort, not through will, not through practicing being other than you are. The possibility is through becoming aware.Rather than trying to be nonviolent, become aware of your violence, of how your violence functions. See the roots of it. Go deep into it, into how it arises, into how it permeates your being and your activities. Watch violence, and in the very watching, being aware of it, you will be surprised: it starts disappearing.Nobody can be consciously violent. This is a fundamental law, the secret. Nobody can be consciously violent, so all that is needed is to bring consciousness, to become more conscious, to become more meditative. Nobody can be meditatively angry, that is not possible. At the most, you can act.That’s what Jesus was doing when he took a whip and went into the temple and threw out the money-changers, started beating the money-changers, overturned their tables. That’s what he was doing – acting. It was just an act, a put-on act. A meditative person cannot be angry, that is impossible.Meditation means you are so conscious of whatever you are doing that in that very consciousness, the quality of the doing changes. You need not have ideals. Ideals are simply postponing the revolution, the mutation.Just a few days ago somebody asked me, “I feel I am stupid. What can I do to become intelligent?” Now, I had to tell him that if a stupid person tries to become intelligent, he will remain stupid. At the most he will become an intellectual, but never intelligent.That’s how intellectual people are: hiding their stupidity behind words, knowledge, information. If a stupid person tries to be intelligent, how can he become intelligent? In the first place, he will be doing everything out of his stupidity – and when you do something out of your stupidity, your stupidity is going to be strengthened. But he can do one thing: he can gather information, he can gather knowledge, he can start having the illusion of knowing through knowledge. That’s how people become pundits, scholars, learned professors; that’s how it happens, but the stupidity remains. In their very foundation, the stupidity remains as an undercurrent. They just have a good show on the outside, deep down they are still stupid.Then what to do? How to get out of stupidity? The only way is, watch your stupidity. Go into its working, its mechanism. Go into how you act, go watchfully into it. See it, how it is there, how it affects your behavior. Watch it in its multidimensional reality, and in that very watching you are becoming intelligent – because watching is intelligence.And if you become really alert about your stupidity, the one who has become alert is no longer stupid. Stupidity is left out. You have become awareness, you have become a witness – and out of this witnessing another kind of life arises which has beauty, which has benediction, which has a grace of its own. But it is arduous to be watchful, it is easier to have ideals.Drop all ideals. Don’t try to become somebody you are not. On the contrary, just watch whatever you are. Watch the fact, don’t create a fiction against it, otherwise you will always be divided. You will remain the fact and you will start believing in the fiction – that’s the meaning of hypocrisy. Your reality goes on persisting in the same way, and just on the surface you have a painted mask. That is not going to help, that has not helped humanity up to now.The new man is possible only if we drop all kinds of idealism. Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, Communist, Gandhian: all kinds of idealism have to be dropped. The moment you drop all kinds of idealism, suddenly you have dropped your schizophrenia. You are not two, you are one. You are simply whatever you are. Then you have the innocence of a tree, the innocence of an animal, the innocence of a bird, and something more: the consciousness of a human being.And the meeting of the innocence of a bird and the consciousness of a human being creates the buddha. Buddhahood is nothing but innocence plus consciousness.But the man who carries great ideals can never be simple and innocent, it is impossible. He is always cunning, trying to be somebody, trying to reach somewhere. All that he can do is pretend.When I am saying this, I am saying it to you. My sannyasins have to drop all kinds of idealism. That’s the revolution I am initiating you into. You have to forget the future, you have to forget what should be. You only have to watch that which is, and that can be done right now, you need not postpone it. At any moment you can watch what you are. Don’t condemn – because if you condemn, you cannot watch. Don’t judge; if you judge you have already become prejudiced. Don’t be in a hurry to conclude. Life never comes to a conclusion; it cannot – because there is no death. It goes on and on, it is an eternal process, it never comes to a conclusion. Only stupid people come to conclusions.The intelligent person goes on moving, flowing, growing. There is no end to it, even the sky is not the limit. The intelligent person goes on learning. He is a learner, and a learner forever. He never becomes knowledgeable.This story is beautiful:Bahaudin el-Shah, great teacher of the Naqshbandi dervishes, one day met a confrere in the great square of Bukhara.What is the meaning of the: …great teacher…? The ordinary teacher only indoctrinates you, he gives you information. In the school, college, the university, that’s what the teachers go on doing: they simply give you information, they feed you knowledge. Their whole function is to transfer knowledge from the older generation to the newer generation. They function as mediators between the going generation and the coming generation. They are agents of the past.That’s why your whole education system is always orthodox, conventional, conformist. It is never revolutionary. That’s why revolution has not happened up to now – because revolution can happen only through education, only through right education. And your education is wrong education; it is miseducation.Why is it wrong? It is wrong because it perpetuates the past against the future. It is wrong because it perpetuates the dead against the living. It is wrong because it goes on molding small children into patterns that their fathers and forefathers have decided. It is wrong because these children will not be living in the same world in which their fathers and forefathers lived, so they will always be misfits. They are being prepared for something, for some world, which exists no longer.Our whole system of education is stupid. It prepares you for a world which is no longer in existence, and it does not prepare you for a world which is coming, arising, which is dawning – so you will remain a misfit. You will never be able to live rightly. If you follow your education, you will feel yourself out of date. If you follow the new world that is happening, your education will not be of any help in it. You will be almost uneducated, and that hurts the ego.The ego does not want to accept the fact that “I am uneducated.” The ego always wants to be somebody special. That’s why people go on bragging about their education, how many degrees they have. People enjoy degrees, certificates, diplomas very much; they are always exhibiting them.Why? – because the ego wants to be somebody special, and your education makes you special. You are a doctor, you are an engineer, a scientist, this and that. If you have no education you are simply a human being; you don’t have any adjectives, you don’t have any specialities with you.So people finally decide to cling to their education. Clinging to the education is, in an indirect way, clinging to the past, and to cling to the past is to live a ghostly existence. They will never belong to this earth, they will never belong to the present.That you can see. The more educated a person is, the less relevant he is to the times he lives in. He is very competent about the past, he is very competent about all that has been, but he is incapable of living herenow, and he is utterly incapable of penetrating the future. He cannot be an inquirer, he cannot investigate. He becomes a believer. The teachers are agents, political agents, of the past, poisoning the future.Then who is the great teacher? The great teacher is not in the service of the past. The great teacher is in the service of the future. The great teacher is in the service of the new, not of the old – that is the difference to be remembered.This man, Bahaudin el-Shah, is a great teacher. He does not impart information, he imparts being. He does not teach in an ordinary way, he finds extraordinary ways of provoking awareness. Rather than giving you verbal information, he creates situations.Because I am creating situations here, I am in constant difficulty with this society, this rotten society that exists all around. I am creating situations here, and they have become accustomed to teachers, they have become completely unaware of the great teachers. They want me just to read the Gita here, and comment on it. I am creating situations, psychological situations and devices in which you can become aware of the great truths of life. Of course, those truths are contained in the Gita, in the Bible, in the Koran too, but they are contained in a very ancient language which you cannot understand at all.And they were also given in particular situations. For example, the Gita was given in a very particular situation: on the battlefield. Krishna was a great teacher. He had not chosen a secluded hermitage in the Himalayas to teach his disciple, Arjuna. He had chosen the battlefield. Armies were facing each other, everybody was ready to kill and murder or be killed and murdered. He had chosen such a tense situation, such an alive situation, such a dangerous situation, to impart something to his disciple. This is a great teacher.The people who have been continuously commenting on the Gita for centuries are just teachers, not great teachers. They are just informing people about the meaning of this word or that. Words don’t count. In the final reckoning, only true situations count. A great teacher is one who uses all kinds of living situations to provoke awareness in you.But then there are bound to be problems. The society feels angry. It is perfectly happy if you go on talking about the Koran, the Bible, the Vedas – because that doesn’t do anything in the world. The reality remains the same, the vested interests remain the same. Nothing is harmed; on the contrary, all this spiritual talk helps the vested interests. It is safer if people are religious – because the so-called religious people are people who are afraid. They can’t make a revolution, they can’t move into a rebellion. They can’t disobey – because all these religious teachers and commentators go on teaching them the beautiful world of absolute obedience, conformity, contentment. They always go on teaching you how to become imitators, they don’t teach you how to become authentic.The authentic person will always be in conflict with the vested interests. If he wants to be authentic and true, he is bound to come in conflict with a false society. He is bound to come in conflict with whatever is false.A great teacher is not only a mediator between the past and you. A great teacher is a herald of the future. He makes you aware of the possible, of the potential.Bahaudin el-Shah, great teacher of the Naqshbandi dervishes, one day met a confrere in the great square of Bukhara.The newcomer was a wandering Kalandar of the Malamati: “The Blameworthy.”That is another order of the Sufis. The Sufis have many orders, many schools. Those schools have arisen through different masters. Whenever a master exists on the earth, he introduces many methods, he creates many devices, and around the master a school arises, a school where people go through alchemical changes.Around a real master a scientific lab exists. It is not just a retreat for old people, as Indian ashramas have become. Old, retired, almost dead, one leg in the grave, just waiting to be thrown in any moment – for all these people Indian ashramas have become shelters.This is not the purpose of an ashrama. An ashrama has to be a great lab, a great experiment into people’s lives. It has to be a scientific process. If people are ready to pass through those processes, they come out totally changed. A mutation has to happen; only then have they been near a master. And it can happen only near a master. The school arises only near a master.The great Sufi master, Rumi, has said:Footprints but come to the ocean’s shore.Therein, no trace remains.All your scriptures only come to the ocean’s shore. They can’t take you into the journey of the unknown, they remain part of the known.Then who is going to take you into the ocean, into the uncharted? Only if you trust somebody, only if you love somebody so deeply that you are ready to risk your life. A master is a person who creates trust in you: “Yes, it is worth risking.” His presence is charismatic, magnetic. Once you have tasted the love of a master, you are ready to go wherever he is going, not knowing where he is going. He cannot convince you of where he is going because the unknowable cannot be communicated through words. And even if he tries to communicate, you will not understand it, you will understand something else.Between a master and a disciple there is a problem: the master speaks from his vision, from his Everest, from his peak of consciousness, and the disciple hears from his darkness, his valley. The moment the words reach the disciple, they have changed their color, their meaning.Just the other day I was reading…In the UN they have developed computers that can translate one language into another. Ideally, if the translated passage were then translated by computer back into the first language, the original words ought to be regained. This, however, does not allow for the ambiguity of languages.There is the story of a computer that was ordered to translate a common English phrase into Russian, and then translate the Russian translation back into English.What went in was, “Out of sight, out of mind.” This phrase was to be translated into Russian and then back into English.What came out was, “Invisible insanity.”That’s what happens continuously between a master and a disciple. And remember, the difference is far greater than between Russian and English. Russian and English are not so different, the distance is not so great, but the distance between a master and a disciple, between the one who is awakened and the one who is fast asleep and snoring, is immense. They are worlds apart. So even if the master tries – and he tries hard, but the result is very disappointing – what reaches the disciple is something absolutely different, and not only different, but diametrically opposite. Then the master has to find other ways, not direct, but indirect.Bahauddin used this situation. The Sufi dervish that had come to Bahauddin’s school was a wandering Kalandar. Kalandar is the name of the Sufis who belong to the Malamati Order. Their name is beautiful, just as the name of the school of Bahauddin is beautiful. Bahauddin’s disciples are known as Naqshbandis; it means “The Designers.” He was a great designer, and you will see it in this story. He used this design to provoke something. He was a great designer, a naqshband; hence the order is known as the Order of the Naqshbandis.But the Order of Malamati is also one of the most beautiful orders. Malamati means: The Blameworthy. The basis of the Malamati Order is: never blame others, always blame yourself. That will bring transformation.The general tendency of the human mind is to throw the blame on somebody. That is a way to protect yourself, but then you remain the same. Watch. We know at least five thousand years’ history that has been going on and on in different names, but the same thing goes on. In the beginning people used to believe, “What can we do? The real doer is God, so whatever he is doing, he is doing. It is beyond our capacity to change.” That is a trick to throw the whole responsibility on God’s shoulders, then you are freed. Then if you are a thief, what can you do? And if you are a murderer, you are a murderer – what can you do? It is God who decides. In India they say – for five thousand years they have been saying this – that not even a leaf moves without his order. The very idea has kept the East poor, starved, ugly, dirty. The very idea, “What can we do? God is the doer,” has created a subtle, spiritual laziness, a very deep sleep. The East has lived in deep sleep, in an utterly helpless way.This has happened in other countries too, in different names. In the beginning it was always God, then by and by people started suspecting whether God existed or not. Slowly, slowly the existence of God became doubtful, but we needed a scapegoat to throw our responsibilities on – then the idea of fate, then the idea of one’s past lives, karmas: that one has done something in the past life and now everything is determined by it. One cannot do anything, one is caught in the trap of one’s past lives.Now, you cannot go back and change your past lives, so everything is destined. Just see the point: God is no longer there, so you need something else – the theory of karma, or fate, kismet, luck. Slowly, slowly these things also became worthless; then new ideas came, but the game remains the same.Darwin said that it is evolution, the forces of evolution: man is not free, he is just a part of the forces of evolution – and they are tremendous! Man is simply moving within those forces. Those forces are the determining factors; you cannot do anything else, you are just a by-product. Whatever you are, you are at the mercy of the forces of evolution.Now, that is another name for God, another name for karma, another name for fate. Nothing has changed. Just a scientific explanation, but the psychological trick is the same.Then there was Karl Marx, and he said it is not evolution, it is the economic structure of the society that determines everything. He said it is not consciousness that determines the society and its structure, the truth is just vice versa: it is the society and its economic structure that determines consciousness, so you cannot do anything directly unless the society changes.It is the same: unless God’s mind changes, unless fate changes; now it is the economic structure. And it is so inevitable that you cannot go against it, everything is determined by it.Then came Sigmund Freud, and he said it is the unconscious that determines everything, your instinctive nature. These are all explanations for the same trick, and the trick is one: blame something on someone so that you can feel good and you can continue as you are, so that there is no need to go through any change.The order of the Sufis called The Blameworthy say, “I am responsible, all blame is mine.” Just for a moment let this thought sink into your heart: I am responsible. Then suddenly two things start happening in you. One, if I am responsible, change is possible. Second, if I am responsible, there is no point in blaming others and constantly quarreling.And there is no point in waiting for the whole world to change. You will not be here. Even if the whole world changes someday – it is not going to change, but even if it does change, you will not be here. Something has to be done right now, immediately – because your life is very short. You cannot wait for eternity for communism to come, for a classless society to happen, for a utopia to be fulfilled, or for the second coming of Christ – or when things have gone very badly, Krishna to come and deliver you. All nonsense! The basic trick is the same: “I am not responsible. Something has to happen to me; I cannot do anything.”The approach of The Blameworthy is my approach here too, the same approach. All of these psychological groups that you have to go through are basically rooted in the idea that you are responsible. Take your responsibility on your own shoulders. In the beginning it hurts. It hurts because when you see the stupidity of your behavior – that your misery is created by yourself – it hurts. It always feels good and nice that somebody else is responsible for your misery: what can you do? The moment you see that you have been slapping your own face, nobody else is slapping you, it looks very stupid to continue. Then it seems meaningless to go on crying and complaining, “Why am I being beaten?” – and you are slapping yourself. If you don’t want to be beaten, don’t slap yourself. If you enjoy it, don’t complain.This is the latest development in humanistic psychologies, but this has been the foundation of the Order of the Blameworthy. Sufis were the first psychologists in the world. Their approach is very psychological.In the beginning, certainly, it feels very bad because suddenly the whole burden that you had been throwing on others falls on your own head. You feel crushed, but only in the beginning. If you can survive the beginning…That’s the whole purpose of living in a commune where you know that others have survived, that you will not be killed by this burden. Where you know that others have gone through it and have become silent and blissful, where you know others have gone through it and not only survived, but have become purified. That the fire is not your enemy, that the suffering gives you maturity, where you can see all kinds of people in all kinds of stages. That is the meaning of a school, a spiritual school: a place where you see the beginners; where you see the people who have gone a little farther ahead than the beginners; and the people who have reached almost to the middle of their journey; and the people who have gone beyond the middle; and then the people who are just reaching to the goal – and at least one master who has reached. It is a place where you can see the whole spectrum of spiritual stages, where you can see the whole journey. It gives courage. You know that you are not moving in a cul-de-sac; that you are not moving in darkness; that you are not moving in some kind of illusion, hallucination; that your efforts are going to bring results. You can see the results all around.When a seed can see that the other seeds have sprouted; when the seed can see that a few other seeds have not only sprouted but become great bushes; when the seed can see that a few bushes have started giving fruit and flowers and are in bloom; a great desire, a longing, arises in the heart of the seed to jump into the soil and die. Then the seed is not afraid of dying because it knows that through dying is resurrection. It can see the resurrection: the whole garden is the proof.The schools of the Sufis have always been called “the garden of the master.” They have been called the garden of the master for this particular purpose; they are places where you can see all the possible stages. That very experience of meeting people at different stages keeps you going on. Otherwise the journey is really in the dark, unknown. If there is only the master and the disciples and there are no people in between, it will be very difficult for you to connect with the master. A chain is needed.You cannot see Everest, it is too far away beyond the clouds. But you can see a few people who are ahead of you; and then a few people who are still more ahead of you; and then you can see a few people who are just near the clouds and they are shouting to you, “Don’t be worried. We can see beyond the clouds, there is a peak.” That helps. That is the meaning of a school.Malamati is one of the most significant Sufi schools, and its basis is now a recognized fact – that you are responsible for whatever you are. If you are miserable, you are responsible. In the beginning it hurts; the old joy of blaming others is gone. It is a joy when you can blame others.Freudian psychoanalysis goes on blaming the mother, the father. It is a great joy – so you are not responsible. Your mother is responsible, your father is responsible. It is the old game.First God was responsible, he is the Great Father. And what else? Now you cannot believe in the Great Father, but you can see that your father is there, your mother is there. Psychoanalysis throws the responsibility: your mother is responsible.All these schools keep you tethered to your ignorance. All these doctrines are hindrances for growth. Growth is possible only when you have taken the whole responsibility upon yourself. In the beginning it hurts, but soon you start feeling a new thrill, a new adventure – because soon you become aware that if you are responsible, there is a way to go beyond. If others are responsible, there is no way to go beyond. Then you are doomed. If you are responsible, certainly something can be done. If you are creating your misery, you can uncreate it. If others are creating it, what can you do?And remember, it is not only ordinary, worldly people who have been thinking in this way. Even so-called spiritual people think in this way. People come to me and they say, “What can we do? We live in the family, in the marketplace. We have wives and children and parents, and we have to look after them. How can we meditate? How can we be pure and honest and authentic? First we will have to leave the whole world. We will have to renounce the world. We will have to go to the Himalayan caves. Then…” But that day never comes. That is a way of postponing.The trick is the same: the wife is responsible. It is not your sexual lust, it is the wife. There are scriptures which go on condemning women. They must have been written by neurotics. How can a man of understanding condemn women? They have not done anything to you. But there are scriptures and so-called saints who have been declaring down the ages that the woman is the door to hell. These people must have been in a very perverted state.It is your lust. Rather than understanding the ways of lust, the ways of greed, the ways of possessiveness, the ways of jealousy, you throw the responsibility on the poor woman. And where is the poor woman going to throw the responsibility? Women have not been allowed to write scriptures, otherwise they would have thrown it on the man. Man has been very cunning. He has not allowed them to read scriptures, to write scriptures; no, not at all. They have been kept completely ignorant. Otherwise they would write, “The man is responsible, the man is the door to hell.” That would hurt your so-called saints very much.Nobody is responsible for whatever you are. Only you are responsible. That is the beginning of real spirituality.That’s why I don’t say to my sannyasins to leave the world, renounce the world, no. Renouncing is based on a false logic that the world is responsible. You can renounce the world and you can go to the Himalayas, but you will be the same person there. How can you leave your mind? You have only left the outer situation, and the inner is with you; it will again create the outer situation. It is not going to help.A man came to me once and he said, “I want to commit suicide.”So I said, “Okay, go and do it. Why have you come to me? Why waste time?”He was shocked – because he had really come so that I could console him, convince him that there was no need to commit suicide, that it was not right, that it was a sin.When I said, “Go and commit it. Why have you come? Why are you wasting your time?” he was shocked, taken aback. For a moment he could not say a single word. I said, “What are you waiting for? Go and commit it! I want to tell you just one thing: you are in for a surprise.”He asked, “What do you mean?”I said, “You will know. Commit suicide; you will still remain. That’s what I am saying. You are in for a surprise. You will still remain after suicide. Then come and tell me. You will be the same, and soon you will be in another womb, and you will start the same nonsense again. This is not the right way to commit suicide. If you really want to commit suicide, become a sannyasin.”He said, “What do you mean?”“Then we can really kill you – and then there is no possibility to survive! You will not enter another womb again. The real thing has to be done in your interiority. Dropping the outer body won’t help, but changing the inner mind will certainly bring great transformation.”So first it may look a little sad – that “I am responsible,” and you may cry for a few days and weep. That’s good: it cleanses the eyes. Then suddenly, by and by, you will start becoming aware that you are free. Just the idea that “I am responsible” brings freedom. No, you are no longer in the hands of others. You are free to be miserable if you choose to be so; you are free not to be miserable if you choose to be so. You are free.That is the meaning of sannyas, that is what sannyas is all about: freedom. But freedom has nothing to do with outer changes, freedom has something to do with inner understanding. And the basis of freedom is, “I am responsible.” Responsibility brings freedom. Throwing responsibility on others keeps you a slave.Bahauddin was surrounded by disciples.“From where do you come?” he asked the traveler, in the usual Sufi phrase.“I have no idea,” said the other, grinning foolishly.This story has two meanings. The first is given by Bahauddin himself, the second is only indicated – and I will give you the second meaning too. Bahauddin has given only the first meaning because the people he must have been surrounded by were not yet capable of understanding the second meaning. But he has indicated it, he has left the seed of it. Unless you are worthy, nothing can be told to you.Now there are a few sannyasins here who are worthy of receiving the second meaning too, so first we will see what meaning Bahauddin gives.He asked: “From where do you come?” It is just a formal question. “I have no idea,” said the other, grinning foolishly. Bahauddin says that he is pretending, he is playing the role, acting the role of humanity. And this is the situation. “From where have you come?” You don’t have any idea. You are here, but from where? Why? To where?I have heard…A man who had a few drinks too many fell from a fifth-floor window.Soon a crowd of people had gathered around him. Then a policeman came along, pushed his way through the crowd and asked, “What is going on here?”“I don’t know,” said the drunk. “I have only just got here myself.”This is the situation that you are in. Fallen from some unknown, from the blue, not knowing at all from where you are coming. And if you don’t know from where you are coming, how can you know where you are going? Still you think there is great purpose in life, still you think that your life is meaningful. You are deceiving yourself.And you have all that is needed for you to know, but you are not using it. You have the guitar, but you are not playing it, so the music is not heard. You have the potential of being aware, which can reveal all the secrets of from where you are coming, and where you are going and who you are, but you have not been digging into it – and that is the first thing any intelligent person would do.I have heard the story of a courting couple…One night they were sitting on a bench in the moonlight, and the odor of flowers permeated the atmosphere. It was a time and a circumstance which would inevitably engender romance in the heart of anybody. And John said to Mary, “Mary, if you was not what you is, what would you like to be?”And Mary said, “John, if I was not what I is, I would like to be an American Beauty rose.”Then Mary turned the question on John and said, “John, if you was not what you is, what would you like to be?”John said, “If I was not what I is, I would like to be an octopus.”Mary said, “John, what is an octopus?”John said, “An octopus is some kind of fish or an animal or something that has a thousand arms.”Mary said, “John, if you was an octopus and had a thousand arms, what would you do with all those arms?”John said, “I would put every one of them around you.”Mary said, “Go away, John. You ain’t using the two you already got.”But this is the situation of humanity: you are not using that which you already have – and you have all that is needed. God never sends you into the world unprepared. Everything that is needed on life’s pilgrimage is provided, already provided.“Where are you going? From where are you coming?”The man said: “I have no idea…”Some of Bahauddin’s disciples murmured their disapproval of this disrespect.There are people who only see the outer, they cannot see the inner. They could not see that the man was acting a role. He was not a fool, but he was behaving foolishly. But great intelligence is needed to see things as they are. Fools can deceive you if they pretend to be knowledgeable, and intelligent people can befool you if they pretend to be idiots.You can’t see, you have lost all vision and perspective. And the reason you can’t see is because you have not even seen yourself.“Where are you going?” persisted Bahauddin.“I do not know, “ shouted the dervish.“What is good?”By now a large crowd had gathered.“I do not know.”“What is evil?““I have no idea.”“What is right?”“Whatever is good for me.”“What is wrong?”“Whatever is bad for me.”Just listen to those answers, and you can see that the man had a great vision. Whatever he was saying is true about ninety-nine point nine percent of people, and it was true about the crowd that was standing there, but nobody could detect it. It was so simple, nobody could think that he was simply answering the way humanity is behaving.If somebody asks you, “From where are you coming?” what answer are you going to give?A Zen master asked a newcomer, “From where are you coming?”The newcomer said, “The trees are green, and flowers have bloomed, and it is tremendously beautiful here.”Now, this is the answer of one who knows. The man is saying, “I am not coming from anywhere, I have always been here.”Raman Maharshi was dying, and the disciples started crying and weeping, naturally.Raman opened his eyes and he asked, “Why are you crying?”One disciple asked, “Bhagwan, where will you be going?”Raman said, “What nonsense are you talking about? I am going to be here. I have not come from anywhere and I am not going anywhere. I have always been here and I will always be here.”Because the innermost core is eternal, it never comes, never goes. It has no birth, no death. If you know, then your answer will be this. If you don’t know, you will say, “I am coming from Mumbai,” or from London or from New York. And where are you going? Then you will say, “To Kathmandu, to Kabul, or to Goa.”That man could have answered the same way, but he really played a beautiful drama: he behaved like humanity. If somebody asks, “What is right?” what are you going to answer? What is right? You may quote scriptures, but that won’t do.If you really look inside yourself, the man has answered for you; he said: “Whatever is good for me.” “Whatever is good for me is right” – that’s how people are behaving.I have heard…Herman Katz lay dying. He called his wife Rebecca to his side and said, “Rebecca, I am dying, I am not going to be around much longer, so please do me a favor. Put on your green silk dress, and your alligator shoes and red nail polish, and fix up your hair, and put on your mink coat, and all your jewelry.”“Herman, have you gone crazy?” asked Rebecca. “This is the middle of August in New York City, you are a dying man, and you want I should put on my green silk dress, my mink coat, my alligator shoes, all my jewelry, and red nail polish? What is the matter with you?”Herman Katz groaned in pain and asked, “Rebecca, please, is this the moment to argue with a dying man? Please, do me this favor. Put on your green silk dress, your alligator shoes, your mink coat, all your jewelry, and red fingernail polish, and come sit by the side of the bed.”So Rebecca, to humor him, puts on her green silk dress, her alligator shoes, her mink coat, all her jewelry, fixes up her hair, puts on red fingernail polish, and sits down by the side of Herman’s bed.Herman Katz looks at her admiringly. His eyes shine with love and he says, “Rebecca, you are a beautiful woman. You are still, even after all these years, a stunningly attractive woman. Rebecca, when the good Lord God comes to finally take me away, who knows, maybe he will change his mind and decide to take you instead.”That’s what everybody is doing in the world. whatever is good for me is right, even if the other has to die. This is the whole politics of the world. Everybody is political in this world because everybody is living with this idea: whatever is good for me is right. Then by right means or wrong means, it doesn’t matter. Everybody is selfish.Even your so-called spiritual people are selfish, very selfish – maybe more than you. If they renounce the world, they are renouncing only to gain the joys of heaven. It is just a projection of greed, ambition, lust, and nothing else.And Bahauddin asked:“What is wrong?”“Whatever is bad for me.”The crowd, irritated beyond its patience by this dervish, drove him away. He went off, striding purposefully in a direction which led nowhere, as far as anyone knew.“Fools” said Bahauddin Naqshband. “This man is acting the part of humanity. While you were despising him, he was deliberately demonstrating heedlessness as each of you does, all unaware, every day of your lives.”Bahauddin has used the situation in a tremendously beautiful way. The crowd must have been shocked; for a moment the thinking of those people must have stopped.Truth always shocks because we have lived so much in lies that whenever a fragment of truth, even a fragment, reaches our hearts, it is an electric shock. We are stoned, we cannot even breathe for a moment.Now, to say it verbally would not have served the purpose. The situation revealed it. This is a design. There is every possibility that the dervish was invited by Bahauddin. There is every possibility that he was a guest, and Bahauddin had asked him to come behave in such a way so he could show people how unaware they were.Sherlock Holmes, that master detective, was sitting in his favorite chair smoking his pipe and reading a book when he heard a knock at the door. It was his loyal friend and assistant, Doctor Watson.“Ah, good morning, Watson. Don’t you find it a bit warm to be wearing your red flannel underwear?”Doctor Watson was astonished by this brilliant stroke of deductive logic. “Holmes,” Doctor Watson said, “how on earth did you guess that I was wearing my red flannel underwear?”“Elementary, my dear Doctor Watson. You forgot to put your pants on.”People are moving without pants – without awareness of what they are doing, of what they are not doing, of where they are going. And when you tell them the truth, they think you have revealed something great: “a great experiment in deductive logic.”Buddhas have been telling you simple truths. No logic is involved at all. Just looking at you is enough – you are not wearing pants! But you go on believing that you are wearing pants.Man is unawareness, and he need not be. Man can become a light of awareness. And only when you are a light of awareness is your life worth living, is your life, life. Otherwise you are simply dragging, somehow managing, pulling. It is ugly, it is desertlike. It has not known anything worth knowing. It has not seen beauty, it has not experienced good, it has not been able to touch anything that is sacred. It has not come across truth; it cannot – if you remain unaware.The only thing needed is to wake up. And remember, you can even dream that you are awake, and many are doing that too. Have you not dreamed sometimes that you think you are awake, and you are going to the office? And then your wife comes and pulls you out of your bed and says, “What are you doing? It is getting late, you have to go to the office, and it is not Sunday.” Then you jump out of bed, then you become aware that you were dreaming. That dream was a trick of the mind.Have you not dreamed sometimes, when your bladder is full in the night and you start dreaming, that you are going to the bathroom and you are in the bathroom? That is just a trick so that the sleep remains undisturbed.Dreaming is a support to your sleep. Ordinarily people think that dreaming is a disturbance in sleep; that is not right. All the psychological investigation that has gone into dreaming has proved something just the opposite. Now the psychologists who have been working on dreaming and sleep say that dreaming is a friend of sleep, not a disturbance. It keeps you asleep, otherwise there are a thousand and one chances of your waking up in the night. But a dream gives you an explanation, a beautiful explanation.For example, you have fixed the alarm, and the alarm goes off. You want to get up at three o’clock. You want to get up to catch a train, and it is cold, and you are sleepy, and the alarm goes off. You start having a dream that you are passing by the side of a hill, and on the hill there is a beautiful temple, and the temple bells are ringing. Now a trick, a rationalization. The mind says, “It is not the alarm clock, it is just temple bells ringing.” And you turn over and pull up your blanket and tuck yourself in well, and go to sleep.Your dreams are in the service of your sleep, they serve your sleep. They always manage to give you some explanation.There are many people who think they are alert. They are not. There are many people who think they are virtuous. They are not. There are many people who go on thinking a thousand and one things, but they are not those things, those things are just dreams. And remember this faculty of the mind: it can rationalize anything.A man walking along a country lane encountered an old lady who was holding two kettles up to her ears. He could not help asking her what she was doing.“Well, if you hold two kettles to your ears,” the old woman said, “you can hear a noise like a football match.”The man took the two kettles, held them up to his ears for a while, then said, “I can’t hear anything.”“Ha ha ha,” cackled the old lady. “It must be halftime.”You can always find an explanation. Explanations help you to remain the way you are. If you really want to move in a new world, in a new consciousness, stop finding explanations for your dreams. Even if the fact hurts, let it hurt, but don’t hide it behind a fiction.You go on doing things you don’t want to do. You go on not doing things you always wanted to do. You live in a very divided way. See to it that this division disappears. This division is the cause of all your misery and hell. A divided person is a miserable person, and a divided person is in constant turmoil; he is in a civil war, fighting with himself. All your politicians and priests want you to continue fighting with yourself so that they can go on exploiting you, so you don’t have enough energy to fight with them.If you are fighting with yourself, you can’t have energy enough to be rebellious. This is the basic strategy which has been perpetuated down the ages by all kinds of exploiters. Divide man and rule. And they have divided you in two: the outer and the inner, the lower and the higher, the good and the bad, the actual and the ideal, the earthly and the heavenly, the worldly and the otherworldly. They have divided everything. You are living in thousands of fragments.Drop all these divisions. See it: these divisions are your enemies. Renounce these divisions, become utterly one.What is the way to become one? Just accept your actuality. There is no other reality. You are the reality. Accept your reality, and in that very acceptance, grace descends. In that very acceptance, intelligence arises because you accumulate so much energy. Not fighting, energy goes on and on, you become a reservoir of energy. Energy is delight, and great energy is great delight.You can become infinite energy. You are, but you are caught in traps. Those traps have beautiful names, of religion, morality, ethics, virtue: beautiful names.Your prison is called the temple, the mosque, the gurdwara, the church. Your jailers have become your priests. Your scriptures have become your knowledge and are preventing your wisdom from arising. All that you have been doing has not helped you to become aware, so now do something that can make you aware.What can make you aware? Seeing the point that society is not interested in your blissfulness or in your awareness, you drop out of society. By dropping out I don’t mean that you escape to the Himalayas. You remain in it, but deep down you are no longer in it. That is sannyas. That’s what it means to become a Sufi.A man wanted to commit suicide. To make sure he did the job, he got a bottle of poison, a rope, a gun, some gasoline, and matches.Pouring the gasoline all over his clothing, he climbed a tree and crawled out on a branch overhanging a lake. He hung himself from the limb, drank the poison, set his clothing on fire, and then shot himself.Alas! He missed his head, the bullet hit the rope, he fell into the water and the water put the flames out. He swallowed so much water that the poison became harmless. Then he had to swim as hard as he could in order to save his life!This is your situation. Beware. Watch what you are doing. Watch each act. De-automatize each act. Remain constantly alert. Walking, watch each step. Eating, watch. Even while going to sleep, go watchfully into it, into what is happening. Slowly, slowly the body relaxes, the limbs relax. Watch: feel the coolness of the bedsheet, the softness of the pillow. Be sensitive, be watchful.Then slowly, slowly the mind is moving into another dimension, the dimension of sleep. You are just in between, a little awake, a little asleep. Watch, go on watching, go on watching as long as you can.And one day it happens: you fall asleep, and yet watching continues. Then you learn how to watch the dreams. Then, on another level, one day you can even watch your deep sleep, dreamless sleep. And then finally, when you have been able to watch your waking life, your dream life, your sleep life, you have arrived at the fourth state. Just the other day I was talking about turiya, the fourth state. You have come home, you are alert.This is one explanation, that Bahauddin gave to his disciples – but hidden in it is another. Those disciples must not have been worthy enough, so he only indicated it.He says: “Fools! This man is acting the part of humanity. While you were despising him, he was deliberately demonstrating heedlessness as each of you does, all unaware, every day of your lives.” But who can act? Only one who has gone out of the act. Who can behave in such a way and depict humanity in its actuality, without any pretensions? Only one who has reached the fourth stage, only one who is now a witness, aware, alert.It is reported that Jesus was thought to be a fool. It is also reported that Francis was thought to be a fool; so was the case with Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen in China; so has the case been with thousands of Zen, Sufi, and Hasid mystics. They have been thought to be fools, and they were the most alert people. But they behaved like fools just to make you aware. If you could not see it in your own life, they functioned as mirrors so that you could see your ugly face.But people are such that if they see a mirror reflecting their ugly face, they will destroy the mirror. They will say, “This mirror is not right. I am such a beautiful person, and this must be a distorting mirror.”That’s why people killed Jesus; he was a mirror, and showed them in their total ugliness and nakedness. And they poisoned Socrates; he was a mirror, one of the best mirrors ever.Why do people become so angry with these people? Why are they so angry with me? Their anger is that what they are doing unconsciously is being done consciously here, deliberately. They can’t understand it. They can’t see the point. They become angry against the mirror.This place is a mirror: it will show you in all your dirt, it will show you in all your perversions. It will take courage to be here. And if you are really courageous, a great blessing is going to be yours. You can go beyond those perversions – because the only way to go beyond is by becoming aware, alert, watchful, a witness.This man must have been a great mystic in his own right. He must have been invited by Bahauddin. He belonged to another school. That’s why he must have been invited, so nobody would recognize, so nobody would think that he was a Sufi at all, so his behavior would be thought the behavior of a madman. It is very easy to understand the behavior of someone who belongs to your own school; it is difficult to understand the behavior of one who does not belong to your own school.For example, Christians will not be able to understand Mahavira standing naked, and Jainas will not be able to understand Jesus being crucified either. Do you know what Jainas say?Once a Jaina monk came to see me and he said, “You talk about Mahavira, but in the same breath you talk about Jesus. That doesn’t look right. Jesus cannot be compared to Mahavira. Mahavira is an enlightened one. Jesus is not an enlightened one – maybe a good man, but not enlightened.” I asked, “Why do you say that he is not enlightened?” He said, “How can he be enlightened? The theory of karma proves it. He was crucified, and one can be crucified only if he has committed great sins in his past.”Now, that is a Jaina explanation. They say that when Mahavira used to move – he was naked, barefoot – on the mud roads of Bihar, if there were thorns on the road, either those thorns would jump outside the road because Mahavira was coming, or they would turn upside down so his feet were not hurt – because he was the purest one. All his karmas were burned, now no suffering was possible for him.If this is the explanation, then certainly Jesus was a sinner, not a savior at all. If Jesus came into the community of the Jainas, he would be thought of as a sinner. They might have compassion on him, but they could not respect him.And the same would happen to Mahavira because the Christians would ask, “What service have you done to humanity? The savior is one who serves.” Now, Mahavira never opened a hospital, never ran a school, never went in search of lepers to kiss them. He would look utterly selfish just standing under beautiful green trees, meditating. “The world is suffering and you are meditating? What more selfishness is possible?” The world is on fire and Mahavira is enjoying ecstasies. What kind of man is this? He may be a good man, but not a savior – and utterly selfish.It is very difficult to understand somebody who belongs to a different gestalt of thinking, a different style of life. Only a man who has arrived can see that Jesus, Mahavira, Krishna, Buddha, and many others, are all the same. Only one reality has been expressed through them – in different languages, of course, in different styles of course. They have all painted the same reality; their paintings are different.For example, if you bring ten painters and the sun is setting and you tell them to paint, do you think their paintings will all be the same? Although they are painting the same reality, the paintings are going to be different. And the greater the painters, the greater will be the difference. If they are just photographers, not real painters, maybe the paintings will look alike. If they are real painters, geniuses – if van Gogh is painting, and Picasso and Goya and Gauguin – those paintings will be utterly different. You will not be able to figure out that it is the same sunset. Their individuality, their signature, will be there.When Mahavira reflects, he is reflecting the same existence, the same truth as Jesus, as Mohammed, as Bahauddin – but it is always difficult to recognize somebody who comes from a different gestalt. That’s why those people missed, otherwise he would have been seen as an awakened soul, an awakened consciousness. He must have been an enlightened person. His answers are almost like Bodhidharma’s: that is the second meaning, the deeper meaning of the story.Emperor Wu in China asked Bodhidharma, “Who are you?” and Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know, sir.” And Bodhidharma was the one who knew. If he did not know, then nobody knew. And he said, “I don’t know.”Even Emperor Wu missed. Thinking that Bodhidharma himself had said he did not know, what was the point? He felt frustrated because he had been waiting for Bodhidharma to come from India; it had taken years for Bodhidharma to reach China.Seeing Wu, Bodhidharma felt, “He has not understood my answer.” He turned back. He crossed the border of Wu’s kingdom, went into the mountains.Later on Wu repented very much because another Zen master told him, “You are a fool. You could not understand. His statement was the absolute statement, ‘I don’t know,’ for many reasons. First, he was no longer an individual; his ego had disappeared” – what Sufis call fana fi’llah, the drop has dropped into the ocean – “so who is there to know? That’s why he said, ‘I don’t know.’“And secondly, in that ultimate knowing, there is nobody who knows and nobody who is known. The division between the subject and the object disappears; there is nobody who knows and nobody who is known. The knower becomes the known. Yes, there is a kind of awareness, but it is neither subjective nor objective. It is transjective, it is transcendental to both. That’s why he said, ‘I don’t know.’ How could he claim knowledge? Knowledge is claimed only by stupid people. He had claimed ignorance and innocence. You missed the whole point.”But then it was too late. They searched for Bodhidharma. By the time they found him in the mountains, Wu had died. On the grave of Wu was written: “I am sorry. If you ever come here, please forgive me, Master Bodhidharma. I am utterly sorry and repentful that I could not understand your answer. It was too big for my understanding, it was beyond me.”That is another explanation.Remember both, one from your side, one from my side. Meditate over this beautiful parable.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am in deep confusion about trust and action. Part of me says, “If you sit back, nothing will happen. God helps those who help themselves,” while another part of me says, “Don't do anything. Don't push the river. Just trust and everything will be all right.”I am neither trusting enough nor active enough. I am caught between the two, or move from one position to the other. Can you say something about this please?Trust does not mean that everything will be all right. Trust means everything is already all right. Trust knows no future; trust knows only the present. The moment you think of the future, it is already distrust.The moment you start thinking, “Everything will be all right if I can trust,” your mind is active, you are not trusting. You are simply trying to manipulate existence now through passivity, but the manipulation is there. Inactivity is not trust. If this motive, “Everything has to be all right for me” is there, you are watching from the corner of your eye. You have not yet understood what trust is.You are hanging between activity and inactivity, and activity and inactivity are just two aspects of the same coin. They are not opposites, they are complementaries. And you will go on hanging between them, wavering between those two because when you do something, sooner or later you will get tired.Each action brings tiredness, and then you start hoping that something will happen through inaction. If you are in inaction, through inaction you will get bored sooner or later. Every inactivity bores, and then you move to action. This is the duality of action and inaction. You have not yet known what trust is.Trust is neither action nor inaction. Trust can act, trust can be inactive. Trust simply means everything is already right, there is no need to hanker for something else. A need not be B. Whatever you are, you are, and it is good. Relaxing into it does not mean becoming inactive – you may be an active person, so if you relax in it, great activity will be released. Or you may be an inactive person: if you relax into it, great inactivity may be released. But that has nothing to do with you. You are not deciding whether to be active or inactive, you are simply relaxing into whosoever you are. Then whatever happens, happens, whatever is happening, is happening, and everything is good because “God is.”I am not saying, let me repeat again, that you will necessarily become inactive, no. Lao Tzu will become inactive, Krishna will not become inactive, but both are men of trust. Then where do they meet? their personalities are totally different, not only different but diametrically opposite. Krishna lives a life of intense activity and Lao Tzu lives a life of tremendous passivity, but both are men of trust.Lao Tzu has trusted and relaxed, and this is what he finds happening to him: he falls deeper and deeper into passivity. He becomes just a presence, a silent presence. If something at all happens through him, it is action through inaction. Remember these words: action through inaction. If something at all happens through him, he is just a catalytic agent. It happens through his presence, not through his activity.Just the opposite is the case with Krishna, he is all activity. He is also a man of trust. He has relaxed into himself and in that very relaxation, he has exploded into a thousand and one actions. If sometimes you find him inactive, that simply means action is getting ready, action is pregnant in his inaction.If Lao Tzu is action through inaction, then Krishna is inaction through action. But both are men of trust. As far as trust is concerned there is no difference at all, both have relaxed.When a rose relaxes it becomes a rose, and when a lotus relaxes it becomes a lotus. A lotus is a lotus, a rose is a rose – they are different, but as far as their relaxation is concerned, their acceptance is concerned, it is the same acceptance, the same being, the same trust.Don’t start thinking that trust is synonymous with inactivity; it is not. So simply relax into your own self.A third possibility is also there because Jesus is both. Sometimes he is active and sometimes very inactive. He is just standing between Lao Tzu and Krishna. If Krishna is all action and Lao Tzu all inaction, Jesus is just exactly in the middle – a great synthesis. Sometimes he is very active, and then he goes to the mountains for forty days to fast, to sit silently with the trees, to meditate, to be with God. Then he comes back again to the world. He is a revolutionary, a rebel. But again and again he says to his disciples, “Now it is enough and I would like to go into seclusion.” Again and again he goes to meditate in the mountains, he disappears for days, and then again he is there in the world like a flame, a torch burning from both ends together.All three possibilities are there. Simply relax and let things happen. But don’t misunderstand trust as inactivity.That has happened in this country; trust became inactivity. This country has thought for centuries that if you trust in God, there is no need to do anything. And it looks logical too. If you trust that he is the doer, why should you bother? You just sit silently, wait: whenever it is going to happen, it is going to happen, and if it is not going to happen, it is not going to happen. Why interfere? The whole country became lethargic, passive. It lost all luster.The West has taken another extreme: because God’s existence became suspicious through scientific evolution, God is no longer as certain as he used to be – his existence is uncertain – so to trust in him may be simply stupid. Man has to act on his own. So the West has taken just the opposite route, to be active, constantly active – so much so that even in the night people cannot fall asleep. The activity has become chronic; even in their sleep they toss and turn and they talk, and they dream. Their sleep is a disturbed sleep, and many have completely forgotten how to sleep. Insomnia is becoming an almost universal phenomenon in the West – too much activity. Because “God is not,” you cannot trust.In the East, too much inactivity… Because “God is,” you need not act. But both standpoints are utterly foolish.Trust simply means that you relax into your nature. Whether God is or is not has nothing to do with trust. That too has to be understood.Whenever you use the word trust you always ask, “In whom?” as if trust needs an object. No, trust does not need an object. Trust is a state of your being, it is not object-oriented. A man who does not believe in God can trust, and a man who believes in God may not trust. God is not so important, not necessarily needed. For example, Buddha trusts; he does not believe in God. Mahavira trusts; he does not believe in God. Lao Tzu trusts; he neither believes in God nor disbelieves in God. He never talks about God, God is almost irrelevant.Then trust is something which happens in you, it has no outer reference. Trust is your relaxed state of being. Trust means be yourself; don’t do anything which goes against your nature. You can call nature “God” or you can call God “nature.” It is just a question of preference. If you are a theist, call nature “God”; if you are an atheist, perfectly good, call God “nature” – but trust remains the very foundation of a real life.And then whatever happens – action, inaction, both – allow it. Go into it deeply, totally, wholly.The second question:Osho,I am experiencing something that I am calling “the pain of myself.” Can you say what this is?The ordinary life of humanity is a continuous effort to avoid oneself. Everybody is doing it, in different ways of course. Nobody can sit silently and be alone. Watch yourself, how fidgety you become if there is nothing to do. If the radio is not there, and television is not there, and the newspaper is not there, and you don’t have a book to read and nobody to talk to, just think how fidgety, restless you become. You are almost in a panic, as if you are dying. You need something to remain occupied with, you cannot be with yourself.Whenever you are with yourself you start feeling bored. Now, this is strange. And if somebody else feels bored with you, you feel very hurt, but you yourself feel bored with yourself! And everybody is the same; nobody feels good being alone.Man is constantly escaping from himself, that is his whole activity. In business, chasing money, or in politics, chasing power, there is a constant need to be amused, to be entertained. Go to a football match or go to a cricket match or go to the races, but go somewhere. Join a club, a crowd, go to a movie, be a spectator somewhere or other, but don’t ever sit silently.Why? What is the fear? Because the moment you sit silently, the first thing that you experience is a tremendous loneliness, and fear arises out of it, and pain and anguish. When you sit silently for a few moments, you suddenly see that your whole life is just illusory. You are only believing that you have friends – because nobody is going to be with you when you die. You are only believing that you have a wife, a husband, children, father, mother, brothers. These are all just make-believes so that you are never allowed to know your loneliness.Whenever you are alone, that loneliness erupts, surfaces. Suddenly you start feeling yourself a stranger in a vast world, an abysmal world, infinite. And you are there, just a tiny speck of dust – although conscious – but so tiny, so helpless, so powerless, and all alone. That creates pain, panic, anguish. You rush back into some activity, you start doing something or other that keeps you away from this truth.There are only two types of people: one, who escape from their loneliness – the majority, ninety-nine point nine percent, who escape from themselves; the remaining point one percent are the meditators, who say, “If loneliness is a truth, it is a truth. Then there is no point in running away from it. It is better to go into it, encounter it, see what it is face-to-face.”Meditation means going into your loneliness wholeheartedly, to discover it, to investigate it, to inquire into it. That’s what meditation is all about.And the person who is a meditator is religious, all others are just worldly. They may go to the churches, to the temples, to the synagogues; that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t mean a thing. That is again an occupation. Going to the temple, to the church, to the synagogue is an occupation. It is exactly the same as going to the Lion’s Club or the Rotary Club or to the movie or to the cricket match – it is the same, a religious kind of entertainment. You can go there and you get involved in something, a ritual, a prayer, music, this and that.Meditation means you are not escaping anymore. Even though it hurts, you are not escaping. It is painful, but you are not escaping. If it is there, you have to face it, to inquire as deeply as possible into it because it is your reality. And by knowing it deeply you will become a man of wisdom.What you are feeling is the first step of meditation. You are encountering your loneliness. If you go on encountering it, if you are courageous enough, and you go on encountering it and you don’t start escaping, then one day loneliness changes its color: it becomes aloneness. And that is the moment of great mutation, when loneliness becomes aloneness. They don’t mean the same thing, they are worlds apart. Loneliness is when you hanker for something, some occupation. When you hanker for the other and you miss the other, that is loneliness.And when you have started enjoying the beauty, the austere beauty of being alone, the silence, the stillness, the joy of just being, breathing in the sun, just sitting under a tree doing nothing, listening to the birds, just being utterly herenow, and a great joy arises…But before that joy, there is going to be much pain. It happens only when you have passed through your pain. The pain is just like when somebody wants to leave alcohol; he will feel much pain because he has become addicted to alcohol. He will go through withdrawal symptoms. The body will ask, the mind will ask – because they always become settled with routines… The mind will say, “I need alcohol,” the body will say, “I need alcohol.” There is a great thirst, a great urge: “What are you doing?” And you will feel great pain.If you can persist and remain patient and watching, withdrawal symptoms will disappear sooner or later. It depends on you. If you are really determined to go into it, those withdrawal symptoms will disappear.You are feeling withdrawal symptoms. You have become addicted to the other. Now for the first time you are taking the courageous step of being lonely: the pain will be there. It is a birth pain, a pain of growth. It will disappear, there is nothing to be worried about. It is good because it is not going to harm you. Escapes harm, encounters never do. Facing a truth is always maturing; it helps you to become integrated. Escaping from the truth is living a lie. You can deceive, but you are simply deceiving yourself and nobody else, and you will be the loser in the end.If you start allowing this pain… Let it be. Note that there is pain, but don’t do anything about it. Let it be. An old habit is disappearing; it hurts. Slowly, slowly you will see your inner sky changing – from darkness to light, from loneliness to aloneness. Aloneness is the joy of being yourself. Loneliness is the misery of missing the other. Aloneness is positive, loneliness is negative.And the man who can be alone, blissfully alone, becomes a buddha. The man who can be utterly alone has arrived home. His is the great benediction. He is a Sufi.The third question:Osho,Can you please give me your car?The question is from Hans Conard Zander. He is a reporter from Germany, he represents the famous magazine, Stern.Coming from Germany and asking for an ordinary Mercedes-Benz? – it is like carrying coal to Newcastle. And this is the only question he has asked. Coming from Germany, from so far away, representing a very reputable, famous magazine, and only this question to ask? It shows much.Hans Conrad Zander was a monk before he became a journalist. The repression must still be there. He has not asked about God, not about meditation, not about love, but he has asked about a car. The monk has not yet died.This is the ugliness of monkhood: you impose certain things forcibly upon yourself. Your poverty is imposed. Your poverty is not your joy, it is your suffering.Monks become poor because they are greedy. They want the joys of paradise later on. They figure out that this life is short – and particularly when you are a Christian you have only one life, just a short life. By the time you start thinking about life, half of it is already gone, so it is only a question of a few years, and then the eternal joys, forever and forever.If Hans reaches paradise, the first thing that he will ask for will be a Mercedes-Benz! Coming to me, and asking such a stupid thing…Hans, it is yours; you can take it away right now. But one thing I must tell you before you start taking it away: it does not belong to me. You may get into some legal trouble. As far as I am concerned, I am absolutely in agreement, you can take it away.Nothing belongs to me. I have not a single pai with me, no bank account. You can see – I don’t even have pockets because there is nothing to put in them.You can take it. It is just as if you ask me, “Can I take the moon?” I will say, “Of course you can take it. As far as I am concerned, I have no objection. You can take the moon.”I have heard…Two hippies were sitting under a tree getting very high, stoned. It was a full-moon night, and one hippie looked at the moon and said, “I would like to purchase it, whatever the cost. I am ready to pay for it, whatever the cost.”The other said, “Forget all about it – because I am not selling it.”My saying to you that you can take it would be as absurd because it does not belong to me at all. Nothing belongs to me. All that you see here belongs to this commune of sannyasins; I am just a guest. I am grateful to my sannyasins because they take every care of me. Otherwise, nothing belongs to me. Any day they can say, “Good-bye,” and I have to go.But it shows much about your mind, what kind of mind you have been carrying.The old lady was a strict teetotaler and always had a glass of milk with her meal. One day she went to a friend’s wedding and a practical joker put some gin in the old lady’s milk, unknown to her.She sipped the milk, savored it, drank some more – and finally emptied the glass.Then, with a smile on her face she said, “What a cow! What a cow!”That’s what is happening to you: “What a car! What a car!” This is ugly. This is ugly because this type of mind can never be at ease, can never be relaxed, can never know the joys of existence. This kind of mind will always remain in misery. The more you hanker for things, the more miserable you will be.And the hankering never comes to an end. You can have all the gadgets that modern technology has made available, and yet you will be in misery because more and more is coming every day. Even if you can get the whole world, still you will be miserable because the mind that asks for more goes on asking for more. If you have this world, the mind will start talking about the other world – how to possess the moon, how to have a plot there.In Japan there is a travel agency that is selling tickets to the moon, and all the seats are already booked. The plane leaves on the first of January 1985; be in a hurry. They are asking fantastic prices for the tickets, and the tickets are being sold on the black market. That will be the first trip according to them. Anybody can go. Sooner or later you will see people making bungalows on the moon – and then those who don’t have a bungalow on the moon will suffer.Without seeing this eternal, infinite obsession with “more,” people go on doing all kinds of things. They even become monks. Hans became a monk. He must have become a monk in order to get free of this whole desiring mind – but you cannot get free by becoming a monk. Then one day he must have become tired, so he dropped the robes of the monk and came back into the world. But that is not going to help. You can move from one extreme to the other. Understanding helps, not moving from one extreme to the other.Kelly had been poverty-stricken all his life, but then an American relative left him a legacy of a million dollars. Kelly decided he would take things easy for the rest of his life.One day he was out driving in his big car when he said to the chauffeur, “Drive over a stone, my good man. There is some ash on the end of my cigar.”Now, taking life easy… People move from one extreme to the other, but they remain the same because understanding happens only in the middle.Hans has been here for a few days, and he is very antagonistic to this place, very antagonistic to sannyasins. He told Prasad that because he has been a monk, he does not like the idea of sannyas at all. Now, this is without knowing that my sannyasins are not monks or nuns! My sannyasins are exactly in the middle: they are neither worldly nor otherworldly. They are exactly in the middle, settling in the middle, settling in a kind of balance.Whatever you have, use it gratefully. Whenever you have it, use it gratefully, thankfully. When you don’t have it, use that not-having gratefully also. When you are poor, thank God that you are poor – because poverty has also a few joys of its own which no rich man can ever have. When you are rich, thank God that you are rich – because there are a few joys only rich people can have, that no poor man can ever have.So I am neither for poverty and against richness, nor for richness and against poverty. I am for trust. The poor man wants to be rich: that is distrust. The rich man wants to be poor, thinks that maybe the poor man is enjoying something he is missing: that is distrust. I teach you that wherever you are, wherever you find yourself, enjoy whatever you have – enjoy it totally.Sometimes if you have nothing to eat, rather than feeling hungry, make it a fast. That is the art of life. Why not transform it into a fast? Hunger can be transformed into a fast, and then it has a beauty of its own because it is no longer forced upon you. You have been artistic about it. Just a little touch of your meditation, and hunger becomes a fast. A fast has a beauty, hunger is just ugly. You were starving, you changed the face of starvation; you made it beautiful, you started celebrating it.When you have something to eat, let it be a feast. Thank God. Wherever you are and whatever is available, feel thankful and prayerful.But that is not the way people are living. They are constantly asking for that which they don’t have – and they will always be asking for that which they don’t have. Life is short, and there are millions of things they will always be missing. People don’t live in what they have, they live in what they don’t have. That’s why they live an empty life, and fullness never happens. Otherwise everybody is so rich, already so rich, that if he knows how to enjoy it, even emperors will feel jealous of him.But coming here to report about this ashram, these beautiful people, this great experiment, and then asking about a car that you could have better asked about in Germany… German roads are full of Mercedes-Benzes, they are everywhere. It is a common car in Germany. But Hans, you must have a very, very repressed mind. And I am surprised that a magazine like Stern sends you here to investigate meditation. You should have been sent to a car garage!The fourth question:Osho,Is not life nothing but misery?It depends on you. Life in itself is an empty canvas, it becomes whatever you paint on it. You can paint misery, you can paint bliss.This freedom is your glory. You can use this freedom in such a way that your whole life becomes a hell, or in such a way that your life becomes a thing of beauty, benediction, bliss, something heavenly. It all depends on you; man has every freedom. That’s why there is so much agony – because people are foolish and they don’t know what to paint on the canvas.It is left up to you: that is the glory of man. That is one of the greatest gifts of existence to you. No other animal has been given the gift of being free, every animal is given an already fixed program. All animals are programmed except man. A dog is bound to be a dog, and forever a dog; nothing else is possible, there is no freedom. He is programmed, everything is built-in. The blueprint is there, he simply follows the blueprint. He will be a dog. There is no choice for him, no alternatives are available. He is an absolutely fixed entity.Except for man, everything is programmed. The rose has to be a rose, the lotus has to be a lotus, a bird will have wings, an animal will walk on four legs.Man is utterly free: that is the beauty of man, the glory. The immense gift of existence is freedom. You are left unprogrammed, you don’t carry a blueprint. You have to create yourself, you have to be self-creative. So it all depends on you: you can become a Buddha, a Bahauddin, or you can become an Adolf Hitler, a Benito Mussolini. You can become a murderer or a meditator. You can allow yourself to become a beautiful flowering of consciousness, or you can become a robot. But remember, you are responsible – and only you, and nobody else.An optimist is a man who goes to the window in the morning and says, “Good morning, God”A pessimist is one who goes to the window and says, “My God, is it morning?”It all depends on you. It is the same morning, maybe the same window, maybe the pessimist and the optimist are staying in the same room – but it depends. And what a difference when you say, “Good morning, God,” and when you say, “My God, is it morning?”I have heard an ancient Sufi parable…Two disciples of a great master were walking in the garden of the master’s house. They were allowed to walk every day, morning and evening. The walking was a kind of meditation, a walking meditation, just as Zen people do walking meditation. You cannot sit for twenty-four hours. The legs need a little movement, the blood needs a little circulation, so in both Zen and in Sufism, you meditate for a few hours sitting, and then you start meditating walking. But the meditation continues; walking or sitting, the inner current remains the same.They were both smokers. They both wanted to ask for the permission of the master, so they both decided, “Tomorrow… At the most, he will say no, but we are going to ask. And it doesn’t seem such a sacrilegious act to smoke in the garden. We will not be smoking in his house itself.”The next day they met in the garden. One was furious – furious because the other was smoking – and he asked, “What happened? I also asked, but he simply flatly refused and said no. And you are smoking. Are you not abiding by his orders?”The other said, “But he has said yes to me.”This looked very unjust. The first said, “I will go and immediately inquire as to why he said no to me and yes to you.”The other said, “Wait a minute. Please tell me what you asked.”He said, “What I asked? I asked a simple thing, ‘Can I smoke while meditating?’ He said, ‘No!’ and he looked very angry.”The other started laughing. He said, “Now I know what the matter is. I asked, ‘Can I meditate while smoking?’ He said, ‘Yes.’”It all depends. Just a little difference, and life is totally something else. Now, there is a great difference. Asking, “Can I smoke while meditating?” is just ugly. But asking, “Can I meditate while smoking?” – it’s perfectly okay. Good! At least you will be meditating.Life is neither misery nor bliss. Life is an empty canvas and one has to be very artistic about it.A tramp knocked at the door of an inn named “George and the Dragon.”“Could you spare a poor man a bite to eat?” he asked the woman who answered the door.“No!” she screamed, slamming the door.A few seconds later, the tramp knocked again.The same woman answered the door.“Could I have a bite to eat?” said the tramp.“Get out, you good-for-nothing!” shouted the woman. “And don’t you ever come back!”After a few minutes the tramp knocked at the door again.The woman came to the door.“Pardon,” said the tramp, “but could I have a few words with George this time?”Life is the inn called “George and the Dragon.” You can ask to have a few words with George too.The fifth question:Osho,As I read your books and hear your discourses you seem to misquote and take out of context the words of Sigmund Freud. What is your point, Osho? I don't understand the trickery involved.Meeto, I am an ignorant man, as ignorant as Socrates and Bodhidharma. You will have to be patient with me. I am not a scholar, and what I am saying to you is not scholarly; it is just the opposite.Just a few days ago there was a Jungian, and I said at that time, “Wait. Sooner or later, a Freudian will be coming.” And now the Freudian has come.The Jungian was very angry, Meeto, because I had mentioned Jung’s name in the same breath with Freud’s. He was very angry. He said, “How can you dare to mention Freud’s name in the same breath with Jung’s – the great Jung? It is as wrong as somebody mentioning Adolf Hitler’s name in the same breath with Buddha’s.”It is very unfortunate that the Jungian has left. Otherwise I would have told him to meet Meeto and have a good discussion.I am not a scholar and I am not concerned with details. And my purpose here is not to inform you rightly; my purpose is not that of a professor. My purpose is not to inform you at all, but transform you. So it doesn’t matter. If it serves transformation, I can misquote. If it serves to hit you, your knowledge, your learnedness, I can do anything. The purpose is to hammer, the purpose is to shock you.See the purpose. I am not reading a scholarly, learned paper about Freud. Sometimes it may look to you, if you are very learned and you have been reading books and Freudian psychology, and you have been concerned with small details… It will look difficult for you, but that’s really the purpose. If you can drop your knowledge and be mad with a madman like me, then something is going to happen to you. Freud is irrelevant.You say that I quote out of context. Out of context or not, my whole purpose is single-pointed: to destroy your attachment to knowledge. And I will use all kinds of things. And I perfectly agree with Machiavelli as far as this thing is concerned – that any means is good if the end is good.I have heard…It is a joke of “fact and fiction,” involving two contemporary English poets, Ben Johnson and John Sylvester.John Sylvester once told Ben Johnson, “Hey, Ben, you and I are famous poets. Let us now create a poem together. I shall construct the first line, you the next, I the third, you the fourth, and so on. Each line must rhyme perfectly with the other.”Ben Johnson, suspecting mischief, said, “Okay John, go ahead.”Sylvester recited his first line: “I, John Sylvester, kissed your sister,” and beamed.An outraged Ben Johnson controlled his temper and calmly said, “I, Ben Johnson, slept with your wife.”“Where is the rhyme?” fumed Sylvester.“Rhyme or no rhyme, it is a bloody fact!” retorted Ben.So, context or no context, it doesn’t matter – it is a bloody fact. My purpose is to destroy all attachment to words, to theories. If you are a Freudian, then I will misquote Freud; if you are a Jungian, I will misquote Jung; if you are an Adlerian, I will do the same to Adler. It doesn’t matter. Freud, Jung, Adler don’t matter. All that matters is that I have to destroy this constant obsession with words, theories, hypotheses.But I know, scholars are scholars…The young scholar walked into the pet shop and asked if he could buy 177 cockroaches, 55 beetles, 21 mice, and 7 rats.“I am sorry, sir, but we can only supply the mice,” said the owner of the pet shop. “But, out of interest, what on earth do you want all those other creatures for?”“Well, I got evicted from my flat this morning,” replied the young scholar, “and the landlord said that I must leave the place exactly as I found it.”I am not that kind of a scholar. If sometimes you get angry, please forgive me.In a small southern Louisiana country town, the teacher of the one-room school was giving the lesson of the day on American history. Asking questions of this little girl and that little boy and this little boy and that little girl, she came to a little boy named Beaudreaux, and she says, “Beaudreaux, who signed the Declaration of Independence – huh?”Without batting an eye, Beaudreaux says, “Teacher, me – I don’t know. And that ain’t all, I don’t give a damn to know!”Upset with Beaudreaux’s reply, the teacher instructed him to bring his father to school with him the next day. When Beaudreaux’s father arrived the next day, the teacher asked him to sit at the back of the room and just observe.Continuing with the history lesson of the previous day, the teacher proceeded asking questions to this little girl and that little boy and this little boy and that little girl, and she came once again to Beaudreaux and she says, “Beaudreaux, who signed the Declaration of Independence – huh?”The boy, as steady as the day before, says, “Teacher, it is just like I told you yesterday. Me…I don’t know. And that ain’t all, I don’t give a damn to know!”Hearing this, Beaudreaux’s father jumped out of his chair, grabbed him by his collar and stiff-armed him outside. Obviously upset, but not knowing exactly what to do, the brief silent stare was broken when Beaudreaux’s father says, “Now, Beaudreaux, you know your momma ain’t got much learnin’, right? And me, I ain’t got that much. So if you signed that damn paper, you get in there and told that teacher!”I am a very ignorant man. As ignorant as Socrates, as ignorant as Bodhidharma. Please be kind with me.The sixth question:Osho,In the process of becoming more ordinary, what is happening to the ego?One cannot become ordinary. No, that is not possible. One always becomes extraordinary. Even if you try to become ordinary, you will become extraordinary – maybe “extraordinarily ordinary,” but you will become extraordinary.Becoming cannot lead you to ordinariness. Ordinariness is to drop the idea of becoming. When you stop becoming, you are ordinary. What is the idea of becoming? – to be somebody special.And yes, remember the cunningness and cleverness of the mind and its subtle ways of deceiving. The egoistic person can try to become humble, but that’s where he misses the whole point. You cannot try to become humble. If you try, your humbleness will be nothing but a new camouflage for the old ego, a new painting, a new coat of paint on the old ego, a new dressing, a new decoration, a renovation – but the old continues. It is the ego that was trying to become humble, and when you become humble the ego will feel very gratified. The ego will say, “Look, now there is nobody else who is as humble as I am.” But this is ego, this is not humbleness.The really egoless person is not humble at all. He is neither arrogant nor humble; he is simply himself. The humble person is just the egoist standing on his head, doing a shirshasana, a headstand, that’s all. Nothing has changed. Do you think when you stand on your head, something changes? You simply look foolish, silly, that’s all. You may think you are doing something great – Yoga, etcetera – all that happens is that you look silly. Nothing changes in you.You have to understand the desire to become. Why do you want to become somebody? Even if that somebody, the idea, the ideal, is that of being humble, ordinary, even if the idea is that of becoming nobody – why do you want to become somebody in the first place? Can’t you be just that which you are? From where does this desire arise? Watch, analyze, diagnose the desire to become.You are not satisfied, you are not contented; you are condemnatory toward yourself. You are not feeling that you are the way you should be. You are carrying many “shoulds” in your head, and those shoulds are creating the fever of becoming.Who is ordinary? – one who is without the fever of shoulds. And that ordinariness is nothing but godliness. Only God is ordinary, and those who are ordinary become divine. But it does not happen through becoming, it happens by dropping all desire to become.You ask me, “In the process of becoming more ordinary…” It is not a process. How can you become ordinary through a process? To become ordinary simply means you have dropped the very idea of becoming anybody – the idea of being ordinary is also included in it. You have dropped the very process, you have simply accepted the way you are: tathata, suchness. You start enjoying the way you are, the person you are. Whosoever you are, you start enjoying it, you are utterly contented with it.This is ordinariness. This is not a process; this is a sudden revelation: “I have been chasing shadows, and because I have been chasing shadows I was suffering. I was missing the present moment, the herenow which contains all. And because I was chasing shadows, it was not possible to attain them, so there was frustration again and again, and again.”Becoming means you are interested in the future, not in the present. Being is in the present, becoming needs the future. Becoming is always tomorrow; tomorrow you will be ordinary, and then you will enjoy bliss, consciousness, love – but tomorrow. And tomorrow never comes, it is always today.Be like the trees, be like the animals, be like the birds. Somebody asked Jesus, “What is the secret of entering your Kingdom of God?” and he said, “Ask the lilies or the fish or the flowers. Ask!” What is the secret of a lily flower? What is the beauty of the poor lily? What is the richness of the poor lily? The richness is, it is always here and now; it knows only the present time. It knows nothing of the past and nothing of the future.Remember: if you are interested in the future you will always remain attached to the past. Why? Because if you want to become somebody, from where will you get the knowledge to become? The knowledge will be supplied by the past, by your memory, by the skill you have learned, by all the experiences you have passed through. The knowledge will be supplied by the past, the know-how will be supplied by the past. If you are interested in the future, you will remain half in the past and half in the future – and this is the division that keeps you schizophrenic. If you are just herenow, the past is not needed.See it. Think of it. Just this moment, see it. If you are interested just in this moment, no past is needed, no skill is needed, no memory is needed, no knowledge is needed. And if you are just herenow, where is becoming? You are a being.To be is to be ordinary. To become is to be ill, to become is to be diseased, to become is to remain insane, split, schizophrenic.But the ego is very subtle. You rush after money, you become frustrated: one day you say, “It is nonsense, only frustration comes. Now I don’t want to become extraordinary, I have tried enough. Now I will try to become ordinary.” But trying continues – the ego has deceived you.A vain lion wanted to find out why the other animals were not as beautiful as he. First he asked a giraffe. The giraffe did not know. Next, the lion asked a bear. The bear had no answer. Then the lion asked a hippopotamus, and again got no answer.Finally, the lion met a mouse. He asked the mouse, “Tell me, why aren’t you as big, as strong, and as beautiful as I am?”The mouse looked up at the lion and said, “Well, I have been sick.”The ego is very subtle: it finds explanations, rationalizations. It can’t allow you to see the truth. Even the mouse says, “Well, I have been sick.” Even the mouse cannot accept that he is just an ordinary mouse. No, not possible.Watch the ways of the ego. It always comes from new dimensions. If you close one door, it comes from another door. If the front door is closed, it comes from the back door.The man who really wants to know the truth will watch, will witness all the possible ways of the ego. Watching the possible ways of the ego again and again, a great understanding arises. One day suddenly you have seen all the games of the ego. In that very seeing, becoming is dropped. Becoming is the shadow of the ego. Becoming is the methodology of the ego.Then you don’t want to become a saint, then you don’t want to become ordinary, then you don’t want to become humble, then you don’t want to become pure, then you don’t want to become anything. You don’t even want to become God; there is nothing you want to become. Becoming simply evaporates. And in that evaporation you are left alone, beautifully alone, totally alone, with no mind.The mind is not needed at all for the being; it is needed only for becoming – it supplies methods, know-how, technology. It is not needed, it is irrelevant. Then it falls silent. In that silence you are ordinary. But it is not the end result of becoming. On the contrary, it is the disappearance of becoming.The seventh question:Osho,We must be free. Yet where does freedom end and selfishness begin?Freedom has to be understood. It is a very delicate matter, a very subtle matter, one of the most profound because freedom is equivalent to God.That’s why Mahavira refused the existence of God – because he accepted the existence of freedom, and that was enough. He called ultimate freedom, moksha. Moksha means absolute freedom, ultimate freedom; then there is no need for God. Freedom is another name for God.Three things have to be understood. First, there is a kind of freedom that you are acquainted with: that is freedom from. A child wants to be free from the parents. The slave wants to be free from the master, from the boss. This is freedom from; it is a reaction, it is the ego asserting itself. I am not saying there is anything wrong in it. You just have to watch the different colors of freedom.When you are seeking freedom from, sooner or later you will fall into another trap – because it is a reaction and not an understanding. That’s what happened in all the revolutions in the past. In 1917 the poor masses of Russia revolted against the Czar, wanting to be free from czardom. And they became free just to become slaves again because they had no positive idea of freedom. Their idea of freedom was negative. Their whole interest was how to be free from the Czar. They forgot, they completely forgot, that just to be free from the Czar was not going to help; some other czar would be waiting.The moment you are free from the old czar, the new czar will jump upon you, and the new will be more powerful. The new will create a far more dangerous slavery – because the new will know that you can revolt. You have revolted against the old; the new czar will have to make a better, stronger structure of slavery so that you cannot revolt anymore. He will be more cautious, obviously.That’s what happened in Russia. Stalin proved to be a greater czar than all the czars put together. He massacred, murdered more people than all the czars put together. Even Ivan the Terrible was not so terrible as Josef Stalin proved to be. Stalin was not his real name, but given by the people. It was given in appreciation, but in fact it is not a compliment. Stalin means “a man of steel.” Yes, we call strong people, courageous people, men of steel. But in fact it proved to be just a derogatory thing: he proved to be a man without heart.The real man of strength is not without heart – because without heart you are a machine, not a man. The real man of strength is hard as steel and as soft as a lotus petal. Only then has a real man attained. But Stalin was just steel, a robot – no heart, no compassion, no love. He killed millions of Russians, he created the greatest slavery yet in history. Even Adolf Hitler was far behind him.Adolf Hitler had concentration camps, true, but Stalin made the whole country a concentration camp. Russia was a concentration camp, there was nothing else; the whole country was a concentration camp. Every single person was watched, people were put against each other. You could not even talk to your own wife honestly because who knows, she could report against you. You could not even talk to your children because they were members of the Youth League, they could report against you. And they were being taught, women were being taught, that the country, Communism, was the only value; everything else could be sacrificed for it. Small children were being taught to detect and spy on their fathers and mothers, on what they were talking about, and report it – because Communism was God. Everything else could be sacrificed.The whole country became a concentration camp. People became afraid even to think because who knows, there may be some way of knowing your thoughts. There may be an electrode fixed inside your head – who knows? – which goes on broadcasting to the Communist Party what you are thinking.Now it is possible, scientifically it is possible, to fix electrodes inside your head. You will never be aware of them because deep inside your skull there is no sensitivity. So if something is put there you will never know about it, you will not feel its presence. But it can go on reporting what you are thinking to the headquarters, it can give signals of what kind of thoughts are moving inside you. And there is every possibility that it is going to be practiced on people in Communist countries.People revolted against the Czar just to fall into the hands and clutches of a far more dangerous czar. Russia seems to be the only country where there is no possibility of revolution, its very roots are cut. It seems impossible that Russia will ever go through a revolution again.So when you are seeking freedom from… For example, if you are searching for freedom from the society, the established society, then you will fall into the trap of an alternative society. You will become a hippie or a yippie or something, and there you will again be in the same trap. If the established society wants you not to wear long hair, in the hippie community you will be asked to wear long hair. If you do not have long hair you will look odd. People will laugh at you, they will think you are a square. They will think you are stupid, that you are not a rebel. So if you are trying to escape from one slavery, you are bound to fall into another because your inner mechanism is already conditioned to being a slave. You can change masters, that’s all.The Christian can become a Hindu, the Hindu can become a Mohammedan, the Mohammedan can become a Jew – it doesn’t matter. You only change masters, you remain the same. First you were dependent on the Hindu priest, now you are dependent on the Christian minister. First you were dependent on the Koran, now you depend on the Gita, but dependence continues. This is not true freedom. Freedom from is not true freedom.Then there is another kind of freedom: freedom for. The second kind of freedom, which is far better than the first. The first is negative, the second is positive. One wants to be free to do something. For example, you want to be free of your family because you are in love with music. You are not really against the family. You are for the music and the family creates a hindrance, so you escape from the family. You are not against the family, against the parents, but they want you to become an engineer and you want to become a musician.And it is good to be a musician even if you have to suffer for it. It is better to be a musician if you really want to be a musician, if you have a passion for it, than to be a successful engineer, rich, comfortable, safe. You can be safe, rich, comfortable, secure, but you will be dead if you do something which you never wanted to do. If you want to become a musician or a dancer or a poet and that is your passion, then go for it. You may be a beggar, you may never become known, you may never be rich – because the society does not need much poetry.The society does not need much music, it needs more weapons to kill. It does not need poetry because poetry cannot be of much use in war. It needs atom bombs, hydrogen bombs. It needs soldiers, not sannyasins. It is a society based on hate, it is a society which is rooted in violence. It is a society which is greedy and lives through greed, ambition, lust – lust for power.If you become a good ladder-climber your parents will be happy – although the ladder leads nowhere. One day suddenly when you have become the president of the country, on the last rung of the ladder, you will see the point. You have come to the highest and now it looks as if your whole life has been a waste because the ladder leads nowhere. You are just in the sky, hanging. You have not arrived anywhere.But then to say, “This is not right” – because at least the people who have not arrived believe you have reached – to say, “I have not reached,” will need great guts. That’s what Buddha did when he renounced his kingdom. He said, “There is nothing.” That’s what Mahavira did when he renounced his kingdom, what Ibrahim did when he renounced his kingdom: he said, “There is nothing.” But these people are really courageous people.Otherwise it looks so stupid. When everybody thinks you have reached, why say it? Why not let the illusion continue? And what is the point in saying that you have been after something which was absolutely absurd, ridiculous, that your whole life has been foolish? Why say it, why confess it? Just keep quiet. Go on holding on to the top, remain there till you die, but never tell the secret to anybody because that will prove that your whole life has been just a life of utter mediocrity, unintelligence.If you want to be a musician or a poet, be a musician, be a poet. This is a second kind of freedom. At least you will be happy that you are doing your own thing, not somebody else’s thing. This is my experience: to be doing one’s own thing is the greatest joy in the world – whether that thing is appreciated by the society or not, valued by the society or not, whether it can be sold in the marketplace as a commodity or not. If it is the thing that you passionately desire, intensely desire, then do it; whatever the cost, sacrifice yourself for it.This is the second kind of freedom: freedom for. This is a positive approach, better than the first. The first type of person becomes a politician. The second type of person becomes a poet, a painter, an artist. The first freedom is negative, the second freedom is positive. But remember, they are aspects of the same thing.Even the first type of freedom at least pretends that there is some goal. Even the politician says, “We are fighting to be free from this kind of society, this kind of structure, this kind of politics. We are fighting to be free from this society just to create another society. We are fighting for some goal, some value, some utopia, some ideology.” Even he has to pretend that because the negative cannot exist alone; the positive has to be talked about, at least. So Communism talks about a classless society, utopia, where everything will be beautiful, where paradise will have descended on the earth. It will take infinity, but that goal has to be given. Otherwise people will not fight for a negative freedom.So the negative implies the positive; and vice versa, the positive implies the negative. When you want to become a painter and your parents are not agreeing and your society thinks it is foolish, you have to fight with them. So freedom for will have something to do with freedom from; they are both together.The real freedom is the third kind, the transcendental freedom. What is that? It is neither from nor for. It is simply freedom. It is just freedom. That is moksha: just freedom. Neither against anybody – it is not a reaction, nor to create a future. There is no goal. One simply enjoys being oneself, for its own sake. It is an end unto itself.Freedom from creates the politician, the reformer, the social servant, the communist, the socialist, the fascist. Freedom for creates the artist, the painter, the poet, the dancer, the musician. And just freedom for its own sake creates the sannyasin, the spiritual person, the truly religious.Your question is, “We must be free. Yet where does freedom end and selfishness begin?” The first two are selfish, ego-oriented. The first, freedom from, is very egoistic because it has to fight against. It is violent; it has to be very egoistic. It has to disobey, it has to destroy, it has to conspire against the status quo. It needs great ego. The politician is nothing but pure ego.The second, freedom for, also has ego, but more delicate, more subtle, not so gross as the politician’s. The musician also has an ego, but more delicate, softer, more gentlemanly. The poet also has an ego, but nice, sweet, not so bitter as the first. They are both ego expressions.Only in the third, pure freedom, neither against nor for, is there no ego and is there no selfishness – because the third freedom happens only when the ego has evaporated. If the ego is still there, the freedom may be either the first or the second. The third requires the phenomenon of the disappearance of the ego, fana, as basic. One has to understand the ego to attain the third freedom.Watch the ways of the ego. Go on watching. There is no need to fight for, no need to fight against. There is only one need: to watch and be aware of how the ego functions, its mechanism. And slowly, slowly out of that awareness, one day the ego is found no longer. Because the ego can exist only in unawareness. When awareness comes and the light comes, the ego disappears like darkness. Then there is freedom. That freedom knows no ego.And that freedom is love, and that freedom is God. That freedom is nirvana, that freedom is truth. In that freedom you exist in God, God exists in you. Then nothing wrong can ever happen through you. Then your life is virtue. Then your very breathing is meditation. Then you walk and it is poetry. Then you sit silently and it is dance. Then you are a blessing to the world. You are blessed and you can bless the whole world.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A man who had spent many years trying to puzzle out meanings went to see a Sufi and told him about his search.The Sufi said, “Go away and ponder this – IHMN.”The man went away. When he came back, the Sufi was dead.“Now I shall never know the truth!” moaned the puzzler.At that moment the Sufi’s chief disciple appeared.”If,” he said, “you are worrying about the secret meaning of IHMN, I will tell you. It is the initials of the Persian phrase ‘In Huruf Maani Nadarad’ – which means, ‘These letters have no meaning.’”“Why should I have been given such a task?” cried the puzzling man.“Because when a donkey comes to you, you give him cabbages. That is his nutrition, no matter what he calls it. Donkeys probably think that they are doing something far more significant than eating cabbages.”Religion is not a philosophical enterprise; it has nothing to do with the mind. Religion has no problems to be solved. It is not a question of thinking, it is a question of living. It is a question of going deeper into your being. It is not a question of an intellectual thought process but existential deepening in your own self. Religion has no question marks as philosophy has.Philosophy is questioning, religion is a quest. The difference is great. If you think, you go on moving on the periphery. Thought has no profundity, thought is always superficial. It is like waves on the surface of the ocean. Waves cannot exist in the depth of the ocean, they can only exist on the surface.Thinking is like waves on the surface of consciousness, and the question is to know the depth. You can go on chasing the waves, you will not attain anything. Your life will be a sheer waste.But why does man go on thinking? When it is a question of getting into one’s own being, why does he keep clinging to the surface? It is out of fear; depth needs courage.You will have to dive deep. Who knows what there is in the depth? You may disappear, you may not be able to come back again, you may melt. And the depth is dark, very dark. On the surface there is light, and on the surface there are many people just like you, you are not lonely. In the depth you will be alone. The deeper you go the more alone you will be. At the very center of your being there is just aloneness and nothing else. There you cannot take your friends, crowds, people. Until you are ready to go on this lonely pilgrimage, you continue thinking.Thinking is a substitute, a substitute for something that is totally different: deepening. Thinking needs talent, deepening needs only courage. In the world of thinking you can prove your ego very easily. If you are articulate, a little logical, cunning, clever, calculating, you can become a great man. But in the depth no talent is needed. All that is needed is an immense courage to be alone.That’s what meditation is all about. Meditation is just the diametrical opposite of thinking. Meditation is not thinking at all, it is a state of no-thought.Philosophy is a substitute for religion. Those who go into philosophy are lost to religion, and those who want to go into religion have to drop all kinds of philosophizing.Out of fear – out of the fear of being alone – thinking arises. It keeps you occupied, it keeps you engaged. And certainly you can always rationalize that your engagement in thoughts is of great significance. If you are thinking about God, naturally you can believe that you are thinking about something great. But whether you are thinking about God or about cabbages, it makes no difference at all; thinking is thinking. The object does not make any difference.The transformation only happens when you drop thinking, when suddenly you are in a state of no-thought, no-mind. There are people who think about money; and people who think about power; and people who think about success; and there are people who think about God, prayer, meditation. But there is no difference at all. The object of thinking does not change the process of thinking. Let it sink deep into you.Otherwise people simply go on changing their objects. If somebody is thinking of money we say he is a worldly man, and if somebody is thinking about God we say, “Look, what a religious man!” Both are worldly. The man who is thinking about God is also as much afraid of no-thought, of aloneness, as the man who is thinking of money: no difference at all.Your gods and your ghosts, all are created out of fear. The people you find in the temples and churches and mosques praying, bowing down to the statues they themselves have made, are not in prayer, they are simply trembling with fear. It is out of fear that they have created the temples, it is out of fear that they have created a God. God is their ultimate companion. They never want to be alone, so they say, “When I die, my wife will leave me, my husband will leave me, my children will no longer be with me, the whole world will leave me – but God will be with me.” At least they can hope: “God will be with me. I will not be alone.” And religion starts happening only when you gather courage to be alone.There is something like God, but that happens only to people who are ready to be alone. Aloneness brings you to your own divinity. Beware of the Gods that you have created out of fear.A story…Three men went up to a haunted house because they had heard there was a fortune there.The first man went in while the two others remained outside. He saw some money on a table and started to put the money in his pocket, when he heard a voice say, “I am the ghost of the Holy Navel. Put the money back on the table!” The man ran out the back door.The second man entered because the first took so long. He also saw the money on the table. As he started to put the money in his pocket, a strange voice said, “I am the ghost of the Holy Navel. Put the money back on the table!” This man also fled out the back door.The third man got tired of waiting and he went inside. He saw the money. As he began to put the money in his pocket, a strange voice said, “I am the ghost of the Holy Navel. Put the money back on the table!”But instead of running away, the man said, “I am the ghost of Davy Crockett, and I will put the money in my pocket!”The ghost disappeared, and the man went out the front door a rich man.Fear is the root cause of all your gods and all your ghosts. Fear is the root cause of how you created heaven and hell.The other side of fear is greed. Wherever fear is, there is greed, wherever greed is, there is fear; they are two aspects of the same coin. So you have created ghosts and gods – ghosts out of fear, gods out of greed – and you have created hell and heaven. If you look deeply into your theologies, you will not find anything else but the psychology of fear and greed.The true religion makes you free of fear and greed. And the only way to be free of fear and greed is to be able to be alone, is to be able to go in – into the darkness of your inner being, to move to the center.We remain on the periphery, and the center is not far away. You do not have to travel long to reach the center. It can happen this very moment because it is your center. You may be keeping your back to it; just a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and it is there. It has always been there, but you have not yet gathered enough courage to face yourself. You get involved in so many things: in relationships, in business, in power politics, in ambition. You go on getting involved in something or other just to avoid one single fact, and that is you.This creates a double bind. Because you are avoiding yourself, you start creating a false self. You cannot live without a self. At least a nominal self, a nominal center is needed, otherwise you will fall apart, into pieces. Because you avoid the real self you have to create a false self; that is the ego.The ego is a make-believe illusion, but very utilitarian. It gives you an idea of being centered, although that idea is very chaotic. The ego cannot really give you the idea of being centered. In the first place it is only a combination of many opinions that have been expressed about you by others. Somebody has said you are very great, and somebody has condemned you. Now both ideas are there. Somebody has said you are beautiful, and somebody has said that you are ugly. Now both ideas are there.Your ego is a patchwork: all the opinions that have been expressed about you, good and bad, favorable, unfavorable, are collected there. Out of those ideas you have created a kind of person in your mind, an image: “Who am I?” This image is very hotchpotch. That’s why your life remains a chaos, a mess. And because this image has come from the outside, from people who don’t know your center – can’t know your center because even you don’t know your center, how can they? It is always something which is opposite to your real center. You become two persons instead of one. You become a duality. You are one thing, and you believe yourself to be something else. You do something; you think you are doing it because of one motivation, but there is some other motivation of which you are completely unaware. You can never become integrated. You go on becoming more and more schizophrenic.I have heard…There is a story about a spinster who had a habit of checking under the bed to see if it was safe to go to sleep. For years she went through this ritual of checking to make sure nobody was hiding there. After many years of doing this, one day she looked and, lo and behold, there was a man hiding under her bed.She screamed from excitement and said, “So finally you are here!”On the surface you are one thing, in the depths just the opposite. On the surface you may be a saint, in the depths a sinner. On the surface you may be very moral, and deep down you may be carrying all kinds of immoral desires. On the surface you may look always very happy, smiling, and deep down you may be just despair and nothing else.This distance goes on growing and becomes bigger and bigger as you grow in life and in experience. By the time you die, you don’t die as one man, you die as a crowd. A child is born as a single individual, but by the time he is eighty and ready to die, he will certainly be two people. There is more possibility that he will be more than two – three, four, five, six, ten – nobody knows. He can be a crowd.Just watch yourself and you will not find one single self in you, but many selves. You are multi-psychic, you have many minds, and each mind is fighting with your other minds. There is great competition inside, continuous quarrel. In that quarrel, in that conflict, you are dissipating energy – and when you dissipate energy in constant civil war you lose the zest for life. You lose all possibilities to be ecstatic, you lose joy.William Blake is right when he says, “Energy is delight.” That’s a very profound statement. Yes, energy is delight, and the greater the energy you have, the greater will be your delight. It is energy that becomes delight; overflowing energy is delight, overflowing energy becomes celebration. When energy is dancing in you, in unison, in a deep harmony, in rhythm and flow, you become a blessing to the world.But how can it happen if you are continuously fighting, and your whole energy goes into the fight? And nobody is going to win because all those selves are false. Only the true can win. Only truth is ever victorious, lies can never win. Yes, small battles maybe – one lie can win from another lie – but the ultimate war can never be won by a lie. It is won only by the truth. But we go on choosing this lie and that lie, and we never move toward the truth.This is a very strange situation that man finds himself in, and this is everybody’s situation. Because we start thinking about life, life’s problems, life’s mysteries, we get trapped in scriptures, doctrines, theories. From where else are you going to get the answer? If you ask, “Who created the world?” now, how are you going to find the answer to who created the world? You were not present there when the world was created – if it ever was created. How are you going to find the answer to who created the world? One thing is certain: nobody could have been present because if somebody had been present, the world would have already been there. Nobody could have been present, so nobody could have been a witness.Once you ask such a stupid question, which looks very, very intelligent: “Who created the world?” – almost every religious person goes on asking this – you are bound to fall into a trap. Then those cunning and calculating people who can answer it… All their answers are false because nobody can be a witness to it, and all their answers are contradictory to each other.Mahavira says the world was never created. Now, how to believe whether he was right or not? Christians say the world was created exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus Christ was born, on the first of January, on Monday, in the early morning, at six o’clock. Now this is patently stupid because now we know, enough proofs are there, that the world has existed – at least this earth has existed – for millions of years. If the world was created four thousand four years before Jesus, that means the world has existed for only six thousand years. But the ruins of Harappa are seven thousand years old; it is scientifically proved. And we have found bones of animals which are millions of years old.But you will be surprised at what Christians say. There was one Christian thinker who said God can do that: he made the world exactly four thousand and four years before Jesus. But God is omnipotent – he made bones that look millions of years old. And why did he make these bones? – just to test your trust. Those who are really trusting will trust, and those who doubt will fall into hell. Cunning people can always go on finding explanations.To ask a question means you are ready to receive an answer from somebody. And whenever you receive an answer from somebody you are falling further and further away from the truth because truth can never be borrowed. Neither can the Vedas give it to you, nor the Koran, nor the Bible. Neither can Buddha give it to you, nor Mohammed, nor I. Nobody can give it to you.Truth has to be discovered by everybody in his own being. You are the truth. “Ana’l haq!” Mansoor, the great Sufi, declared. “I am the truth!” But how can you declare this unless you have reached the very core of your being?Because we ask such questions, we are supplied with answers. There is an economic law: wherever there is a demand, there will be a supply. Ask a stupid question and you will get a thousand and one stupid answers. And because you have asked the question, the question creates irritation; you cannot be satisfied unless you receive an answer. The question goes on haunting you, so you are bound to fall into the trap of a dogma, doctrine, scripture, priest, philosopher. You are bound to fall into somebody’s trap, and it is because of a wrong question.The only right and religious question is one: “Who am I?” Because nobody can answer it, that’s why it is the only valid question. Only you can answer it. Nobody can say who you are, only you, and you too only when you go deep into yourself, beyond all the labels that are sticking on your surface: “I am a doctor,” “I am an engineer,” “I am a businessman,” “I am a professor,” “I am a Christian,” “I am a Hindu,” “I am a Catholic,” or a communist, socialist, “I am Indian,” or German, or Japanese.When you start penetrating all these labels that have been stuck on you – they are many, layers upon layers. If you throw away one layer of labels you will find another layer of labels there – you will have to peel all these labels off. Man has become almost like an onion: you have to peel all the layers off, and only then, one day you will reach the center. That center is nothingness. Sufis call it fana: all is gone, all that you believed, all that you trusted, all those labels, gone.You are no longer a Hindu and no longer a Mohammedan. You are no longer a communist, no longer a socialist. You are no longer this or that: neti-neti, neither this nor that. You have abandoned all those labels. You are not even a man or a woman – because consciousness cannot be man or woman. You are neither white nor black because that is only the pigment in the body. You are not the body either. Why? – because you can be conscious of the body. I can see my hand, that means the seer must be separate from the seen. I can observe my thoughts, so I am not my thoughts. I can watch my feelings, so I am not my feelings either.You go on: “I am not this thing, I am not that thing.” You go on and on, then a moment comes when all things have been dropped. You are a no-thing; that means nothing.Nothing is not a state of emptiness. Remember, nothing is not a state of emptiness, nothing simply means no-thing. You are a consciousness, not a thing. And consciousness cannot be reduced to anything whatever. It is irreducible. Consciousness cannot be made an object, it always remains your subjectivity. The deeper you go, the deeper you will find it is standing beyond and beyond and beyond. It is always the beyond, the transcendental.It cannot be identified with anything: the body, the color, the race, the language, the religion, the church, the philosophy – no, not at all. All those things are borrowed. You have been told that you are a Hindu, so you believe that you are a Hindu. Just think: the day you were born, if you had been removed from your family and you were brought up by a Christian or a Mohammedan, would you have ever thought that you are a Hindu? And who knows, exactly the same thing might have happened. You might have been brought up by a Christian, but you might not have been born to a Christian family. You would not have ever been able to find it out, there would be no way. You would always think that you were a Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or whatever was told to you.You are born as purity, a mirror; then things are imposed on you. The religious person has to unburden himself.I am reminded of a minister who so thoroughly bored the members of his congregation that they finally asked him to leave.“Give me one more chance,” he pleaded.The congregation turned out in force the next Sunday and heard him deliver, to their surprise and delight, the most inspired sermon heard for years.After the service, everyone shook his hand warmly. One man, an elder of the church, said, “You must stay, with an increase in salary, of course.”The minister accepted. Then the elder said, “That was the greatest sermon I have ever heard. But tell me one thing. As you began to speak you raised two fingers of your left hand, at the end two fingers of your right hand. What was the significance of those gestures?”“Those,” answered the minister, “were the quotation marks.”Just look at yourself: whatever you are, whatever you think you are, is within quotation marks. You have been told. You are quoting others when you say, “I am a Hindu.” Your Hinduism is within quotation marks. When you say, “I am a communist,” you are again quoting others. You can believe in the Bible, or in Das Kapital, it doesn’t matter: you are a believer. Then you are not a true person. You have not yet known who you are. You are clinging to some information fed from the outside by others.To discover oneself means to drop all quotation marks, to be utterly naked in the sun. Only then does one become religious, only then does one know one’s true center and being.But people are wasting their energies in unnecessary questions. If you ask one question, you will get a thousand and one answers for it, and you will become more and more confused. If you believe in any answer, that answer is not going to satisfy either; it will create new questions.For example, if you believe that God created the world, the question arises, “Why?” Nothing is solved. You were thinking, “My question, ‘Who created the world?’ will be solved if I can trust and believe that God created the world.” But now the question arises, “Why?” Why did he not create it before? What was he doing before he created the world? For eternity, just think, what was he doing? And why did he suddenly create the world four thousand and four years before Jesus? Why so suddenly? What happened, what motivation? Maybe an answer can be given to it; that is not going to help. New questions will arise. That is one of the indications of a false answer: it does not solve the basic question – on the contrary, it creates more questions.Then the question arises, “Okay, he created the world for a certain reason, but why did he create such an ugly world, with so much suffering, with such poverty, illness, death? Why such an ugly world?” An answer will be supplied. He had created a beautiful world, but Adam created the original sin and that’s why we are suffering. But why did he create Adam in such a way that he was capable of committing the original sin? Ultimately he must be responsible for it. The tree is judged by the fruit; God has to be judged by his creation. If he has created this world, then he doesn’t look like much of a God. He looks more like a devil. Why did he create Adam with such desire, with such disobedience? And even if he had created Adam, why did he create the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden? At least he could have destroyed it, or not created it. Problems and problems… And for thousands of years man has been writing, thinking, puzzling about these things.Sufis say this is all nonsense and only mediocre minds become interested in it. The really intelligent person simply gets out of all this rubbish.But people go on asking in a kind of unawareness, not knowing why they are asking, not knowing what answers they will get, not knowing that each answer is going to create new problems. And the more problems they have, the more mediocre they become.Everyone may not be as unaware as the owner of a large furniture store who was in Denmark to buy some stock. But still, everyone is unaware…While on his business, he happened to meet in a hotel elevator a beautiful girl who gave him a friendly smile. The furniture store owner tried to become acquainted, even though neither could understand a word of the other’s language. He drew a picture of a taxi and she nodded her head in agreement, so they went for a ride in a taxi.While riding in the cab he drew a picture of a table in a restaurant and again she nodded her head in agreement, so they went to a fine restaurant for dinner. After dinner he sketched two dancers and she was delighted. They went to a nightclub and had a lovely time.Then the girl indicated she would like to use the pencil and paper, which he gave to her. She drew a picture of a four-poster bed.The fellow was dumbfounded. As he said to a friend later, “You know, I never could figure out how that girl knew I was in the furniture business.”Now, you can go on figuring it out your whole life. People are mediocre – not that they are born mediocre. Every child is born utterly intelligent, absolutely intelligent, but we destroy intelligence. That’s what we do with our children in the schools, colleges, universities. These are the factories where we create machines and destroy human beings. These are the factories for miseducation, where we go on throwing more and more information into the child without ever helping him to become more aware, more meditative, more silent. We never teach the child how to be silent, how to be alone, how to sit by a tree sometimes and just be still. Just still, watching the green of the trees and the red of the trees and the gold of the trees, and the sun, and the birds on the wing. Just simply being there, utterly silent, not doing a thing. Not thinking, just being; breathing in great joy, in great gratitude. We never teach children how to be open to existence.All that we do in the schools and the universities is to go on pouring necessary and unnecessary information into their heads. And it is no wonder that when a person returns from the university, he comes home a mediocre person. It is very rare to come back from the university and still be intelligent, very rare. Very fortunate are the people who can escape from a university without being harmed by it. The university creates computers, not human beings. Its whole effort is how to make you useful as a clerk, as a collector, as a stationmaster. It has no concern with your heart, with your being; it has no concern with your life. All that it teaches is how to earn your living – but to earn your living is not equivalent to being alive.To be alive needs something more, something deeper, something more profound. To be alive needs more awareness, more meditativeness, more consciousness, not more information.Intelligence is intrinsic to every human being, and not only to every human being, to everything that exists. To trees – trees are utterly intelligent; of course they have a different dimension of intelligence. And so do the animals and the birds. In a way, their intelligence remains pure, it is not contaminated. Man’s intelligence becomes contaminated.By the time the child is four years of age he has lost the real zest for life, love for life, joy of life. He has lost something immensely valuable. It has been replaced by plastic things. He is now being forced to become a parrot. He will simply repeat, now his whole life will be a repetition. He will be a gramophone record.Two men who had been boyhood companions were reunited after many years. One was a preacher, the other a sailor. Each was the proud owner of a parrot.In the interests of science, the two birds were placed in the same room, and the preacher’s parrot immediately asked, “What must we do to be saved?”“Man the pumps and work like hell, or we will all go down with the ship,” replied the sailor’s pet.This is how you are doing things, not a little bit differently, just exactly like that. The preacher’s parrot has been listening again and again to the preacher, the priest: “What must we do to be saved?” He has learned it. He does not know the meaning of it, he cannot know the meaning of it, but he can repeat the words. And the sailor’s pet answered, “Man the pumps and work like hell, or we will all go down with the ship.” He has also heard continuously, “Man the pumps and work like hell, or we will all go down with the ship.” Both are simply repeating without any meaning.Watch yourself, how you go on repeating what your parents have told you, what your teachers have told you, what your priests have told you, what your politicians have told you. Watch! And if you really want to become intelligent – and you will not be really alive if you are not intelligent – then drop all those repetitions. It is better to be ignorant than to have borrowed knowledge because ignorance has a beauty of its own, it is innocence. Knowledge is ugly if it is borrowed, it makes you a gramophone record, “His Master’s Voice.” You go on repeating your whole life. Even parrots are not that unintelligent.An old maid who enjoyed the companionship of a profane parrot was in the habit of receiving a visit from her pastor each Monday. Before the reverend gentleman arrived, the maiden lady would throw a cloth over the parrot’s cage.It happened after one such visit that the preacher had occasion to call again the following day. Seeing him on the porch, the old maid hastily threw the cloth over her pet’s cage.As the minister entered the room, the parrot remarked, “This has been a damn short week!”Even parrots are not as unintelligent as your so-called knowledgeable people are. Intelligence is a mirrorlike quality in your consciousness; it reflects that which is. It has no past, it has no future, it has only present. Intelligence lives in the present. Knowledge lives in the past and hopes for the future, and goes on missing the present. No mirror can reflect the past – or do you think it can? The mirror cannot reflect the woman who was looking in the mirror yesterday. She is gone, and it is gone. The mirror cannot reflect what is going to happen tomorrow. That which is not yet, is not yet. The mirror only reflects this moment, whatever is.Intelligence reflects whatever is, knowledge goes on repeating the past and fantasizing about the future. It is because of knowledge that you are missing your life.Sufis call these people donkeys. Why do they call them donkeys? – because a donkey can carry all the scriptures and yet will remain unaware of what he is carrying. He will not know the meaning. A donkey can carry the Koran, the Veda, the Gita, the Bible. You can load all the great scriptures of the world on the donkey and the donkey will carry them, and may even feel very egoistic: “Look! I am no ordinary donkey, I am carrying all the great scriptures of the world” – but a donkey is a donkey. He does not know any meaning.That is the situation of a pundit, of your so-called learned people. Sufis call them donkeys. In a subtle way they are carrying the Vedas, the Korans, the Bibles, but they don’t know the meaning – because the meaning cannot be known through study, the meaning cannot be known through words. The meaning can only be known by experience.You cannot know the meaning of Jesus’ words by studying the Bible and all the commentaries on it. You can know the meaning of Jesus’ words only when you attain Christ consciousness, when you become a Christ. And remember, to become a Christian is not to become a Christ. Christian means a plastic flower, Christ means a real rose. The Christian is an imitation, an imitation of Christ. That is the title of one of the most famous Christian books, Thomas A. Kempis’ Imitation of Christ. How can you imitate Christ? And if you imitate, you will not be Christ; certainly you will not be Christ, you will be only a carbon copy. You will not have any authenticity, you will not have any original experience of your own. You will be a parrot, a gramophone record: “His Master’s Voice.”You can understand the Bible only when you have become a Christ because those words were uttered in that state of consciousness. Unless you attain that state of consciousness you will not be able to know the meaning. And by “meaning,” I do not mean the dictionary meaning. Dictionaries are there, and you can look into the dictionaries and you can find the meaning, but that is not the real meaning. Those meanings are only synonyms, they replace one word with another word.For example, what is the meaning of love? You can go into the dictionary and you can find many meanings of love – profane love and sacred love, and the love of the mother for the child, and the love of the husband for the wife, and the love of the disciple for the master. You can have all those meanings in the dictionary. But unless you taste something of love, unless you fall in love yourself, unless you become soaked with love, unless your heart throbs with love, your heart sings with love, unless you feel the dance of love happening within you, you will not know the real meaning. The meaning has to be existential.Today’s story:A man who had spent many years trying to puzzle out meanings went to see a Sufi and told him about his search.Every single word has to be meditated upon. A man who had spent many years trying to puzzle out meanings… There are many people, and they are very respectable because people think they are doing something great: philosophers, thinkers, theologians. They are simply wasting their life, and wasting it to no purpose. They go on seeking and searching for meaning in words, they become very, very skillful about words, but all that they know are words. Their words are empty. This man: …had spent many years trying to puzzle out meanings…Once a man came to me. For thirty years he had been searching the lives of Buddha and Mahavira for only one single thing: who was older? They were contemporaries, and the records are puzzling and confusing because the people of those days were not very interested in records. They were not interested in so-called history at all. Their interest was far deeper. They were not interested in the personality of Buddha, his body, where he was born, the exact date, etcetera. They were more interested in what had happened in his consciousness. Their records are very accurate as far as Buddha’s enlightenment is concerned, but their records about his physical birth, his physical death, how long he really lived, are just very confusing.So is the case with Mahavira. There are records which say Mahavira was older, and it can be proved that he was older because he never mentioned Buddha. But Buddha criticized Mahavira many times. That means Mahavira must have been very old, already respected, recognized. Buddha must have been very young, and he had to fight his way. He must have criticized Mahavira. Mahavira must have kept silent because who bothers about a young man? Let him speak, it doesn’t matter. But there are books which say that Buddha was older and Mahavira was younger; they can also prove it.Proofs are very easy. The same thing can be used to prove just the opposite – and the same thing has been used. Those who think that Buddha was older say that he was angry with Mahavira because he was younger and was trying to convert his disciples; that’s why he was angry and he criticized Mahavira. Mahavira did not bother. Who bothers about an old man? “He will be here just a few days, and gone.” He went on working on his own. And he had everything to gain because he had no disciples that Buddha could take away, but he could take away Buddha’s disciples. Buddha must have been angry.That is how people go on thinking. Both kinds of people miss. They don’t understand either Mahavira or Buddha – because neither could Mahavira be angry, nor could Buddha be angry. And neither of them could be interested in converting others’ disciples. But this is how scholars think. It is their minds that come in. It says something about the so-called scholars and the historians.This man who came to me – he was a well-known man, had written many books, particularly on Mahavira and Buddha – for thirty years his whole problem had been how to decide who was older. He asked me, “Can you shed some light on this problem: who was older?”I said, “Bothering about that is just rubbish. Why should I waste my time on who was older? And how does it matter in any way? It is not going to affect what Buddha was, whether he was three years older than Mahavira or ten years younger. Neither is it going to affect Mahavira’s vision. But why have you wasted thirty years? Your thirty years have just gone down the drain. If some day you come across Buddha and Mahavira, they will laugh. They will say, ‘You are a fool! Why have you wasted your thirty years? And you are getting old; any day you will die. When are you going to become a buddha on your own?’”He was shocked – because nobody had been so hard on him. For a moment he could not speak a single word. But he was an intelligent man, he recognized the truth. He said, “Perhaps you are right. But nobody ever told me this; everybody appreciated my work, that I am doing great research. You are the first person who has been so hard on me. But I can see the point; my thirty years are lost.”And within just six or seven months from the day he saw me, he was dead. So his whole life was gone, and he had been thinking he was doing great research.There are millions of people, your universities are full of such people: they strut about and brag about how many PhDs and DLitts they have, and how many papers they have published in great academic journals. But if you look into their work you will be surprised; it is just trivia, utterly meaningless.This man must have been a philosopher. He: …had spent many years trying to puzzle out meanings, went to see a Sufi and told him about his search.Now, a Sufi is just the opposite of a philosopher. A Sufi is one who is not concerned with words at all. A Sufi is one who is not interested in scriptures at all. A Sufi is one who is interested in going into existence itself. He does not want to bother about the word beauty, he wants to experience beauty itself. He is not concerned about the word water, he is thirsty and he wants to drink water. His interest is in drinking, his interest is existential.He: …told him about his search. The Sufi must have laughed inside. This is not a search at all! The search has to be inward; the search has to be into reality, into that which is, not into words and puzzles. All the searching into words and theories keeps you away from the real search.The Sufi said, “Go away and ponder this – IHMN.”The man must have felt very happy; so now he had a real puzzle from a real Sufi. He must have really rejoiced. He must have pondered over it.It was just a koan, just as Zen masters give koans: “Go and ponder over the sound of one hand clapping,” or “Go and meditate on the original face that you had before your parents were born.” Now, what kind of face did you have before your parents were born? Not even you, but your parents, even they were not in existence. Then, what face did you have? That is your original face. Go and ponder over it. Absurd, you cannot figure it out… The whole point is to give you something absurd, to make you aware that your whole life you have been doing such absurd things and thinking that you were doing some great research or search, that you were a spiritual seeker.Now see the point. The Sufi says: “Go away and ponder this – IHMN.” And that man did not even ask what it was!That’s what he had been doing his whole life. It must have fallen in harmony with his mind. He must have been intrigued, tremendously thrilled: “Now this is a real puzzle and I will show this Sufi that I can find out the answer to it.”The man went away. When he came back, the Sufi was dead.Remember, if you come across a master, don’t miss the opportunity because the next time you come, the master may not be there. Life is fleeting.He missed a great occasion. He was face-to-face with a master who could have guided him into the innermost mysteries of life, but he became satisfied with a toy, a meaningless thing. He could have become a disciple. Instead of becoming a disciple he was perfectly satisfied with something utterly foolish, and he did not even ask what it was. That would have been against his intellectual ego; he would find out himself.There are people who come here, but they would not like to get involved in the experiment that is going on here. They remain outsiders, spectators, because they believe that they can work it out on their own. Why should they get involved? They should watch from the outside, find a few clues, and then escape. Those clues will all be rubbish, they will be like IHMN. A few people come here and they become very scared.Just a few days ago a famous Dutch actor, writer, a well-known person in Holland, came, and started being afraid. He had come with the idea of becoming a sannyasin, not exactly knowing what it meant. He must have thought that it was just a formality. Watching here, seeing sannyasins committed, devoted to a great inner search, he became more and more afraid. He had come with a friend; the friend is now a sannyasin.When his friend took sannyas he was there, and in that darshan, two, three times, he started weeping. When his friend was taking sannyas, tears were flowing from his eyes: a great turmoil – to be or not to be, to take the jump or not, a constant hesitation. His innermost core wanted to get involved, but his worldly-wise mind was afraid, thinking, “What will happen back home? Moving in orange in Holland? People will think that I have gone mad.” And he is well-known.That is the trouble when you become well-known. When you are famous you are more of a prisoner than you are a free man, because then you have to look at what people will think because your prestige is at stake. It is good to be a nobody, you can move into the search easily. When you are somebody, the fear arises. The fear is not spiritual, the fear is very worldly.For two lectures he was here, crying, weeping, and then he even became afraid to come to the lectures. Then yesterday he suddenly escaped from Pune, went to Nepal. That is just out of fear. He seems to be an intelligent person, but is using his intelligence in a wrong way.The day he was at darshan I could feel his heart. He has a heart, the heart is not dead yet. Just a little caring, just a little watering, a little better soil – that sannyas could have provided easily – a little meditation and he would have become a totally transformed person. He would have been on the wing. But he has missed. And I know he will have to come back.But then, who knows? I may be here, I may not be here. But he has missed this opportunity. And he is not a young man, he is getting old. Maybe I will be here; he may not be able to come back, he may not be here tomorrow. Life is very precarious. To come across a master and to miss the master is the greatest accident, very unfortunate, that can happen to a man.And remember, this has been happening to all of you – because many of you were there when Buddha was on the earth, and many of you were there when Jesus was crucified, and many of you were there when Lao Tzu was alive, and many of you must have come across many masters. Because you are not new ones, you have been here as long as existence has been here; you are ancient ones. But you have missed. And you can always find explanations for missing.Now, this man is to be really pitied. He was so close to the flame. A little more courage and he himself would have become aflame, but he missed. He went with a toy: IHMN. So foolish, but that’s how it happens.You go to a master and you want something without risking anything at all. Nothing can be attained without risk. You have to pay for everything. And when you want truth, you have to pay with your totality, with your whole being.The man went away. When he came back, the Sufi was dead.“Now I shall never know the truth,” moaned the puzzler.At that moment the Sufi’s chief disciple appeared.“If,” he said, ”you are worrying about the secret meaning of IHMN, I will tell you. It is the initials of the Persian phrase ‘In Huruf Maani Nadarad’ – which means, ‘These letters have no meaning.’”Sometimes – and it happens to almost all – you become puzzled by such stupid things that later on you will laugh at yourself. You will find it very ridiculous; why did you become so interested in such a thing?Just watch your own questions. How many of them are just useless? And why do you go on pondering over them? Why do you go on feeding them with your energy? Why do you go on carrying their load? Just watch for twenty-four hours, take note. You will be surprised: ninety-five percent of the load can be dropped right now, and you will feel such great freedom.But the problem is that the ego always wants problems. It exists through problems. If there is a problem to solve, the ego has some work to do. If there is no problem to solve, the ego has nothing to do, and when there is nothing to do the ego starts dying. The ego is a great doer.That’s why all real masters in the world have been telling you that meditation is nothing but a state of non-doing, a state of passivity. Sitting silently, doing nothing, and the spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. Meditation is not something which you have to do, it is something which you have to be. It is a state of non-doing, it is a state of utter receptivity. Only then does the ego die.That’s why the ego is not interested in meditation. It is perfectly interested in chanting a mantra, and that mantra will be nothing but IHMN. It is perfectly happy with just something to do; give it something to do and it is perfectly happy.And it creates mountains out of molehills. It makes small problems very big. It is a very great magnifying glass; ants start looking just like elephants. Then you have much work to do. Because if there is only an ant, what work is there? The ego is not much interested in the ant, it needs elephants. It makes mountains out of molehills.I have heard…Mrs. Smith’s husband was of a nervous disposition and somewhat inclined toward hypochondria. From time to time he would be taken with strange ailments which for some reason or another never developed into anything fatal.But one morning, just at breakfast time, it appeared that Mr. Smith’s time had come. He staggered out of his bedroom with ashen face and terror-stricken eyes. His body was bent forward in the shape of a parenthesis.“Ah, Carrie!” he wailed, “it has come just like expected. I am due to be an invalid the rest of my days.”“Henry!” shrieked Mrs. Smith. “What on earth has happened?”“It came on while I was dressing. All of a sudden I found that I could not lift my head. I could not straighten up. Now I feel that I am actually being drawn double.”“Are you in great pain?”“No, no pain at all, it is probably paralysis! Run for a doctor!”Mrs. Smith flew. In a few moments she was back with the family physician, and entering the room where her husband lay, she stood by, wringing her hands while the doctor made an examination. Suddenly the doctor’s shoulders began to quiver and heave.“Ah, doctor, is there any hope?”“Why yes, Mrs. Smith, there is,” said the doctor presently. “In fact, his condition should improve rapidly after he has unhitched the third buttonhole of his vest from the top button of his trousers.”All your problems are like that. Sometimes a very small problem is magnified by your ego – because the ego always likes big things. It lives on big things, it is not interested in small things.The chief disciple said, “Don’t be worried.”“If you are worrying about the secret meaning of IHMN, I will tell you.It is the initials of the Persian phrase ‘In Huruf Maani Nadarad’ – which means, ‘These letters have no meaning at all.’”“But why should I have been given such a task?” cried the puzzling man.”Because, when a donkey comes to you, you give him cabbages. That is his nutrition, no matter what he calls it. Donkeys probably think that they are doing something far more significant than eating cabbages.”The master had to give something stupid to this man because the man could not have understood anything better than that. You get only that which you deserve because nothing more can be absorbed by you.Remember it always: you have to be worthy to get something better. The master is always just. He is ready to give you as much as you can take, but he cannot give you more. You will not be able to understand it; in fact, you will misunderstand it. You may misuse it, you may harm yourself with it. Because anything that you cannot absorb, cannot digest, becomes poisonous to your system. The master has to be careful to give you only that which you can absorb. If you can eat only cabbages, then only cabbages will be given to you.The disciple is one who prepares himself, who prepares to receive more. He does not demand because demands cannot be fulfilled. You can demand anything which may not have any relevance to your being. The donkey can demand anything – which may not prove nutritious, which may not be nourishing, which may even be poisonous. But the master has to give only that which you need in a particular moment.If you need a shock he will give you a shock; if you need a good beating he will give you a good beating; if you need love he will give you love; if you don’t need love in a certain moment he will ignore you, he will completely forget about you, as if you don’t exist at all. But whatever is your need, the master fulfills it. He does not fulfill your demands, remember.And the person who fulfills your demands is not a master. He is dangerous. Beware of him because he does not know your real needs. He cannot be any help to your growth. It is a long journey, a perilous journey too, hazardous. The path is an uphill, mountainous track; there is every possibility – a slight mistake and you will fall into the ditch, or you will disappear into the valley. It is a narrow path. It is a razor’s edge.The master has to be very careful to give you only that which you are capable of absorbing. If you absorb it, more will be given to you. You will never be loaded. The master gives nourishment, not weight, because the weight will become a hindrance to your progress. He does not give you knowledge, he gives you only hints; then you have to work upon those hints. But you always receive that which you need, never less, never more.If you are blind the master will not talk about light; that would not be of any help to you. If you are deaf the master will not talk about music and will not play his flute; that would be useless. First your eyes have to be opened. And remember: nobody is blind. People are only blindfolded, so the blindfold can be removed.The real master will not talk about light but will try in every way to remove the blindfold. But the problem is that you may resist because you may think that your blindfold is a protection to your eyes. Your ears may be blocked but you may think that it is a safeguard, that it doesn’t allow unnecessary sounds to enter you. You may have the idea that sounds are dangerous, or light is dangerous.People are living with so many misguides, with miseducation, with so many false ideologies, but still they have many opinions. It is very rare to find a man who has no opinions.The master first has to take all misguidance, all miseducation, all opinions, away from you. Those are your blindfolds. Otherwise it is playing music to a deaf person or bringing light to a blind man. It is utterly futile, and no master ever engages in futile activity.A young lady sat next to a distinguished bishop at a church dinner. She was somewhat modest and diffident, and was rather awed by the bishop’s presence. For some time she hesitated to speak to him, waiting for what she considered a favorable opportunity. Finally, seeing some bananas passed, she turned to him and said,“I beg your pardon, but are you fond of bananas?”The bishop was slightly deaf, and leaning forward, asked, “What did you say?”“I said,” repeated the young lady, blushing, “are you fond of bananas?”The bishop thought a moment and then said, “If you want my honest opinion, I have always preferred the old-fashioned nightshirt.”If you are talking to a deaf person, remember not to use words like bananas; he may think you are talking about pajamas.You have to take every care – with whom you are talking, what you are saying, what it is going to become in him – because what you say is not the point, what will be heard is the point. What you give is not the point, what will be received is the point, and it is not necessary that whatever is given will be received. In the very exchange, things change. One thing is said, another thing is heard; one thing is given, another thing reaches.The master is very careful, he gives only that which can reach you. The first thing is to make a contact with you.This man missed from the very beginning. If he had been a little alert, the first thing, the first intelligent thing to inquire about would have been, “What is this IHMN?” He simply went away and started pondering over it. He relied too much on his own ego. He must have thought, “I have been working so many years thinking about puzzles, riddles, problems. I will solve this.” He was not even anxious to know what it exactly was.A great Sufi parable is…A king wanted to appoint a prime minister. Four great thinkers of the country were called. They were put into a room. They were told that the door was going to be locked and the lock was not an ordinary lock, it was a mathematical puzzle: “Unless you solve the puzzle you will not be able to open it. If you solve the puzzle you will be able to open the lock and come out.”The king went out, closed the door. Three persons out of the four started immediately working. They had brought papers and they had brought a few guidebooks, and they started working hard. There were a few numbers written on the lock; they looked at the numbers, they noted down the numbers. They started working out the problem, what the problem was.The fourth simply sat in the corner. The three others thought him to be mad: “What is he doing?” He was sitting there with closed eyes. After a few minutes he stood up, went to the door, pushed the door – and it opened! He went out.All those three were engaged, continuously engaged. They didn’t even see what had happened, that one man was already out.When the king came with the man, he said, “Now stop your activity. The examination is over. I have chosen my prime minister. This is the man.”They could not believe their eyes. They said, “What has happened? He was not doing anything, he was just sitting in the corner. How could he solve it?”The man said, “There was no problem. I simply sat there and the first thing, the basic thing, was to know whether the lock was locked or not. The moment I came to feel that, I simply meditated silently. I just gathered my consciousness together, I became completely quiet. From where to start? The first thing an intelligent person would ask was whether there was really a problem or not. If there was a problem it could be solved. If there was no problem how could it be solved? – and if one starts solving, one is going into an infinite regress; one will never be out of it. So I just went to check whether the door was really closed, and it was not closed.”The king said, “Yes, that was the trick: there was no lock. The door was not closed, it was left open. I was waiting for the man who would ask the first real question. You accepted the puzzle and you started solving it; that was where you missed. You could not have solved it even if you had worked for your whole life. This man knows how to be aware in a situation. He asked the right first question.”The seeker, the so-called seeker, missed. The right first question was to ask, “What is this IHMN?” and the whole story would have been totally different; but he went to solve it.Now, the disciple said, “There is no problem. It simply means: ‘These letters have no meaning…’ and you were searching for meaning.”In fact, no letters have meaning. Meaning is in life, not in words. Meaning is in living, not in scriptures. Meaning is in love, not in the word love. Meaning is in loving.Change the gestalt: that is the message of the story. Change your mind from words to life itself. Become more existential. Had he asked the right question, he would not have missed the master.Now he asked the disciple. “But why should I have been given such a task?” cried the puzzling man. “Because, when a donkey comes to you, you give him cabbages.”“You were a donkey and nothing more. You were a very scholarly, learned man, knowledgeable: you were a donkey.” That is the Sufi meaning of the word donkey: one who carries a great weight of knowledge. “The master knew you, he recognized you immediately, he respected your donkeyhood. He simply gave you cabbages. That’s how a donkey has to be received. This was just a cabbage.”That is his nutrition… “And you were happy, and you went away with great gratitude toward the master.”…no matter what he calls it. “You called it a great puzzle given by a great Sufi master, but it was simply cabbage. You meditated over it, but it was nonsense. One cannot meditate over it, there is nothing to meditate over.”That is the meaning of a Zen koan: there is nothing to meditate over in it. Sometimes it has happened that the master gave the koan, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” and the seeker simply slapped the master. And the master laughed. He said, “There is no need for you to meditate over it. You already know the answer!”This is the answer. When a master gives you a koan, go and meditate. What is the sound of one hand? This is the answer, but you cannot imitate it. If you just imitate it you will be caught. If it happens spontaneously – “What nonsense!” and the seeker simply slaps the master, and he says, “What are you trying to do with me, make a fool of me? Stop playing games with me! I have come here to really seek” – that is the beginning of right disciplehood. He is not hitting the master out of disrespect, not at all. He is simply saying to the master, “Don’t play games with me. Don’t befool me. I don’t need cabbages, I am not a donkey. These cabbages may have worked for other donkeys but they will not work for me. I need real nutrition.”“Donkeys probably think that they are doing something far more significant than eating cabbages.” That’s what the donkeys in the universities and the colleges and research centers and great academies think, that they are doing something great. They are simply eating cabbage, that is their nutrition. They are struggling, fighting about small matters: who was older, Buddha or Mahavira; whether Krishna ever existed or not; whether Jesus is a myth or a historical person. This is all nonsense.The real thing is one: when am I going to become authentic, true, original; when am I going to know myself; when will I be able to answer the question, “Who am I?”? That is the only religious question, all other questions are false. And if you have asked the one question, the basic question, the answer is hidden in the question itself.If you go on asking deep inside yourself, “Who am I?” and you don’t accept any false answer given by the mind, from the labels attached to you – that you are this or that, a Hindu, Mohammedan, communist, Catholic, man, woman, beautiful, ugly, old, young, body, mind – if you don’t accept any answer given by the mind and you go on asking and asking, and the question penetrates your heart like an arrow and goes deeper and deeper to the ultimate core, there, suddenly, is the explosion.Not that you will hear a voice saying who you are. There is nobody. But you have come to your source; you have tasted it, you have known it, you have experienced it. And with that one question solved, all questions disappear. That one experience is the experience of God. It liberates. It is truth.Truth is in your being, but you can find it only by becoming a quest, an intense, passionate longing to know yourself.Drop all other unnecessary questions. Only one question is relevant: Who am I?Enough for today.

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

The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-08/

The first question:Osho,I too, then, am a donkey. If you had given me IHMN to meditate over, I would have silently accepted it out of trust that you were giving me what I needed. Or is it a matter of trust? Can you please explain the right attitude of a disciple receiving instruction from the master?The moment you recognize that you are ignorant, you are no longer ignorant – because only intelligence can see the point of your own stupidity. The stupid person cannot see it; that’s why he is stupid. The most fundamental stupidity is that you cannot see it. When you start seeing your unintelligence, intelligence is arising in you. When you start recognizing your confusion, you are becoming clear. Otherwise who will recognize the confusion? You are becoming separate from the confusion.You say, “I too, then, am a donkey.” If you can really see it, then you are no longer. Then the first ray of intelligence has penetrated you. No donkey can accept it, the donkey will make much fuss about it. If you tell the donkey, “You are a donkey,” he will kick you! He will become your enemy. But if you can find a donkey who simply tries to understand the fact of his stupidity, that’s enough proof that the change has started happening.And secondly, you did not rightly understand the meaning of the story. The person who had come to the Sufi master was not a disciple. He was just curious. He had come accidentally. Just because he was going to all kinds of people – to all masters, learned people, schools – he had come to this master too. It was just part of his accidental life. He was not there to seek and to search. He was not there to be in the company of the master, he was not ready to dissolve into the master. He was not surrendered either.Listen to the story again:A man who had spent many years trying to puzzle out meanings went to see a Sufi and told him about his search.He must have bragged about his search. He had come to be recognized by the master: “Yes, you are a great seeker; you have already done so much.” He had come to be certified. He had not come as a seeker, he had not come to become part of the family of the master – because unless somebody becomes part of the family of the master, falls in tune with the master, nothing can be done for him. He was an outsider, just a visitor, was bragging about his search, which was utterly meaningless because he was simply trying to think about puzzles.That’s what philosophy is: it is nothing but trying to puzzle out meanings. It is like a blind man thinking about light.You must have heard the ancient Indian parable that five blind men went to see an elephant. They touched the elephant from all sides. Somebody touched his legs and thought that the elephant is like a pillar, obviously, and so on, so forth, and they all started quarreling. Everybody was proposing a philosophy about the elephant and nobody had seen the elephant. They were all blind, but a part of the elephant had been touched by each. But the part is not the whole, and if you start calling the part the whole, you are falling into one of the greatest lies possible. It is the greatest lie because it contains a little portion of truth in it. It is a half-truth, a partial truth, and a partial truth is more dangerous than a total lie because it can deceive people. You can be deceived through it, and you can deceive others because it contains a little ingredient of truth.They all started fighting and quarreling. That’s what philosophers have been doing: this is a story about philosophers.Each philosopher has touched a part – because the totality is not conceivable through the intellect. The totality is conceivable only when you dissolve your ego, your intellect, your heart, everything into it, when you disappear into the ocean like a dewdrop falling into the ocean. Then you know the whole of it, then you see, then you experience. Otherwise, everybody comes to touch a small portion of this infinite universe and then he starts claiming, “This is the truth.” That’s how systems of philosophy arise.The man must have been a philosopher. He was trying out, figuring out what this reality is, who has created it, why he has created it, what is the purpose of existence, what is the goal, what is the source. And those are all puzzles, and insoluble puzzles: they cannot be solved. Only stupid people become interested in them, but these stupid people think they are religious. Seeing the man’s utter stupidity, the master gave him another puzzle – because that’s what he was interested in.I will not give you IHMN unless I see that a donkey has arrived. Donkeys keep far away from me, they know that they will be exposed here. They never come close to me. It needs courage to come close to me because the closer you come, the more you will be exposed. The closer you come, the more naked you will be standing under the sun. The closer you come, the more your image about yourself will be shattered into pieces. The closer you come, the more you will see that whatever you have been doing up to now has been utterly absurd.It needs guts to come close to me. It always needs guts to come close to a master.The man had come just out of curiosity: maybe he could get another puzzle. His interest was not truth, his interest was puzzles. He wanted a puzzle so he could take the challenge and start working out a way to solve it. He was not interested in truth.Truth is not a puzzle at all. Let me repeat it: truth is not a puzzle. Truth is not a problem, not at all. Truth is very simple, utterly simple. And truth is not a problem, but a mystery – just as love is a mystery, not a problem. You cannot solve it through logic, mathematics. You can move into love, you can be madly in love, you can have the taste of it, it can transform you. It is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.Truth is this mystery that surrounds you, in the form of people, in the form of trees, animals, birds, stars. This whole mystery is the truth. There is nothing problematic about it. It is already here. You are in it, how can you solve it? You are it, who is there to solve it? There is nobody except the mystery. How can a small ripple in the ocean solve the mystery of the ocean? It itself is part of the mystery. So are you.The religious person is one who has seen the fact that existence is not problematic; it is mysterious, it is miraculous. Dive deep into it. Celebrate it. Make a festival out of it. Sing, dance, love, pray, paint, create music – but don’t try to solve it.The musician is much closer than the philosopher; so is the poet much closer than the philosopher; so is the dancer even closer than the musician and the poet. Why is the dancer so much closer? Because in the dance you dissolve; the dancer disappears and only the dance remains. Dance is one of the deepest meditations possible.In India we have conceived of God as a dancer, Nataraj. That is very significant – because when a painter paints, immediately he becomes separate from the painting. If the painting remains in his being, he is one with it. When it is yet hidden, just a seed, just a thought, a dream, the painter is one with his painting. The moment he has painted it, poured it on the canvas, he has become separate from it. Duality has arisen. So is the case with the poet, so is the case with the musician.Only the dancer has something unique: the dancer remains one with the dance. Even when he starts dancing, the unity is not broken, there is no duality: utter oneness. In fact, when the dancer is thinking about the dance there is a duality – the idea of the dance and the dancer – there is a subtle duality. The moment he starts dancing even that duality disappears. Then the dancer is the dance. There is no dancer separate from the dance, no dance separate from the dancer. This is unio mystica.God is a dancer. That means he has not painted the world, otherwise he would have become separate from it. It is not his poetry, it is not his music. It is his dance. He is in it, he is it, right this very moment: these green trees, and the sun pouring its gold through them, and the call of the bird, and you here sitting in silence, just being with me for no particular reason, just enjoying this moment, this silence. This is it.The man who had come to the Sufi master was very knowledgeable, a thinker; he was not a disciple. Had he been a disciple, the master would have never given him IHMN – because it is utter nonsense. He gave this to the man just to see how he would react, and the man was very happy, grateful, that now he had a great Sufi puzzle; he would go and meditate. It was his ego that was satisfied. He was gratified. It was not out of trust that he didn’t ask a question, it was because of the ego that he didn’t ask a question. How could such a great philosopher ask a question? He would work it out himself, he would go home and ponder over it.You say to me, “If you had given me IHMN to meditate over, I would have silently accepted it out of trust…” He had not accepted it out of trust. If he had known even a little bit of trust, if the master had seen even a little trust in his being, this puzzle would not have been given to him. There was no trust. The man must have been a doubter because thinkers live through doubt. They live in doubt, doubt is their very medium of functioning.A student comes to the master with all kinds of doubts. That is the difference between a student and a disciple. When the disciple comes, he comes in complete trust.The Sufi said, “Go away and ponder this – IHMN.”The man went away.Not because he trusted, not because he was a devotee, not because he was in a love relationship with the master, but just because he said, “Okay, so I will bring the answer. Just give me a little chance. I have all the capacities and the intelligence and the talent, and I have worked out many puzzles before. Soon I will be here with the answer.”When he came back, the Sufi was dead.“Now I shall never know the truth!” moaned the puzzler.But he could not get anything out of those four puzzling letters, IHMN – because there was nothing to get out of them.At that moment the Sufi’s chief disciple appeared.“If,” he said, “you are worrying about the secret meaning of IHMN, I will tell you. It is the initials of the Persian phrase ‘In Huruf Maani Nadarad’ – which means, ‘These letters have no meaning.’”“But why should I have been given such a task?” cried the puzzling man.“Because, when a donkey comes to you, you give him cabbages. That is his nutrition, no matter what he calls it. Donkeys probably think that they are doing something far more significant than eating cabbages.”The master had given such an absurd thing to meditate over because the man wanted a challenge to his ego. He was not interested in truth. He was interested in a great puzzle so he could fight with the puzzle, find out a solution to the puzzle, and feel good – “I have got the intelligence, I have got such power, I am no ordinary man; I am a great philosopher” – although he was only a donkey, and only cabbages were given to him.You say, “If you had given me IHMN to meditate over, I would have silently accepted it out of trust…” First, I would not give such a thing to any of my disciples. But sometimes I give a few puzzles to people because they are not disciples, even if they think they are. If they are not disciples, or only pretending to be disciples, I give them a few puzzles. If they can accept those puzzles out of trust, that very phenomenon immediately makes them disciples.There is a subtle point to be understood. If the master had seen that the man had accepted out of trust, if the man had bowed down and touched the feet of the master… If the master had seen in some way that he had accepted out of trust he would have said, “Wait, let me change it. You don’t need a cabbage, you are not a donkey.”Trust is the greatest intelligence. Why don’t people trust? – because they don’t trust their intelligence. They are afraid, they are afraid they may be cheated. They are afraid, that’s why they doubt. Doubt is out of fear. Doubt is out of a kind of insecurity in your own intelligence. You are not confident that you can trust and you can go into trust. Trust needs great intelligence, courage, integrity. It needs a great heart to go into it. If you don’t have enough intelligence, you protect yourself through doubt. It is doubt that shows you have a very mediocre mind, although mediocre minds, people who doubt too much, think they have great skeptical minds.It doesn’t matter what donkeys think: cabbages are cabbages. It is their nutrition, although they think they are doing something great, something very significant. Maybe they are waiting for the whole existence to be grateful to them because they are transforming cabbages into great energy! The man who doubts thinks he has great intelligence. That’s why he doubts, that’s why he is skeptical, that’s why he is atheistic and all that. That is not true.If you have intelligence you are ready to go into the unknown because you know that even if the whole known world disappears and you are left in the unknown, you will be able to settle there, you will be able to make a home there in the unknown. You trust your intelligence. Doubt is on guard. Intelligence keeps itself open because intelligence knows, “Whatever happens, I will be able to take the challenge, to respond adequately.” The mediocre mind does not have that trust in itself.What I am saying is, you can trust a master only if you trust yourself. If you can’t trust yourself, how can you trust a master? If you can’t trust yourself, how can you trust your trust in a master? It is impossible.If the Sufi had seen even just a little ray of trust in the man, he would have immediately taken the puzzle back. He himself would have said, “This means nothing. You don’t need a cabbage, you are not a donkey. You are not merely a knowledgeable man, you are a real seeker. Now, rather than giving you a puzzle, I will give you a taste of the mystery that I am, and the whole existence is, and you are too – but you are fast asleep. Let me awaken you.” Then the whole thing would have been different.I cannot give it to you because you have trust. Have you watched one thing? It is very difficult to deceive a small child. Even very cunning people find it very difficult. If a small child is carrying a note of a hundred rupees, nobody will be able to cheat the child. It will be very difficult to cheat the child. Why? – because of the trust, the innocence, the very innocence. And if you take the note from the child you will never be able to forgive yourself. That memory will haunt you forever and ever, it will create hell for you.Have you watched some strange things like this? You are sitting on a railway platform and you tell a stranger who is sitting by your side, “Please, just take a little care of my luggage; I am going to purchase a ticket.” You don’t know the man, he is an absolute stranger, you have never seen him before. You are leaving your suitcases, all your money, all your things in the hands of an unknown stranger. Who knows, he may escape with the whole thing, but it never happens. Why does it never happen? – because of trust. How can that man deceive you? You trusted him, an unknown stranger. There was no need to trust him. You didn’t have any proof of his honesty, of his character, you knew nothing about him – but it never happens.If you are watching your luggage, he may steal something – that is possible – but if you leave your luggage to him and go to purchase a ticket, it is impossible. What makes it impossible? Trust has its own power. Trust has its own energy, its own vibe. The very gesture that you trusted him makes it impossible, he cannot deceive you.That means, when people deceive you, it is not only their fault. You are also at fault. You must be carrying mistrust in you – they got the vibe. If trust prevents them from deceiving you, then your mistrust about people must be creating an atmosphere in which deceiving becomes easier for them.I would not have given it to you. I have seen the light of trust in your eyes. And even if I had given it to you, out of trust it would have changed its total quality. Then it would not have been just a puzzle, it would have become a koan. If you had accepted not out of the ego but out of trust, it would have become a great meditation. And if you had accepted out of trust and love, just repeating this sound, meaningless sound, would have led you into some deeper realms of your being.It is said…An ancient Indian story: there was a dacoit, a robber. He was looting all kinds of people. One day he came across the mystic Narada. Narada was singing on his one-stringed guitar, utterly lost in ecstasy, passing through a jungle, and the robber caught hold of him. Narada continued playing on his one-stringed guitar.The robber’s name was Vallya. Later on he became a great seer, Valmiki. He was the first man to write the story of Rama.Vallya could not believe his eyes – because he had seen two types of people up to then, up to that moment. One was the type who would start trembling, seeing this strong man. He was a very strong man, and very dangerous and murderous. Just seeing him there, the other would start trembling and collapse, would give all that he had, voluntarily, to him. He had seen that kind: the coward, the fearful. The other kind was the brave, who would start fighting back. Either the person would start running, or the person would start fighting. Fight or flight – those had been his two experiences with people up to then.But Narada did nothing. He was a third type. For the first time Vallya had come across the third type. He continued playing on his musical instrument with the same joy and the same ecstasy. Even Vallya started feeling the joy, the vibe. Narada was dancing and Vallya also started dancing. And Vallya said, “This is strange. What are you doing to me? I am a robber and a murderer. I can kill you. You should not trust me.”But there was nobody to listen to him. The song continued, the music continued, that celestial vibe continued. Then, when Narada was finished with his music he asked Vallya, “What do you want?”By that time a great change had happened. Vallya said, “I would like to be as ecstatic as you are. Can you help me? I don’t want anything else. You are the first man who is really rich. I have come across only beggars up to now – rich beggars, poor beggars, but all beggars. You are the first man who is really rich, and you have such a richness that I cannot steal it. It is your inner richness. Can I also have glimpses like this? Is it possible for a murderer like me, a robber like me, a sinner like me? What should I do?”Narada said, “Do one thing: start chanting the name of Rama.”Then Narada went, and Vallya really got into it. He was a man of will, very strong. He chanted day in, day out.When you chant “Rama, Rama, Rama, Rama” continuously, when there is not much gap between “Rama” and “Rama,” slowly, slowly you will start hearing “Mara, Mara, Mara.” If you chant “Rama, Rama, Rama” continuously, the gestalt will change. The m of the Ram will become joined with the ra of another Ram that is following. Then it becomes “Mara, Mara.” Ram means God, Ram means the immortal element, the eternal element; mara means death.Vallya was a very uneducated man, had never been in any kind of religious education. He forgot all about Ram. Slowly, slowly he chanted only “Mara, Mara, Mara.”Months passed. Narada came back; he was surprised. Vallya was chanting “Mara, Mara, Mara” – his whole body was chanting “Mara, Mara, Mara.” Narada could feel the change that had happened to that jungle from miles away. It had a different atmosphere. When he came closer and heard “Mara, Mara,” he was surprised because the man has been chanting in a completely wrong way.He came closer and saw Vallya. The man was totally transformed. He was luminous; the ecstasy had happened. It happened even by chanting the wrong mantra. Narada kept quiet; he didn’t say anything to him. There was no need, no point in disturbing the poor man. He had arrived.There is a Sufi saying that even a wrong means becomes right in the right person’s hand – and vice versa, even a right means becomes wrong in a wrong man’s hand. And it is so. The ultimate result depends on your heart, not on the means used. When a master is alive, he can use any means, and they all become transforming forces. When the master is gone, all those means slowly, slowly lose their grace. Then people go on doing them for centuries, but nothing happens. Right means in wrong hands are wrong; wrong means in right hands are right.If you had trusted, then even this meaningless sound, IHMN, would have become a great meditation to you.And the last thing. You ask, “Can you please explain the right attitude of a disciple receiving instruction from the master?” Only no attitude is the right attitude from the side of the disciple. If you have a certain attitude, that means you are not totally open. You are open only in a certain way, in a limited way. You have your certain conditions. No, the disciple has no conditions, the disciple’s surrender is unconditional. He is just open – no attitude. Because attitude means your mind is still functioning. You are carrying a certain attitude. You are saying, “If you say this, I will follow. If you say something else, I am not going to follow. I will go only up to that limit; beyond that I am not coming with you.”You are keeping a suspicious eye. You are judging the master from the corner of your eye, whether he is giving you the right thing – as if you know what is right. Whether he is the right master – as if you can judge who is the right master and who is not. How can you judge? You have never known light. How can you judge the eyes which have seen light?The only approach, right approach, toward a master is to have no attitude. That’s the meaning of surrender: just being open, vulnerable. The disciple has to disappear, only then is he a disciple. If the disciple is still there, then he is only a student, not a disciple; then he has come to gather a few more bits of knowledge.Then he will accumulate a little more knowledge and will go home – a few more feathers for his ego, a few more decorations. But he is decorating his prison cell. He can decorate it with precious stones, with diamonds, but then too it is a prison cell.The master is there to help you to come out of your prison, come out of your ego, come out of the shell that you have become enclosed in. You can’t have any attitude toward the master. Love knows no attitude, love knows no conditions. Love is unconditional. Only then is the master allowed in, with no strings attached. Only then can the master pour into your being. And that very pouring is a transformation.The second question:Osho,Is it not possible at all that the great religious scriptures of the world can help the seeker in his search for God?The real seeker cannot search for God because to start a search for God means he has already accepted that God is. He has already concluded. How can one start a search from a conclusion? He is already prejudiced. He is a believer, not a seeker. The seeker cannot search for God because he does not know. He can only search into existence, not for God. He can inquire into the reality that surrounds him, not for God.Yes, when you go deep into reality you will find God. God cannot be the beginning of your search; it is the end, the climax, the culmination. God is the discovery. How can you begin with God?Once a psychologist and a professor of Jaipur University came to see me. He said, “I am a man of science and I have decided to prove through scientific methods and inquiry, the reality, the truth of reincarnation.”I asked him, “Do you know what scientific inquiry means? Scientific inquiry means that you have not decided anything at all in the beginning. The inquiry is open. You say, ‘I am a man of science.’ You are not. And you say, ‘I have decided to prove through scientific methods the existence, the reality, the truth of reincarnation.’ If you have not already proved it, how can you accept it? And if you have proved it already, then what are you going to prove, what is the point of your inquiry? Either you know the truth of reincarnation, then there is no need to inquire; or you don’t know the truth of reincarnation, then how can you decide from the very beginning that you are going to prove it? This is a prejudiced inquiry, this is not inquiry.”Inquiry means you move without any conclusion. Maybe it is true, maybe it is not; maybe something else is true. You simply keep your doors open. Whatever the truth, you allow the truth to have its say.I told the professor, “You are just a Hindu, already prejudiced, believing in reincarnation. Just as Christians don’t believe in it, you believe in it. A Christian also starts a “scientific inquiry” to prove that there is no reincarnation. Will it be scientific? It will only be a Christian inquiry, an effort to use science to prove your prejudices. Your inquiry will be a Hindu inquiry, not a scientific inquiry.”A scientist cannot be a Hindu or a Christian or a Mohammedan; a scientist has simply to be a scientist. He can only inquire. Inquiry means you have not arrived at any conclusions, no a priori conclusion. That is the fundamental of all inquiry.You cannot inquire and search for God. You can only inquire into the reality that is already available: these trees, these rocks, these rivers, these people – you. You have to go into it. No scripture is going to help you because all scriptures will make you prejudiced, and all scriptures will only be borrowed. You will become a donkey.I have heard…The new clergyman was coming to call, and the mother gave Emma some instructions: “If he asks your name, say Emma Jane. If he asks how old you are, say you are eight years old. If he asks who made you, say ‘God made me.’”The clergyman arrived in due time, and putting down his hat and Bible, approached little Emma, and patting her head, asked: “What is your name, little girl?”“Emma Jane.”“And how old are you, Emma Jane?”“Eight years old,” replied Jane.“Well, well, well! Isn’t that fine! Do you know who made you, Emma Jane?”The little girl hesitated for several moments and then she replied, “Mamma did tell me the man’s name, but I’ve gone and forgotten it.”Borrowed, learned from others, from scriptures, from traditions, your knowledge is never going to become your knowing. It will make you only more and more ridiculous. This is not the way of a seeker.The seeker has to begin in absolute openness, with no conclusion this way or that. The seeker has to begin without any belief or disbelief. The seeker has to begin with great trust in his intelligence, that is true – trust in intelligence but not in any conceptions.Your scriptures can only be in your mouth, they cannot reach your heart.Some wasps built their nests during the week in a Scottish clergyman’s best breeches. On the Sabbath, as he warmed up to his preaching, the wasps too warmed up, with the result that presently the minister was leaping about like a jack-in-the-box and slapping his lower anatomy with great vigor, to the amazement of the congregation.“Be calm, brethren,” he shouted. “The word of God is in my mouth, but the Devil is in my breeches!”Just learning words, theories, systems of thought is not going to help you at all. Deep down you will remain the same. Deep down no change has ever happened through knowledge. At the most you can cultivate a beautiful personality, a beautiful outside. Jesus has condemned such people as “whited sepulchers” – just whitewashed from the outside.Deep inside, how can words change you? Yes, you can cultivate decorum, you can cultivate a certain character, but the character remains superficial. It is never your consciousness. And only consciousness matters, only what you can see on your own is decisive. All else will make you a donkey, and all the scriptures will prove nothing but cabbages.You ask, “Is it not possible at all that the great religious scriptures of the world can help the seeker in his search for God?” Buddha has said again and again: “Ihi passiko” – come and see.” Don’t believe because the Vedas say so, don’t believe because the ancient masters say so, don’t believe because the traditions say so – and don’t believe even because I say so. Come and see – ihi passiko. Come and experiment. But how can you experiment with scriptures? You can experiment only with a living master.Religion lives only while there is a living master. Once the master is gone, you have scriptures, words, memories, nostalgia, but the spirit has left. You only have the cage, the bird has flown.That’s how all the traditions have been created. When Jesus was there, there was life in what he was saying. Those words had fire. His passion was in his words, his heart was beating in his words. Those words were hot. Now turn the pages of the Bible; those words are just ashes, just utterly cold. There is nothing left. You will have to again find a living master.And the problem is, when Jesus is alive nobody listens to him. He is condemned from every corner. When he dies everybody worships him. The same people who had been condemning him become his worshippers. They start feeling guilty. To put their guilt right they start worshipping; worship comes out of guilt.The same people who condemned Buddha become Buddhists and go on praising him for centuries. But when Buddha is alive he is condemned; only very rare courageous people follow him. The general masses are always against a living truth. They are too engrossed in their lies, they are too involved with their futile life, they are too ignorant to see the light or even to raise their eyes, and they become angry easily.The presence of a Buddha or a Christ creates much anger in the masses. But when the Buddha or the Jesus is gone, the same masses start feeling guilty that they didn’t behave rightly with the man. Now things have to be put right: they start worshipping. But worship is not religion. Worship is a way of avoiding religion, and worship brings no transformation, so there is no risk. You can be a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; there is no risk.The risk was there when Mohammed was alive. It was dangerous to be with that man, it was a question of life and death; but now to be a Mohammedan is perfectly convenient, comfortable. And if you live amid Mohammedans it is dangerous not to be a Mohammedan. It is better to be a Mohammedan, it makes your life easier. To be a Mohammedan becomes a kind of lubricant. And so is the case with the Hindus and the Christians and the Jainas and the Buddhists. These have become social conveniences.You will have to come out and search for a place where the fire is still alive, where God is still alive, where a Bible is still in the process of being born, where a Gita is being expressed. Soon those words will become scriptures.Scriptures are the footprints of the buddhas – but the buddhas are gone and you are worshipping the footprints on the sands of time. It is utterly meaningless, stupid. Those footprints are not the feet of Buddha. If you had surrendered to the feet of Buddha, you would have been transported into another world. From time to eternity you would have been transported, from the finite to infinity you would have been transported, from death to deathlessness you would have been transported if you had surrendered to the alive feet of Buddha.But Buddha is gone. On the sands of time his footprints are left. You are putting flowers and bowing down to the footprints, but footprints cannot help.That’s what your scriptures are all about, footprints of beautiful people, but the worship of the footprints is just meaningless. You cannot get anything out of the footprints.If you really want to know the truth of existence, you will have to be in the company of someone who has known. Seek a man who has eyes, seek a man who has love, seek a man in whose heart there is the flame of prayer. Then there is a possibility the flame may jump into your heart. You may become aflame.Come closer to a master. There comes a moment when you are so close, in deep intimacy, that the flame from one lit candle jumps into another unlit candle. Then the disciple becomes the master himself. That’s the only way to seek and search, all other ways are just to avoid, to pretend.The third question:Osho,I would very much like to take sannyas but it will be totally ruinous for my career as orange clothes will not be accepted at my place of work. Is there any alternative to this?Remember only one thing: if you really want to do something, do it. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it, but be clear. Don’t be a hotchpotch, don’t be a mess.When you really want to be a painter, become a painter, whatever the risk. Yes, you will not be able to become a prime minister by becoming a painter. You will not be very respectable in the society because your paintings are not useful to the society in any way. They are not utilitarian. And the greater they are, the less utilitarian they will be. The more original they are, the less they will be understood and sold. But if you want to be a painter, be a painter – even if that means to remain poor, even if that means to remain starved, even if that means you will be dying earlier.Suffer if it means suffering – because even in that suffering you will have a subtle joy that you are doing the thing you wanted to do. You will have a tremendous contentment. Comforts you may not have, convenience you may not have, but contentment you will have, and that is the real value.But if you think of other things, if you are considering every other thing, it is better to be a politician than to be a painter. You will become rich, you will be powerful, you will be well-known, you will be respected. Your family will be proud of you; your parents will be proud of you; your wife, your children, all will be proud of you. Everybody’s ego will be fulfilled. Your neighbors will be proud. Everybody will think that you are a precious gem, but you will be discontented.I have heard…A great surgeon was retiring. He had served almost fifty years. He was now seventy-five, still perfect in his surgery. All his friends, his patients, his well-wishers, his students had gathered to celebrate the occasion. Many speeches were delivered in praise of him, he was praised like anything. He was almost a demigod in his world, in the world of surgeons.But he was sitting there looking very sad, and when finally one of his famous colleagues was praising him – saying that he was the greatest surgeon that happened down the ages, and it would take many centuries again to get such a perfect hand, such an artistic hand – the old surgeon started crying. Tears came to his eyes.People were worried about what had happened. They asked, “Why do you look so sad and why are tears in your eyes? You should be perfectly happy. What more can one expect in life? You are one of the most successful men.”He said, “That I know, but I know something else too. I am the most frustrated too because I wanted to become a dancer and not a surgeon. Now I have succeeded in something which I never wanted to become. My whole life has been a waste. Even if I had become only a dancer unknown to the world, I would have been utterly contented. I would have done my thing.”Remember, if you want to become a sannyasin, become one. There will be problems, there are bound to be problems. It is not cheap. You will have to pay the price for it. Yes, you are right, it may ruin your career, but who bothers about a career except stupid people? A career? What does that mean? That you will live safe and you will die safe? That you will live with much money and you will die a rich man? But what about your inner contentment? If your soul remains crippled and paralyzed, what is the point of gaining the whole world?The real thing is to have the joy, the joy of life, that you lived courageously in your own way, and whatever was asked as a price, you paid it. Whenever you attain something through paying for it, it is more valuable. If you can get it cheap, it loses all value.Sannyas is costly, particularly my sannyas. If you become a traditional sannyasin, there will be no problem.Just a few days ago a Jaina woman came and started crying. I asked, “What is the matter?”She said, “My husband has become your sannyasin. If he really wanted to become a sannyasin he should have become a Jaina sannyasin. Then at least he would be respectable. Becoming your sannyasin is dangerous. Now people have started thinking that he has gone crazy. Even his own children are suspicious. I myself think that something has gone wrong with him.”Now, she is ready if he becomes a Jaina sannyasin, although by becoming a Jaina sannyasin he would have to leave the house, the family.The wife is ready. She told me, “I am ready. If he has to leave the home and the children and me, we will manage. It will be difficult, but we will manage. By becoming your sannyasin he is not leaving the house: that is the problem. Now the neighbors are asking, ‘What kind of sannyasin is he? Still living with the family, still living with the wife and the children, still going to work? What kind of sannyasin is he?’“I am being tortured,” she said, “continuously ridiculed. I am ready if he leaves the home. It’s okay, we would manage. It would be difficult, it would be financially difficult, but we would manage. We would be poor, but that’s okay. At least we could keep our heads high, proud.”You see, if you become a traditional sannyasin your parents may not be so angry. In fact they may enjoy it. People will say, “Look, your son has become a great sannyasin. You are fortunate; the tree is known by the fruit. Look, your son… Such a great sannyasin. He has renounced the world.” And your father will feel proud, your mother will feel proud. Even your wife – who will be suffering very much because you have left her – will feel proud that she is the wife of somebody who has renounced the world, a traditional value. And everybody will be thinking highly of you and your family.If you become my sannyasin you are crazy, you are mad: “You have fallen in this man’s trap, and he is just hypnotizing people and doing nothing. You are a victim.” Everybody will advise you, “Why don’t you go to the psychiatrist and take some help? Why don’t you go to the mountains and rest a little?”Yes, Ghurye, you are right, it may ruin your career. It is dangerous. In the days of Mahavira it was dangerous to become a Jaina sannyasin. Just wait two thousand years, then my sannyasins will be respected. It will help their career. By that time everything will be dead; whatever I am saying will have lost all fire, all rebellion, things will have become formal. Ghurye, you will have to wait at least two thousand years. Then you can become my sannyasin without ruining your career, and your wife will be happy, and your children and your parents, and everybody will be happy – but you will have to wait for two thousand years.If you want to become a sannyasin right now, there are going to be problems. But a real man is born out of facing problems and challenges.Never decide for a career. Think of consciousness because that is the only richness. And think of the inner journey. Always be authentic to yourself. For no other consideration should you compromise. A compromising person has no soul. The more you compromise, the less soul you have. By and by you are just nothing, just apparently alive, but deep down, dead. Beware of that.Ghurye has been asking many questions. I had not answered him yet. This is the first question I am answering. And I am answering this question to provoke a respect for his own soul in him. Nothing else is more important. If you cannot respect your own longing, you are disrespectful to God. If you cannot assert yourself in the way you want to be, you are a coward, you are compromising. Then you will never be centered, you will never have an integrated being, you will never find yourself crystallized. You will always remain a hazy, cloudy thing.The soul is born through such sacrifices. I am not saying that there will be no problem. There will be problems – many more than you can think of right now, many more than you can even imagine. Friends will turn into enemies, your own family will start looking at you as if you have fallen from grace, and certainly, wherever you work, your colleagues will start putting you out of their circle, as if you have become an outsider, a foreigner.But all these problems are worth facing. These are the steps of the temple of God. This is real sacrifice, austerity. And slowly, slowly when one passes through such fire, the gold that you are carrying within you becomes pure – and only through the purity of your inner gold, one day, the golden flower blooms.I am all for individual freedom, and freedom is the door to God. What do I mean by freedom? To live fearlessly is freedom, to drop fear is freedom. Fear creates our chains.Now you are afraid of your job, career, family, neighborhood. These are all chains made of your fear. Drop these chains. Live in freedom. Live authentically the life you really want to live. Don’t try to be somebody else, just be yourself.A great Hasidic mystic, Josiah, was dying and somebody asked him, “Master, why don’t you pray now to Moses because you are now on your deathbed? Pray to Moses. He will help you in the other world.”Josiah opened his eyes and said, “Stop all this nonsense! God is not going to ask me, ‘Josiah, why were you not Moses?’ He will ask me, ‘Josiah, why were you not Josiah?’ Moses has nothing to do with this. I will have to answer for myself, why I was not myself, why I betrayed my innermost being. That’s the question!”Freedom means don’t betray yourself, whatever the cost. Remain true to yourself, and you will be true to God.A parable…In the land of the moths, there is the legend of the Old One. It says that one night, when a very young moth was flying about with his friends, he happened to look up and saw a wondrous white light hanging between the branches of a tree. It was in fact the moon, but as all moths are so preoccupied with candles, street lamps, and other lights that they are constantly circling, our hero and his friends had never seen it before.With this sight came a sudden and firm resolution: our moth would never again settle for flying around anything else but the moon. And so every night, when the moths would venture out from their resting places and each head for a suitable light, our moth headed upward toward the heavens.But the moon, although it always seemed so near, remained always beyond his finite capacity for flight. He never, however, allowed his frustrations to overcome him, and in fact his efforts, though unsuccessful in making him into a lunar astronaut, yielded him an unexpected dividend.For while his friends and family, his neighbors and co-citizens of moth land all reviled and ridiculed him, they all preceded him to the grave in the fiery incinerating death of their kind, burned to a crisp in one of those accessible flames they had set as their goal.The Old One died peacefully at a very ripe age, beneath the cool white shine of his beloved.Sannyas means you have become interested in the moon. Sannyas means you have become interested in attaining the impossible. Sannyas means now you are entering a journey for the unknown shore. It is dangerous, but through this danger one is reborn. Through this impossible longing – passion for the impossible – something integrates in you.Other moths are bound to be angry with you. They will ridicule you because you are insulting them. They feel the insult because they are only living around candles and street lights, and they think that is the only goal worth achieving in life – to go round and round around a candle and then die.The people who are living for money and power and prestige are going round and round around street lamps. They will naturally be offended by you when you raise your heads toward the moon. They will ridicule you, they will call you mad. They will say, “Nobody has ever attained it. Don’t be foolish. Be normal. Come, how beautiful is this candle and this street light!”Sannyas means love for the moon. That very love transforms. It is not a question of whether you reach the moon or not. That very love transmutes, that very love becomes the alchemy. You are no longer part of the ordinary world, you start living in an extraordinary world. Poetry is born in you, the music of the unknown is heard, a dance starts happening. That’s what God is all about. Sannyas is an invitation for God to become a guest in your being. Sannyas is readiness to be a host for God.The last question:Osho,Why is the West becoming more and more interested in meditation? And also, why is the East losing interest in its own spiritual treasures?A lawyer made his way to the edge of the excavation where a gang was working, and called the name of Timothy O’Toole.“Who is wanting me?” inquired a heavy voice.“Mr. O’Toole,” the lawyer asked, “did you come from Castlebar, County Mayo?”“I did that.”“And your mother was named Bridget and your father Michael?”“They was.”“It is my duty then,” said the lawyer, “to inform you, Mr. O’Toole, that your Aunt Mary has died in Iowa, leaving you an estate of 60,000 dollars.”There was a short silence below and then a lively commotion.“Are you coming, Mr. O’Toole?” the lawyer called down.“In one minute,” was bellowed in answer. “I have just stopped to lick the foreman.”It required just six months of extremely riotous living for O’Toole to expend all of the 60,000 dollars. His chief endeavor was to satisfy a huge inherited thirst. Then he went back to his job. And there, presently the lawyer sought him out again.“It is your Uncle Patrick this time, Mr. O’Toole,” the lawyer explained. “He has died in Texas and left you 40,000 dollars.”O’Toole leaned heavily on his pick and shook his head in great weariness. “I don’t think I can take it,” he declared. “I am not as strong as I once was, and I misdoubt me that I could go through all that money and live.”That’s what has happened in the West. Man in the West has succeeded in attaining all the affluence that the whole of humanity has been longing for down the ages. The West has succeeded materially in becoming rich and now it is too weary, too tired. The journey has taken all its soul. The journey has finished the Western man. Outwardly all is available, but the contact with the inner is lost. Now everything that man needs is there, but the man is no longer there. Possessions are there, but the master has disappeared. A great imbalance has happened. Richness is there, but man is not feeling rich at all. He is feeling, on the contrary, very impoverished, very poor.Think of this paradox: when you are outwardly rich, only then do you become aware of your inner poverty, in contrast. When you are outwardly poor, you never become aware of your inner poverty because there is no contrast. You write with white chalk on blackboards, not on white boards. Why? – because only on blackboards will it show. The contrast is needed.When you are outwardly rich, suddenly a great awareness happens: “Inwardly I am poor, a beggar.” And now a hopelessness also comes as a shadow: “All is attained that we had thought – all imagination and fantasies fulfilled – and nothing has happened out of it, no contentment, no bliss.” The West is bewildered. Out of this bewilderment a great desire is arising: how to have contact with one’s self again.Meditation is nothing but again putting your roots into your inner world, into your interiority. Hence the West is becoming very interested in meditation and very interested in the Eastern treasures.The East was also interested in meditation when the East was rich; this has to be understood. That’s why I am not against richness and I don’t think that poverty has any spirituality in it. I am utterly against poverty because whenever a country becomes poor, it loses contact with all meditation, all spiritual efforts. Whenever a country becomes poor outwardly, it becomes unaware of the inner poverty.That’s why you can see a kind of contentment on Indian faces that is not found in the West. It is not real contentment; it is just unawareness of the inner poverty. Indians think, “Look at the anxiety, anguish, and tension on the Western faces. Although we are poor, we are inwardly very content.” That is utter nonsense, they are not contented. I have been watching thousands of people, they are not contented. But one thing is certainly there, they are not aware of the discontent – because to be aware of the discontent, outer richness is needed. Without outer richness nobody becomes aware of the inner discontent. And there are enough proofs of it.All the avatars of the Hindus were kings or sons of kings, kings or princes. All the Jaina tirthankaras, all the Jaina prophets, were kings, and so was Buddha. All the three great traditions of India give ample proof.Why did Buddha become discontented, why did he start a search for meditation? Because he was rich. He lived in affluence; he lived with all that was possible, all the comforts, all the material gadgets. Suddenly he became aware. And he was not very old when he became aware, he was only twenty-nine when he became aware that there was a dark hole inside.Light is outside, hence it shows your inner darkness. Just a little dirt on a white shirt and it shows. That’s what happened.He escaped from the palace. That’s what happened to Mahavira, he also escaped from a palace. It was not happening to a beggar. There were beggars also in Buddha’s time. In fact, the story is that Buddha renounced the world when he saw a beggar for the first time, and an old man, and a dead body, and a sannyasin. Beggars were there.Buddha was going to participate in a youth festival, he was to inaugurate it. From his golden chariot, he saw a beggar for the first time – because his father had managed his whole life that Buddha should never see a beggar, or an ill man, or an old man, or a dead man. Astrologers had told the father when Buddha was born that if he ever saw those things he would immediately renounce the world, so not to allow him to see them. So wherever Buddha would move, beggars would be removed, old people would be removed or forced to remain in their houses, not come out. Even in Buddha’s garden, no dead leaf was allowed. Every dead leaf was removed during the night so in the morning when Buddha would come there he could only see youth, young leaves, young flowers. He had never seen a flower withering.When he saw a beggar for the first time… And the parable is beautiful, it says the gods became worried: “The father is succeeding too much. Twenty-nine years have passed, and Buddha has the capacity to become one of the most awakened persons in the world.” The gods became worried: “The management of the father is such that he may never come across a beggar or an old man. He may miss.” So they pretended – one god walked like a beggar, another like an old man, another became like a dead man, another like a sannyasin.There were beggars, but they didn’t renounce anything. They had nothing to renounce, they were contented. Buddha became discontented.When this country was rich, many more people were interested in meditation; in fact, all of the people were interested in meditation. Sooner or later they would start thinking of the moon, of the beyond, of the inner. Now the country is poor, so poor that there is no contrast of the inner and the outer. The inner is poor, the outer is poor. The inner and the outer are in perfect harmony, both are poor. That’s why you see a kind of contentment on Indian faces that is not true contentment. And because of this, people have become accustomed to thinking that poverty has something spiritual in it.Poverty is worshipped in India. That is one of the reasons why I am condemned continuously – because I am not in favor of any kind of poverty. Poverty is not spirituality, poverty is the cause of the disappearance of spirituality.I would like the whole world to become as affluent as possible. The more affluent people are, the more they will become spiritual. They will have to, they will not be able to avoid it. And only then does real contentment arise.When you can create inner richness and there comes a moment when again a harmony happens – outer richness meeting inner richness – then there is real contentment. When outer poverty meets inner poverty, there is false contentment. Harmony is possible in these two ways. The outer and inner in harmony, and one feels contented. India looks contented because there is poverty on both sides of the fence. There is perfect harmony, the outer and inner are in tune; but this is ugly contentment, this is really lack of life, lack of vitality. This is a stupid kind of contentment, dull, insipid.The West is bound to become interested in meditation, there is no way to avoid it. That’s why Christianity is losing its hold on the Western mind – because Christianity has not developed the science of meditation in any way. It has remained a very mediocre religion; so has Judaism.The West was poor: that is the reason. Up to now the West has lived in poverty. When the East was rich the West was poor. Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism, all the three non-Indian religions, were born in poverty. They could not develop meditation techniques, there was no need. They have remained the religions of the poor.Now the West has become rich and there is a disparity. The Western religions were born in poverty; they have nothing to give to the rich man. For the rich man they look childish, they don’t satisfy. They can’t satisfy him. The Eastern religions were born in richness; that’s why the Western mind is becoming more and more interested in the Eastern religions. Yes, the religion of Buddha is having a great impact. Zen is spreading like fire. Why? – it was born out of richness.There is a tremendous similarity between the Western psychology of the contemporary man and the psychology of Buddhism. The West is in the same state as Buddha was when he became interested in meditation. It was a rich man’s search. And so is the case with Hinduism, so is the case with Jainism. These three great Indian religions were born out of affluence, hence the West is bound to be attracted to these Eastern religions.The East is losing contact with its own religions. It cannot afford to understand Buddha. It is a poor country. You will be surprised – poor Indians are being converted to Christianity. Rich Americans are being converted to Buddhism, Hinduism, Vedanta. And the untouchables, the poor, the poorest of the poor in India, are becoming Christians. Do you see the point? Those religions have a certain appeal for the poor. But they don’t have any future because sooner or later the whole world is going to become rich.You will not find many Indians here either because I don’t praise poverty, I have no respect for poverty. Poverty is illness, disease. It has to be uprooted completely. Man has to be given both kinds of richness. Why not both? Science has developed the technology to make you outwardly rich. Religion has developed the technology to make you inwardly rich: that is Yoga, Tantra, Taoism, Sufism, Hasidism – these are the technologies of the inner.A story…The central figure of this story is one of those persons who accepts everything that happens as the manifestation of a divine power. Not for him, he said, to question the workings of a Divine Providence.All his life misfortune had been his, yet never once did he complain. He married, and his wife ran away with the hired man. He had a daughter, and the daughter was deceived by a villain. He had a son, and the son was lynched. A fire burned down his barn, a cyclone blew away his home, a hailstorm destroyed his crops, and the banker foreclosed on his mortgage, taking his farm. Yet at each fresh stroke of misfortune he knelt and gave thanks to “God Almighty for his interminable mercy.”After a time, penniless but still submissive to the decrees from on high, he landed in the county poorhouse. One day the overseer sent him out to plow a potato field. A thunderstorm came up but was passing over when, without warning, a bolt of lightning descended from the sky. It melted the plowshare, stripped most of his clothing from him, singed off his beard, branded his naked back with the initials of a neighboring cowman, and hurled him through a barbed wire fence.When he recovered consciousness he got slowly to his knees, clasped his hands and raised his eyes toward heaven. Then, for the first time, he asserted himself: “Lord,” he said, “this is getting to be plumb ridiculous!”That is the situation in the East: “This is getting to be plumb ridiculous!” But the East goes on thanking God, goes on feeling grateful. There is nothing to feel grateful for anymore! The East is utterly poor, ill, starved; there is nothing to be grateful for. But the East has forgotten how to assert, the East has forgotten to do anything about its condition.So the East cannot meditate. The East is living almost in a kind of unconsciousness. It is too hungry to meditate, too poor to pray. Its only interest is in bread, shelter, clothing. So when a Christian missionary comes and opens a hospital or opens a school, the Indians are very impressed – this is spirituality. When I start teaching about meditation they are not interested. Not only not interested, they are against it: “What kind of spirituality is this?” People come to me and they ask, “Can meditation give us bread?” And I understand. They need bread, they need shelter, they need clothes.But it is because of their mind that they are suffering. On the one hand they need bread, shelter, clothes, better houses, better roads, and on the other hand they go on worshipping poverty. They are in a double bind. The East cannot meditate yet. First it needs scientific technology to make it a little physically better. Just as the West needs religious technology, the East needs scientific technology.I am all for one world, where the West can fulfill the needs of the East and the East can fulfill the needs of the West. The East and the West have lived apart too long, there is no need any more. The East should not be the East any longer, and the West should not be the West any longer. We have come to that critical moment where this whole earth can become one – should become one – because it can survive only if it becomes one.The days of nations are over, the days of divisions are over, the days of the politicians are over. We are moving in a tremendously new world, a new phase of humanity, and the phase is that now there can be only one world, only one single humanity. And then there will be a tremendous release of energies.The East has treasures, the religious technologies, and the West has treasures, the scientific technologies. If they can meet, this very world can become a paradise. Now there is no need to ask for another world; we are capable of creating paradise here on this earth for the first time. And if we don’t create it, then except for us, nobody else is responsible for it.I am for one world, one humanity, and ultimately one science which will take care of both – a meeting of religion and science – one science which will take care of both the inner and the outer.That’s what I am trying to do here. It is a meeting place of East and West; it is a womb where the new humanity can be conceived, can be born. You are fortunate. You may not be aware that you are participating in something of eternal value, a great experiment upon which the whole future of humanity depends. If you become more conscious of it, it will be better because then you will be more helpful.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Bahauddin Shah once gave an address on the principles and practices of the Sufis. A certain man who thought that he was clever and could benefit from criticizing him, said, “If only this man would say something new! That is my only criticism.”Bahauddin heard of this and invited the critic to dinner. “I hope that you will approve of my lamb stew,” he said. When he had taken the first mouthful, the guest jumped up, shouting, “You are trying to poison me – this isn’t lamb stew!”“But it is,” said Bahauddin, “though since you don’t like old recipes, I have tried something new. This contains lamb all right, but there is a good dash of mustard, honey and emetic in it as well.”Truth is. Truth simply is. It is neither old nor new. It is eternal, it has no reference to time at all; it is beyond time. That is the meaning of the eternal. Eternal does not mean forever because forever has a reference to time; eternal does not mean permanent because permanency has a reference to time. Eternal simply means timeless. It is.Truth is never past and never future. It knows only one tense, the present. Truth knows only one time, now – which is not time at all, but timelessness. And truth knows only one space, here – which is not a space at all, it is the transcendence of space. Truth is always now-here. Truth has no history. History belongs to the world of lies. Politics has history, religion has no history.This is the first thing to be understood: truth cannot be old and cannot be new either. If truth can be new, then one day it will become old. Whatever is new today will be old tomorrow. Truth is never old, hence it can never be new.Truth is equivalent to existence. In a way, it can be said it is as old as the mountains and as new as this morning’s dewdrops, but that is only a way of saying. What is being said is that truth is eternal.But there are people who are very much interested in the old. They are past-oriented. They believe in something only if it is very old. The older it is, they think, the better it is. All that is old is gold for them. They go on trying to prove that their scripture is the oldest scripture in the world, their religion the most ancient.There is another group of people who think the new is always better than the old because it is new. It is more evolved, more improved, more refined.These are the two kinds of people, both go on missing the truth. One is past-oriented, the other is future-oriented, and truth exists now, neither in the past nor in the future.Before we can enter this small parable you will have to understand something about time – because basically it is a question of understanding time and its process. Time moves in a horizontal line from past to future. Time’s movement is linear; hence it is shallow, it can’t have any depth. One moment is followed by another moment and so on, so forth. Before you can catch hold of the moment it is already gone, so you cannot move into depth. You cannot dive in time; you can only float, you can only swim. It is very thin, it has no depth. It is horizontal.Eternity is vertical: it moves into depth and into height. Just think of the cross of Jesus, it is a symbol of time and eternity. The cross is made of two lines, one horizontal on which Jesus’ hands were nailed, the other vertical on which his body was nailed. The cross represents the whole phenomenon of time. The horizontal line is history, politics, the mundane life, the world of events, the world of facts. The vertical line is the world of truth, not of facts. The vertical line is the world of absolute reality, of God, of nirvana, of meditation.Whenever one starts moving into the vertical world, one simply goes beyond time. Then there is nothing new, nothing old. Truth only is.Time, the horizontal line, consists of two things: the past and the future. The present is almost absent. You never become aware of the present – or have you ever become aware of the present? – because the moment you become aware, it is already past. You always become aware of the past.For example, this moment: if you become aware of it, the time that is taken by your becoming aware is enough to make it past. The moment you say, “Yes, this is the present,” it is already gone. You cannot even utter the word now because when you have uttered it, it is no longer now. The present that you think exists in time is almost nothing. It is sandwiched between the past and the future. The past is big. Look backward: it stretches and stretches, on and on. It seems to be beginningless. And so is the future, very big: it goes on stretching ahead of you, on and on, endlessly.Between these two big phenomena, the past and the future, your present is just a sandwiched atomic moment of which you cannot even become aware. The moment you know it, it is no longer there; it is already gone. You only become aware of the past. So time consists of the past and the future.Eternity consists of the present. Then what we call “present” is nothing but the spot where eternity crosses time, where eternity penetrates time. There is a way to move into that eternity and that’s what meditation is all about.Meditation is a drop into eternity. That’s why all techniques, all methods of meditation, insist: don’t be too obsessed with the past, let it go. And don’t be too infatuated with the future, let it go too. Slowly, slowly withdraw yourself from past memories and future projections. The past is no longer, the future is not yet; both are nonexistential. To remain in the nonexistential is to remain in misery – because existence is bliss, sat chit anand: it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss. Nonexistence is untruth, unconsciousness, misery – just the opposite. And we live in the nonexistential.Just watch what goes on inside you. Either you are thinking of the past, the nostalgia of the past – your beautiful childhood, or your youth, your love affairs, and this and that, or you are immersed in the future – what you are going to do tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow. Either you are drowned in the past or you are drowned in the future. That’s why you are not. That’s why you yourself have become a falsehood. You are too concerned with the false and that concern makes you pseudo. Withdraw yourself from the past and the future.Withdrawing yourself from the past and the future is real renunciation, is sannyas. Not by effort, remember: if you withdraw yourself by effort you will be deceived. If you withdraw yourself by effort, if you say, “I will withdraw myself from the past so that I can be in deep meditation,” then your deep meditation is a future project. Then it is neither meditation nor deep. You have already moved from the past to the future. If you say, “If I withdraw from the past, I will attain nirvana,” now you have only substituted the past with the future. Both are the same, both are nonexistential. It does not make any difference.If you withdraw from your future, if you say, “I will not desire the future because I have to attain nirvana, enlightenment, satori,” it is the future. You cannot withdraw by effort because with effort you will always be motivated. There will be a desire, there will be a goal.Then how to withdraw? You withdraw only by understanding the situation: the past is not, it is futile. Not that withdrawing from the past is going to lead you into the world of truth, no. Just seeing the futility of the past – it is all memory, dust that has gathered on the mirror of consciousness, it is just useless – you wash it away, with no motivation. Just seeing the futility of it, you drop it. Not that you drop it for something else; if you drop it for something else the future has entered. You have deceived yourself.When you drop your past, seeing the futility of it, how can you go on living in the future? The future is always based on the past. Whatever you want tomorrow is nothing but all those beautiful things you had yesterday. You want a repetition – maybe modified, a little bit better, refined – but it is the past again. When the past is dropped by seeing the futility of it, just out of the understanding that it is futile, for no other reason, it drops out of your hands. With it the future also disappears. The future is the shadow of the past. You were with a woman yesterday and you would like to be with the woman again tomorrow: that is the future. Yesterday you went to Latif’s and the food was delicious; you are thinking of going there again tomorrow. Your tomorrow is nothing but a reflection of your yesterday. When yesterday disappears, reflections disappear. With the past, in the same package, the future is also dropped.And then there is the present. Not that you asked for it, or you longed for it, or you desired and worked and practiced for it: no. Because the past and future are no longer there, the present is. The same space that was occupied by the past and the future is now empty. In that emptiness you feel the present.And to be in the present is to be in truth. Then you have depth, you have fallen into the vertical dimension. You have heights, heights which are higher than Everest and depths which are deeper than the Pacific. Then your life has a grandeur, a splendor. This is what is called buddhahood, christ consciousness, or whatever you will.There are people who are past-oriented, there are people who are future-oriented; both go on missing. The orthodox, the conformist, is past-oriented, and the revolutionary, the rebel, is future-oriented. There is not any difference between them. The orthodox thinks the Golden Age was in the past, the Garden of Eden. The revolutionary, the so-called communist, the fascist, the socialist thinks the Golden Age is to come. It is in the future, the utopia, the classless society where everyone will be equal, the world of freedom where exploitation will have disappeared and paradise will descend on the earth. But paradise is right now, here.Beware of these two traps. You need not go into the past to search for truth. You need not go into the scriptures – because the scriptures belong to the past. And you need not go into imagination, logic – because all that logic can do is create utopias in the future. You need not go anywhere, neither in the past nor in the future. You have to be just here.The utter beauty of the moment and the utter blessedness of the moment, and one is transformed, not by doing anything, but just by being here.Allow yourself this fall into the present more and more. And you will be afraid because it is really a fall. You will be going into depths, and those depths are abysmal. There is no bottom, and we have become accustomed to floating on the surface. For many lives you have been just swimming on the surface; you have forgotten the depth of the ocean, of this reality. So when you start falling into the depth you will become afraid, you will have a very deep, frightening, scary experience; you will be in a panic.That is the moment when you need a master to say to you, “Don’t be worried, there is nothing that can be lost, and that which can be lost is not worth keeping. That which is essential will remain with you, only the nonessential will be gone – and it is good that the nonessential goes.”The man of awareness becomes a man of essence. Personality consists of the nonessential. Your soul consists of the essential, and the essential is immortal. The nonessential is momentary, and you cling to the nonessential; hence you suffer because you cannot keep hold of it. It disappears sooner or later. Whatever you do is futile because the momentary cannot be forever. Just as it comes, it goes. It is a wave, a ripple, a bubble. Sooner or later it will be gone. For the moment it looks so beautiful – the sun is reflected in it and a small rainbow surrounds it – but it is just a soap bubble. You can play with it but don’t become attached to it, otherwise you will suffer.That’s why people are suffering: they become attached to soap bubbles. They have given different names to the soap bubbles. Somebody calls it love, somebody calls it money, somebody calls it power, somebody calls it life, prestige, and so on, so forth – but they are all soap bubbles. Any moment they will be gone, and the person will be left in despair. To cling to the personality is to cling to soap bubbles.But this has been the attitude of your so-called thinkers down the ages. One party says the old is gold, and the older it is, the better. That’s what Hindus say: their Vedas are the oldest scriptures. That’s what the Jainas say their first tirthankara, Adinatha, is the ancientmost master in the world. It may be so, but it has nothing to do with truth. It has something to do with history, it has something to do with the body and the personality of Adinatha, but it has nothing to do with his inner truth, not at all.Just the other day in the newspapers, I came across Morarji Desai’s statement about me, that I cannot be compared with Mahavira. Why? What can the problem be? Mahavira is old, ancient; twenty-five centuries have passed – how can Osho be compared to Mahavira? But Morarji Desai has to be reminded.Jesus said of Abraham: I am before Abraham was. Abraham preceded Jesus by at least twenty-five centuries, just as Mahavira has preceded me. But Jesus says, “I am before Abraham was.” What does he mean? Morarji Desai would be at a loss.I also say, “I am before Mahavira was.” The difference between me and Mahavira is only on the surface, on the horizontal line where we are separated by twenty-five centuries. But on the vertical? And it is the vertical which is significant, not the horizontal. On the vertical, we are not two.That’s what Jesus is saying: “I am before Abraham was.” He is not saying that Jesus is older than Abraham. He is saying that this reality of I-amness, this truth of being, is eternal. It was there even before Abraham. But maybe Morarji Desai is not interested in Jesus and Abraham. He has a very conditioned Hindu mind. Then I will remind him of a great mystic, Gorakh. Gorakh says, “My master is my son, and my master’s master is my grandson, and my master’s master’s master is my great-grandson.” What does Gorakh mean? Is he just destroying the whole idea of history? The disciple saying that “My master is my son” now, is he putting things upside down? How can Gorakh be the father of his own master? And how can he be the grandfather of his own master’s master?What he is saying is simply this: there is a sequence in time – the father precedes the son, never otherwise – but in the world of eternity nothing is preceded by anything, all simply is. There, distinctions, distinctions of time, disappear. Only one remains.Morarji Desai is offended because some of my sannyasins met him and compared me with Mahavira. He was very angry. He said, “No, you cannot compare Osho with Mahavira.” Why? Essentially there is only one truth. Lies are many, truth is one. Diseases are many, health is one.Mahavira moved in the vertical, disappeared as a personality and became the essence; so has it happened to Mohammed, so has it happened to Bahauddin, so has it happened to me – so can it happen to anybody who is courageous enough to take the jump into the vertical.The moment you take the jump into the vertical, personality disappears; you are no longer abc. Then the taste is the same, just as it is the same salty taste from wherever you taste the ocean. The taste of truth is one. It is the same truth that Jesus tasted, it is the same truth that Buddha and Mahavira tasted. It is the same truth that I am tasting and you can taste. And that taste knows no time, no distance.My disciples were not wrong. Each master contains all the masters of the past and all the masters of the future. I contain all the masters that have been and all the masters that will ever be – because the taste is the same. When one disappears, when the ego is no longer there and there is only an inner empty sky, when the forms of the clouds have disappeared into the formless sky, how can there be any difference?Yes, clouds are different from each other. If you watch the sky, each cloud has a personality, a different form. You can even search: one cloud looks like an elephant, another cloud looks like a camel, and so on, so forth. But when all the clouds have disappeared, have you ever seen any personality in the sky? The sky is impersonal; it has no form, no color, no name. You cannot find your elephants and camels in the sky, it is utterly empty of all forms.That is the state of a master. So whether it happens in this body or it happened twenty-five centuries ago in Mahavira’s body, or it happened five thousand years ago in Krishna’s body, it makes no difference. The sky was as formless in Krishna’s time as it is in my time, as it will always be. Only the clouds are different – but to be cloudy is to be unenlightened.Unenlightened people cannot be compared. You will be surprised to know this: unenlightened people cannot be compared. They are all different because they are clouds. One is the elephant, another is the camel, and so on, so forth. Unenlightened people cannot be compared because they are wearing masks, and each is wearing a different mask: that is the personality. The nonessential is so important, and the nonessential is different. The essential is not different.Just the other day I came across a very beautiful story…Samuel Pinsky was on a camping expedition when he got stranded in a small town. Hungry and without money, he tried everywhere to get something to eat, but he was always met with the hostility which provincials generally show Jews. At last he had the good fortune to come across a small circus, the owner of which was of his own race. Sammy immediately applied for a job, explaining that he would starve if he did not get something to do.The circus owner thought for a moment, and then said that one of his lions had died recently and that Sammy might have a job if he could get inside a lion’s skin and play lion. It was so arranged. Sammy was sewed into a lion’s skin and occupied a barred den, exposed to the view of the admiring circus throngs.All went well until one afternoon he was startled to see a huge Bengal tiger come bounding down the chute that led into his cage.Sammy took to his heels. Round and round the big cage he ran on all fours, with the tiger in hot pursuit. Finally, his last ounce of strength exhausted, the terrified Israelite fell to his knees, clasped his hands and began a Hebrew prayer: “Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad!” – Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one!The bounding Bengal tiger at once drew up and responded with the antiphony: “Baruch Shem Kevod Malchuto Le'olam Va'ed!” – Blessed be the name of his glory forever and forever!“Oi, Jew,” exclaimed Sammy, tearing off his lion’s head.“Oi, Jew,” returned the other, tearing off his tiger’s head.When you drop your mask, when you drop your personality, when you look inward, when you see the inner sky, then who is Osho and who is Mahavira? Then who is Jesus and who is Abraham? Then who is Gorakh and who is Adinatha? All have disappeared, it is one truth.But there are people who are too addicted to the past. Worship of the past is one of the most poisonous things in the world: it does not allow you to be herenow.And there are others also. Once, a professor who is – or at least thinks he is – in deep love with me came to me, and he said, “Your disciples go on comparing you with Jesus, with Mahavira. It should not be done! I am also a lover of yours. How can you be compared with Mahavira? Twenty-five centuries have passed. You have twenty-five centuries’ more experience than Mahavira!” Now, he was angry – I should not be compared to Mahavira – just as Morarji Desai is angry for different reasons. He was saying, “It is insulting and humiliating that you should be compared to Mahavira. Twenty-five centuries have passed. In twenty-five centuries man has evolved, has become more knowing, has come to higher peaks.” He said, “Comparing you with Mahavira or Jesus is like comparing Albert Einstein to Newton.”I had to tell him just exactly the same as I am telling you and Morarji Desai: time makes no difference. And his example is not right, that Newton and Albert Einstein cannot be compared, because both work in time. Certainly Albert Einstein is far ahead of Newton, Newton will look almost childish in comparison to Albert Einstein; but that is not the case with me and Mahavira.It has nothing to do with human progress and all the explosion of knowledge in the world because it is not a question of knowledgeability. I may know more than Mahavira ever did. Certainly, he had not read Sigmund Freud, he knew nothing about Albert Einstein, that is true, but that has nothing to do with the inner space.After twenty-five centuries have passed, again, somebody will be there, ahead, coming; he will know more than I know. Certainly he will know more than I know, but still there will be no difference, not an iota – because it is not a question of knowledge and it is not a question of social evolution. It is a question of no-mind, it is a question of innocence. It is not a question of better universities, better books, better information about the world. It has nothing to do with that.In fact, one has to drop all that one knows to go in. Mahavira dropped whatever he knew. I dropped whatever I knew. When Mahavira became completely devoid of his knowledge, he attained. That’s how it happened to me: whatever I knew, I dropped it. So I may have dropped a bigger burden than Mahavira, that is true, but that makes no problem. I may have had to clean and wash more dust from my mirror than Mahavira ever had to, but once the dust is cleaned and the mirror is reflecting perfectly, it is the same quality, the same mirroring. It has nothing to do with dust.Will you say that this mirror is greater because we had to remove more dust from this mirror than the other mirror – because less dust had to be removed from the other mirror? Less and more dust make no difference.Once a person has arrived, all that we know is irrelevant. He simply disappears from the world of time into the world of eternity – and that is the world of truth.This question of comparison arises again and again. It has to be understood; it will be good if it is clear to you. Two unenlightened people cannot be compared because they are only personalities and nothing else. And personalities are different because personalities are like diseases. Two enlightened persons can be compared because they are no longer personalities, but if you think of their personalities, they also cannot be compared.For example, if you look at Mahavira through his personality – as Morarji Desai is doing – then he is right. But that is not the right way to look at Mahavira or to look at me or to look at Bahauddin. Yes, Mahavira walked naked; I am not walking naked, so certainly I am different, he is different. This is a difference of the frame of the mirror, not of the mirror.Just the other day I read in another newspaper that a Christian has asked why I am compared to Jesus. “Why do people go on comparing Osho with Jesus? Jesus never lived in an air-conditioned house.” That’s true – poor Jesus – but that is not the question at all. Jesus ate meat, I do not eat meat. Jesus drank alcohol, I do not drink alcohol. Do you think eating meat and drinking alcohol is a lesser sin than living in an air-conditioned room? I don’t think living in an air-conditioned room is a sin at all. I have never come across any scriptures about it! Certainly, if you look through the personality, I am a different person – and Jesus is different.Krishna had sixteen thousand wives – poor man. Just think of it, how much he must have suffered. One wife is enough to create hell! Sixteen thousand wives…Certainly I have a different personality than Krishna had, but personality is not the essential thing. It is just the outer frame of the mirror. Buddha had a different personality, so had Lao Tzu. All masters have different personalities if you look from the outside. Certainly, they lived in their time, in their own way. They did their thing, I’m doing my thing.This is why Morarji Desai thinks I cannot be compared to Mahavira – Mahavira believed in fasting, and I believe in feasting. Mahavira lived naked, never used any vehicle. I move in a car, certainly I am different. But so was Krishna; he was moving in a gold chariot. What does Morarji Desai say about that? And Krishna used beautiful clothes – not only clothes, he used ornaments like women use. In those days it was a common thing and it seems to be more natural. If you look into nature, you will always find it.For example, if you look at the peacocks, the male peacock has all the colors. The male peacock is decorated, the female peacock is not decorated. It is enough for the female peacock to be female; that’s enough, nothing else is needed. That is more than is needed, that makes her beauty. Just her feminine energy is enough attraction. But the male substitutes: he does not have that feminine beauty, that feminine, elusive mystery. He has to create some substitutes. Nature provides. The male peacock is very decorated, ornamental.And so is it the case with all the animals. When you hear the cuckoo calling from the mango grove, it is the male cuckoo whose sound is so sweet. It is a substitute. You can see it everywhere.In those old days, in Krishna’s time, man was also decorating himself – ornaments, all kinds of beautiful clothes, colorful designs. Now, if suddenly Krishna appeared in front of the Blue Diamond, the police would catch hold of him: “Looks like a mad hippie! What is he doing here?”Personalities are different – and it is good, perfectly good. Krishna had to live in his time, I have to live in my time. He used ornaments, that was the universal phenomenon. It was natural, it was befitting, it was in harmony with the background of his life. Jesus lived in his own way, I have to live in my own way. I am nobody’s imitation. I am not imitating Christ or Krishna or Buddha or Mahavira here. I am living in my own way. I have to sing my song.So if you listen to the songs, just to the words of the songs, they will be different, and they cannot be compared, that is true. But if you listen to the soundless source of the songs, if you go deeper into the music of the songs, into the rhythm of them, you will find the same rhythm, the same music, the same melody. The words are different: Krishna was speaking in Sanskrit, Mahavira was speaking in Prakrit, Buddha was speaking in Pali, Jesus was speaking in Aramaic. Now, I cannot speak in Aramaic and I cannot speak in Pali. That would be utterly meaningless. Even if I could speak it, with whom would I speak? What would be the point of it? I speak the language that can be understood, and I speak in the metaphors that can be understood.In that sense – if you look at the personality, at the form, of a certain master – no master can be compared to anybody else because personalities cannot be compared. But if you look at the deepest core, not at the circumference but at the center of the cyclone, then all masters are one.Joshu asked his master, Nansen, “What is the Way?”Nansen said, “It is everyday mind.”Joshu said, “Then one should aim at this, shouldn’t one?”Nansen said, “The moment you aim at anything, you have already missed it.”Joshu said, “If I do not aim at it, how can I know the Way?”Nansen said, “The Way has nothing to do with knowing or not-knowing. Knowing is perceiving, but blindly. Not-knowing is just blankness. If you have already reached the unaimed-at Way, it is like space: an absolutely clear void. You cannot force it one way or the other.”At that instant Joshu was awakened to the profound meaning. His mind was like the bright full moon. Suddenly, he himself became that space, that clear, void emptiness.Look into me, and you will find the same taste as was found by the disciples of Mahavira.But the taste of a master is available only to the disciples. Morarji Desai cannot have it. He does not deserve it! Only a disciple is worthy enough to partake of the being of the master. Only disciples can understand what the master is. Jesus was known by his disciples; others crucified him. The others were millions and the disciples were few. Couldn’t those other people see that he was the son of God? Had they seen that he was the son of God, would it have been possible for them to crucify him? They could not see a thing, they were utterly blind. Only a few disciples were aware of something that had entered Jesus from the beyond – but only a few were aware.And you will be surprised: had Morarji Desai been there, he would not have been aware because the people of those days behaved in the same way as they are behaving with me today. The politicians were against Jesus. He was crucified by the conspiracy of the politicians and the priests. The professors and the pundits were against Jesus, the great rabbis were against him, the so-called virtuous people were against him. It looks really very paradoxical that he was understood by a prostitute like Mary Magdalene. He was understood by fishermen, woodcutters, villagers, innocent people. And the rabbis? And the professors? And the priests? And the politicians? – they could not see anything in him. They only saw some kind of danger. They only saw that this man’s existence could be a beginning of rebellion. It was better to finish off this man, it was better to destroy this man, so the seed was destroyed. Otherwise this man would bring chaos.That’s what they are seeing again in me. In fact, they have started becoming afraid.Just a few days ago, I had told you that a day may come when my sannyasins will have to go underground. I was simply meaning that you can easily go underground if you don’t wear orange and the mala. In fact, the day I had decided to give you the color orange and the mala and a certain uniform of a sannyasin, this was part of the consideration: if you become visible, you can easily become invisible, at any moment. That is the secret of becoming invisible. You move in orange, you are a visible sannyasin. Going underground will be so simple: you simply don’t move in orange, and you are underground.Now, from Delhi, the Pune police have received a note to go deep into this matter: “What does he mean by saying, ‘My sannyasins will have to go underground’?” Just stupid people. And if I call them stupid, they become very angry. They think I am slandering them, that I am abusing them. I am simply stating a fact.Mrs. Vandergelt took her Peke to the vet. “There is something wrong with Fido,” she told the dog doc. “Yesterday I gave him a savory bone to chew on, but he refused it. This morning I tried to give him a piece of broiled sirloin steak, but he just walked away from it. And this afternoon I put him next to a cute little female Peke, but my Fido just turned up his nose at her.”The vet looked up from the dog and shook his head. “There is nothing wrong with your dog, madam,” he told her. “He is just stupid.”Now, what can one do? The facts have to be stated as they are. The politicians have always been stupid, this is nothing new. Otherwise why should they be politicians? They would have been poets, they would have been mystics, they would have been painters, they would have been musicians, they would have been dancers. But when a person cannot be anything, when he has no talents, no intelligence, the last possibility is, he becomes a politician. Because in politics, stupidity is an asset. The more stupid you are, the more is your possibility of reaching to the top – because it needs arrogance, violence. It needs insensitivity, it needs hatred, jealousy, ambition, to reach the top of the ladder. And it needs utter unintelligence. Otherwise who would be interested in becoming just a ladder climber? Life has much more to give.Just sitting under a tree and playing on your flute is far more satisfying than being the president of a country. Just being in love with a woman or a man is far more satisfying than having all the riches of the world and all the power that it can give.When Alexander the Great came to India and conquered the frontier provinces, he was surprised to see one thing: people were so contented, so happy. He could not believe his eyes. There was such order, and there seemed to be no imposition on them. He asked the king, whom he had conquered and defeated… In fact, the king was defeated because he had never prepared for war. His whole energy had been devoted to peace. It was a beautiful country and people were happy, and people were still singing and dancing, and people were grateful to God. They had not thought that somebody was going to conquer them. For what? In fact, no resistance was given to Alexander the Great. People were not ready at all; they were simply surprised by the whole idea that somebody had started on a great movement, a struggle to conquer the whole world. They were puzzled: “For what?”Even Alexander was puzzled and surprised seeing the peace and the contentment and the joy. Even when the people were defeated there was nothing – as if nothing had happened. Things continued as they were, as if nothing had happened.He asked the king, “How have you managed this, this order? And I don’t see much military, much police. I don’t see much government machinery. And people are living with such love and brotherhood. How have you managed?”The king said, “It has nothing to do with me. My prime minister is a mystic. It is his work.”“Where is your prime minister?” Alexander said. “I would like to see him, I would like to talk to him, I would like to learn something from him. I would like my country to also be in such order, in such inner discipline. I have fallen in love with the grace that I see all around. Although you are defeated, I don’t see any sadness – as if I don’t mean much.”The king said, “The prime minister has become a sannyasin now, he has moved to the mountains. It may be difficult to find him.”But Alexander was insistent, so messengers were sent.But the messengers came back. They said, “That old man has said that he is not interested in showing himself off to any Alexander, to any great king and conqueror, because the very idea of conquering others is so stupid: ‘I am not interested in coming. Just go and tell him that I don’t think that he is even worthy enough to be given any advice.’”The politician’s whole mind is nothing but ambition, and ambition is violent, ambition is murderous. It is ambition that has made the whole earth a hell.Morarji Desai also thinks that I am slandering him, that I am abusing him. I am not. I have nothing to do with Morarji Desai. When I say something against any politician, it is being said against politicians as such. It has no personal difference.Now this small story:Bahauddin Shah once gave an address on the principles and practices of the Sufis. A certain man who thought that he was clever and could benefit from criticizing him, said, “If only this man would say something new! That’s my only criticism.”Bahauddin: …gave an address on the principles and practices of the Sufis. There is only one principle, and there is only one practice. What is the principle? The principle is that only God exists. There is no god but God. That is the principle, that is the very seed of Sufism. Only God is – in millions of forms. Forms are different, personalities are different, but deep down, if you go on searching for the innermost core, you will always find God and nothing else. This is the fundamental principle, all other principles are secondary. This is the cornerstone of the temple of Sufism: God is.And God cannot be new or old. You cannot use words like “was” in reference to God; you cannot say “God was,” you cannot say “God will be.” You can use only one tense, the present tense, for God: God is. God always is, so how can it be new or old? Yes, expressions can be old, but not the truth expressed. Bottles can be new but not the wine. What I am saying is just a new bottle for the eternal wine. That’s what Bahauddin was saying.But you can always criticize, and criticism can have two possibilities. One is: you can say, “This is something new.” There are people for whom it is enough criticism to say, “This is something new.” New means wrong – because if it were the truth, others would have found it before you. How did it wait so long? If it is new it must be wrong. Why is it not in the Vedas? Why didn’t Jesus say anything about it? Why did Buddha keep quiet about it? If they were knowers they must have known it, so if it is not there, something is wrong.This is one criticism: the people who always like the old, for whom if something is old it is bound to be right – as if only Jesus is old and Judas is not old; as if only Rama is old and Ramana is not old; as if only Krishna is old and not the people who were against him. They are as old, so if something is just old it does not mean that it is right.Then there is the other party; the man must have belonged to the other party. He says there is only one criticism: “If only this man would say something new. That is my only criticism.” He is saying, “You are just saying old things which everybody knows. There is no need to talk about old things, saying ‘God is, truth is, truth is eternal.’ This has been said so many times. Why go on repeating it? Say something new! If you have something new to say, say it!”It is not a question of saying it, it is not a question of repeating it. Bahauddin is not repeating Mohammed. What he is saying is his own experience. Now, what can he do if his experience and Mohammed’s experience coincide?What I am saying is not a repetition of Buddha or Mahavira. I am saying it from my own experience, on my own authority. It is my experience, in that sense it is new. But what can I do? It has been the experience of all the buddhas too. So in a sense, it is as old as the mountains and as new as the dewdrop on the grass leaves in the early sun.This is the paradox of truth: everyone has to know it on his own. Then it is new – but it is the same truth. Buddha went to the sea and tasted it, and he said, “It is salty.” After twenty-five centuries I went to the sea and tasted it, and I said, “It is salty.”Now the question is, is what I am saying just a repetition of Buddha? If I had not gone to the sea, and just reading scriptures I had repeated like a parrot that the taste of the sea is salty because Buddha says it is so – and I trust him, he must be saying what is right; who bothers to go to the ocean? When Buddha has said so, it is finished, it is decided forever – then it would have been a repetition.But I went to the sea; I tasted the sea and I found that it is salty. Now what should I do? Just because Buddha has also said it is salty, should I not say it is salty because people will think it is a repetition? But then I would be lying! Should I say it is sweet? Then it would be untrue. I have to be truthful, so I have to say two things: one, that I have tasted it myself, and the second, that now I am a witness that Buddha was right. I am not saying it on Buddha’s authority, I am saying it on my own authority. In fact, I am giving Buddha a witness, an eye witness, that whatever he said twenty-five centuries ago was true, was right. I know it through my own experience.That’s what Bahauddin was doing. Now, that man said… He thought that he was clever, and clever people, or at least the people who think they are clever, are almost always stupid people. Only stupid people have the idea that they are clever.A really intelligent person is not clever. When you have intelligence, what need do you have of being clever? Your very life shows your intelligence. The clever person is trying to show that he is intelligent, and only one who is not intelligent tries to show that he is intelligent. Remember this. Only the ugly person tries to show that he is beautiful, and only the ignorant tries to show his knowledge.The man who knows never tries to show it. It is seen by others, it happens on its own accord. When spring comes and the trees bloom, they are not advertising, “Come and see.” But their perfume spreads to the winds, people start coming. And if people don’t come – because people are so blind, they have lost all sensitivity – then at least the bees come, butterflies come, birds come, and that is enough. But they come on their own.When perfume is released to the winds the people start coming. There is no need to brag about the fact. The person who is trying to be clever simply shows he is not clever. He is afraid. If he does not show it, he will be caught. If he does not show his knowledge, he will be caught: people may come to know he is ignorant. Before they come to know, he has to make much noise.Morarji Desai was interviewed on the BBC a few days ago and the interviewer asked a very relevant question, significant too: “You talk so much of morality, why don’t you lead your country morally?”Morarji Desai said in anger, “Then what am I doing? I am leading my country both politically and morally. Do you mean to say that I should leave my prime ministership and lead the country only morally? Do you think yourself very smart? Nobody has asked this question of me. Do you think that you are very smart?”Now, the man had not asked anything wrong. It was a relevant question: if you talk about morality so much, why don’t you become a moral teacher? Why are you wasting your time being a prime minister? Then lead the country morally! Because what does a politician have to do with morality? A politician is bound to be immoral. Immorality is a strategy for the politician, and morality too. He talks about morality to hide all the immoral practices that he goes on doing behind it. The morality, and the talk about it, and the religion, are just a camouflage.The man had asked a relevant question, but Morarji became very much annoyed. And this is not a right way to answer, to ask, “Do you think you are very smart? Nobody has been able to ask me such a question up to now.”My feeling is that the man was really intelligent. He simply said, “Thank you,” and finished the interview. He must have been really intelligent. Now there was no point in continuing. Now there was no meaning. But why did Morarji Desai jump upon the poor man and ask him, “Do you think you are very smart?” That’s what he himself was trying to show, that he was very smart, very clever.The really intelligent person does not try to show that he is clever or smart. He is clever, so there is no need to show it. He is not even conscious of it; he is unselfconsciously intelligent. Cleverness is a plastic substitute for real intelligence.This man: …who thought that he was clever and could benefit from criticism, said, “If only this man could say something new! That is my only criticism.” Now, he must have been a believer in the new; the new is right. If anything is new, it is bound to be right. That is another extreme of the same stupidity. One extreme is: if anything is old, it is bound to be right. The other extreme of the same stupidity is that if anything is new, it is bound to be right.Right has nothing to do with old and new. Right is right, whether old or new doesn’t matter. It does not add anything to it.Bahauddin heard of this and invited the critic to dinner.That was his way of creating a situation.“I hope that you will approve of my lamb stew,” he said.When he had taken the first mouthful, the guest jumped up, shouting, “You are trying to poison me – this is not lamb stew!”“But it is,” said Bahauddin,”though since you don’t like old recipes, I have tried something new. This contains lamb all right, but there is a good dash of mustard, honey and emetic in it as well.”This was Bahauddin’s way of teaching. Now, Buddha would not have done this, neither would Mahavira. This was Bahauddin’s way; he wanted to create a real situation. He was a very scientific mind: he wanted to hammer the truth while the situation was hot. He did not believe in talking, he believed in a pragmatic experimentation. He was very empirical. Rather than refuting the man verbally, he refuted the man in a very realistic way. Now he has shown the man his stupidity without saying a word. Now the situation was such that the man could not argue.Just by being new, nothing becomes significant. And just by being old, nothing becomes wrong either.Bahauddin is saying, “What can I do? If I were to mix something of my own into my statements of truth just to make it new, it would be just like this stew. It: …contains lamb all right, but there is a good dash of mustard, honey and emetic in it as well. It would be poisonous, it would not be nourishing.”Man has existed for centuries; truth has been discovered again and again and again. Many people have reached to the ultimate light; they have expressed it in their own ways. Their languages are different but their message is the same.It is as if a few people go to see a sunset. One is a painter; he paints it. He is thrilled by the beauty of the sunset. He immediately goes to work; he is lost in his painting, he forgets everything, he has to paint the sunset. It has stirred his whole heart. That is his way of expressing it. Another man, seeing the same sunset, may simply sit silently and watch it. He is also thrilled, but he goes into deep meditation. One can see the grace on the man’s face. One can see that it is not only that the sun is setting, something is disappearing in the man too. Maybe it is the ego that is setting. He has fallen into a deep harmony with the sunset; he is no longer separate, he is part of it, part of the whole scene. He has disappeared as a spectator, he has melted into it. And the third may start playing on his flute; the sunset has become a song in him. And the fourth may start dancing. The message is the same, but the mediums are very different.Now, if later on you come to hear a recording of the flute, and you see a film of the dancer, and you see the painting of the painter, and you see a photograph of the meditator, will you be able to recognize that the source of it all was a sunset? Will you be able to logically reach the conclusion that they have all expressed the same thing? It will be impossible. Logically it is impossible – what relationship will you be able to find between the flute and the painting? What relationship is there between sound and color? How will you deduce that those colors represent the same thing as those sounds? And how will you be able to see that one man started dancing and another became so silent that he looked like a statue? How can the same sunset stir such different manifestations? Still it was the same sunset.It created dance in Krishna, it made Buddha a marble statue, it made Jesus sacrifice his all, it made Mahavira go naked in utter innocence, like a child. Different manifestations, but the source is the same.But how can you deduce it logically? Logically there is no way – unless you have also come upon the sunset. If you have seen the sunset, then you will be able to understand that the dance and the song on the flute and the painting and the man meditating are all using different languages – because they are talented in different languages and because they know different ways of expression – but the experience that triggered those different manifestations came from the same source, the same sunset.Bahauddin speaks in his own way, but the truth remains the same. Truth is eternal. Truth is. Truth simply is. It is never new, it is never old – or, it is as old as the mountains and as new as the dewdrops on the grass leaves in the early sun. It is both and it is neither; it is both and beyond.But you cannot arrive at this conclusion only by thinking, you will have to move into experiencing. Truth has to become an existential phenomenon to you, you have to live it. Only by living it will you be able to know it, not vice versa. Not by knowing it would you be able to live it, no.That’s what has been traditionally told to you: know about truth so that you can practice and live it. That is utter nonsense. Live truth so that you can know it. Living comes first, experiencing comes first, and then the shadow falls on your intelligence too, and your intelligence can make an understanding out of it.That’s why Bahauddin created this situation; otherwise it would have been an unnecessary argument. This was his way. Each master has his own way, but the truth is the same forever and forever.A monk asked, “When I wish to become a buddha, what then?”Joshu said, “You have set yourself quite a task, haven’t you?”The monk asked, “When there is no effort, what then?”Joshu said, “Then you are a buddha already.”You are truth. There is no need to know about it; you have to be silently listening to it in your inner world. You have to become still, calm and quiet, and suddenly the truth arises in you. Truth is already the case.Once Joshu was asked about the “holy” person, the “purified” person.He responded, “There is no room in my place for such a rascal! Why should one be purer than one originally is? And moreover, there is no one to be pure or impure inside.”Then he was asked, “Who is Joshu?”He said, “A rustic.” And that is what he happened to be: a Chinese peasant.Then he was asked, “Then who is the buddha?”He laughed and pointed to the field and said, “The man leading his oxen, it is he.”You are divine, you are buddhas. You have forgotten about it, that’s all. It has to be remembered. All that is needed is remembering. Nothing has to be achieved, you are it already. Truth is your very being, so it has not to be achieved. You have fallen into a kind of sleep. Awake, and you will know it – and you will not know it as an object, you will know it as your very subjectivity.Søren Kierkegaard says, “Truth is subjectivity.” He is right. Truth is your innermost core.And that is the only principle of the Sufis: Only truth is – or, only God is. How to practice it? Then too there is only one single practice, zikr: remember. Come out of your sleep: remember.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is simplicity?Simplicity is living without ideals. Ideals create complexity, ideals create division in you and hence complexity. The moment you are interested in becoming somebody else, you become complex. To be contented with yourself as you are is simplicity. The future brings complexity; when you are utterly in the present you are simple.Simplicity does not mean to live a life of poverty. That is utterly stupid because the person who imposes a life of poverty on himself is not simple at all. He is a hypocrite. The need to impose poverty means deep down he hankers for the diametrically opposite; otherwise why should there be any need to impose it? You impose a certain character upon yourself because you are just the opposite of it.The angry person wants to become compassionate, the violent person wants to become nonviolent. If you are nonviolent you will not try to become nonviolent. For what? The person who imposes poverty upon himself is simply trying to live out a life according to others, not according to his own innermost core, not according to his own spontaneity. And to live according to others is never to be simple.To live according to others means to live a life of imitation. It will be a plastic life; you will be one thing on the surface and just the opposite of it in your depths. And only the depths matter, the surface never matters. You will be a saint on the surface and a sinner deep down. And that’s what is going to be decisive about you because God is only in contact with your depth, not with your surface.The surface is in contact with the society, existence is in contact with the depth. Existence only knows what you are, it never knows what you are pretending. Existence never knows about your acting. You may be pretending to be a great saint, a mahatma, but existence will never know about it because it never knows about anything false. Anything false happens outside of existence. It knows only the real, the real you.Simplicity means to just be yourself, whosoever you are, in tremendous acceptance, with no goal, with no ideal. All ideals are crap; scrap all of them.It needs guts to be simple. It needs guts because you will be in constant rebellion. It needs guts because you will never be adjusted to the so-called – rotten – society that exists around you. You will constantly be an outsider. But you will be simple, and simplicity has beauty. You will be utterly in harmony with yourself. There will be no conflict within you, there will be no split within you.An ideal brings a split. The bigger the ideal, the bigger is going to be the split. An ideal means somewhere in the future one day, maybe in this life or another life, you will be a great saint. Meanwhile you are a sinner. It helps you to go on hoping, it helps you to go on believing in the surface – that tomorrow everything will be okay, that tomorrow you will be as you should be. Today can be tolerated. You can ignore it, you need not note it, you need not take any notice of it. The real thing is going to be tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. It is always today, it is always today.And the person who lives in ideals goes on missing reality because reality is now, here. To be now and to be here is to be simple: to be like the trees, herenow, to be like the clouds, herenow, to be like the birds, herenow, to be like buddhas, herenow. An ideal needs the future. Simplicity is not an ideal. People have made an ideal out of simplicity too, such is human stupidity.Simplicity can never be an ideal because no ideal can create simplicity. It is the ideal which poisons you and makes you complex, divides you, makes two persons in you – the one you are and the one you would like to be. Now there is going to be a constant war, a civil war.And when you are fighting with yourself – the violent person trying to be nonviolent, the ugly person trying to be beautiful, and so on, so forth – when you are constantly trying, endeavoring to be something else that you are not, your energy is dissipated in that conflict, your energy goes on leaking. And energy is delight. To have energy is to be alive, to be fresh, to be young.Look at people’s faces, how dull they appear. Look into their eyes, their eyes have lost all luster and all depth. Feel their presence and you will not feel any radiance, you will not feel any energy streaming from them. On the contrary you will feel as if they are sucking you. Rather than overflowing with energy they have become black holes. They suck you, they exploit your energy. Being with them you become poorer. That’s why when you go into a crowd and come back you feel tired, weary, you feel exhausted, you need rest. Why? Why after being in a crowd do you feel as if you have lost something? – you certainly lose something because the crowd consists of black holes. And the more unintelligent the crowd is, the more of a mob it is, the more you will feel exhausted.That’s why when you are alone, sitting silently, not with anybody – in a tremendous celibate state, just alone – you become replenished, rejuvenated. That’s why meditation makes you younger, makes you livelier. You start sharing something with existence. Your energy is no longer frozen, it starts flowing. You are in a kind of dance, as the stars are. A song arises in you.In the crowd you always lose. In meditation you always gain. Why? What happens in meditation? In meditation you become simple; the future is no longer your concern. That’s what meditation is all about: dropping the concern with past and future, being herenow. Only this moment exists. And whenever it happens, whenever only this moment exists – watching a sunrise, or looking at a white cloud floating in the sky, or just being with a tree, silently communing, or observing a bird on the wing – whenever you forget all about the past and the future and the present moment takes possession of you, when you are utterly possessed by this moment, you feel rejuvenated. Why? The split disappears, the split created by the ideals. You are one in that moment, integrated, you are all together.Simplicity is not an ideal, you cannot impose simplicity on yourself. That’s why I never say that people like Mahatma Gandhi are simple. They are not, they cannot be. Simplicity is their ideal, they are trying to attain it. Simplicity is a goal far away in the future, distant, and they are striving, they are straining, they are in great effort. How can you create simplicity out of effort? Simplicity simply means that which is. Out of effort you are trying to improve upon existence.Existence is perfect as it is, it needs no improvement. The so-called saints go on constantly improving upon themselves: drop this, drop that, repress this, impose that, this is not good, that is good. Continuous effort, and in that very effort they are lost.Simplicity is a state of effortlessness. It is humbleness: not the humbleness created against arrogance, not the humbleness created against the ego, not the humbleness opposite to the proud mind. No, humbleness is not the opposite of pride. Humbleness is simply the absence of pride.Try to see the point. If your humbleness is against your pride, if you have strived to drop your pride, your ego, your arrogance, what you have done is only repression. Now you will become proud of your humbleness, now you will start bragging how humble you are. This is what happens. Just see the so-called humble people; they are constantly broadcasting that they are humble.The really humble people will not know they are humble, how can they then brag about it? How can the humble person know he is humble? The humble person is no longer a person. The humble person is in a state of fana: the humble person has dissolved. Now he is only a presence. Humbleness is a presence, not a characteristic of personality, not a trait, but just a presence. Others will feel it, but he will not be able to feel it himself.So is the case with simplicity. Simplicity simply means living spontaneously moment to moment, not according to some philosophy, not according to Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, not according to any philosophy. Whenever you live according to a philosophy you have betrayed yourself, you are an enemy to yourself. Simplicity means to be in a deep friendship with yourself, to live your life with no idea interfering.It certainly needs guts because you will be living in constant insecurity. The man who lives with ideals is secure. He is predictable, that is his security. He knows what he is going to do tomorrow. He knows, if a certain situation arises, this is the way he will react to it. He is always certain. The man who is simple knows nothing about tomorrow, knows nothing about the next moment, because he is not going to act out of his past. He will respond out of his present awareness.The simple person has no character; only the complex person has character. Good or bad, that is not the point. There are good characters and bad characters, but both are complex. The simple person is characterless, he is neither good nor bad, but he has a beauty which no good people, no bad people can ever have. And the good and the bad are not very different, they are aspects of the same coin. The good person is bad behind it and the bad person is good behind it.You will be surprised to know that saints always dream that they are committing sins. If you look into the dreams of your so-called saints you will be very surprised. What kinds of dreams do they go on seeing? It is their suppressed mind that bubbles up, surfaces in their dreams. Sinners always dream that they have become saints. Sinners have the most beautiful dreams because they have been committing sins during their whole life. They are tired of all those things. Now the denied part starts speaking to them in their dreams.In dreams the denied part speaks to you, your unconscious speaks to you. The unconscious is the denied part. Remember, if you are good in your conscious, if you have cultivated good characteristics in your conscious, you will be bad: all that you have denied will become your unconscious, and vice versa.The simple person has no conscious, no unconscious. He has no division. He is simply aware. His whole house is full of light. His whole being knows only one thing: awareness. He has not denied anything, hence he has not created the unconscious. This is something to be understood.Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler and others think that the conscious and the unconscious are something natural. They are not. The unconscious is a by-product of civilization. The more civilized a person is, the bigger an unconscious he has because civilization means repression. Repression means he is denying a few parts of his being from coming into the light, he is pushing them into darkness, he is throwing them into his basement so that he never comes across them.People have thrown their sex, their anger, their violence into the basement, and they have locked the doors. But violence, sex, and anger, and things like that cannot be locked up. They are like ghosts. They can pass through walls, there is no way to prevent them. If one succeeds in preventing them in the daytime, they will come in the night – they will haunt him in his dreams.It is because of the unconscious that people dream. The more civilized a person, the more he dreams. Go to the aboriginals, the natural people – a few still exist – and you will be again surprised to know that they don’t dream much, very rarely, once in a while. Years pass and they never report any dreaming. They simply sleep without dreams because they have not repressed anything. They have been living naturally. The simple person will not have an unconscious, the simple person will not have dreams. But the complex person will have dreams.Mahatma Gandhi said that although he had succeeded in attaining celibacy as far as the waking consciousness is concerned, in dreams sexual imagery still floated into his being. To the very end he had sexual dreams, and he was very puzzled. He was puzzled because he was absolutely miseducated about the whole phenomenon. He thought that he had done whatever one could do to be celibate. And he had done that; there is no question about his sincerity as far as his efforts were concerned, he was very sincere. He had done all that is said by the tradition, and he had failed.In Mahatma Gandhi’s failure the whole tradition failed – the tradition of repression, the tradition of denying, the tradition of life negation, the tradition of imposing ideals. All failed in his experiment because in the night whenever he would sleep, the unconscious would start speaking, and the denied parts would start playing in his mind. All that he had denied would surface.That’s what happens to you. If you fast one day, in the night you will have a feast in your dreams. In dreams Deeksha is bound to invite you for a special treat! The fast creates the feast in the dream. And the people who are feasting in the day may start thinking of fasting; they always think about it.It is only rich countries which become interested in fasting. Now only America is interested in fasting, dieting, and all things like that. A poor country cannot think of fasting. A poor country is always fasting, always dieting, always undernourished. Only rich people think of fasting. In India, Jainas are the richest community, their religion consists of fasting. Mohammedans are the poorest, their religion consists of feasting. When a poor man celebrates a religious day he gives a feast. When a rich man celebrates his religious day he fasts.You can see the logic in it. We go on compensating. The dream is compensatory, it compensates your waking life. The simple man will not dream, the simple man will not have an unconscious.The simple man will be simple. He will live moment to moment with no idea how to live, he will not have any philosophy of life. He will trust in his intelligence. What is the need of having a philosophy? Why should one have a philosophy? – so that it can guide you. It means if you are stupid you need a philosophy of life so that it can guide you. If you are intelligent you don’t need any philosophy of life. Intelligence is enough unto itself, a light unto itself.A blind man asks for guidance: “Where is the door? In what direction should I move? Where is the turn?” Only the blind man prepares himself before he takes any move. The man who has eyes simply moves because he can see. When the door comes he will know, and when the turn comes he will know. He can trust in his eyes.That is the case with the inner world too. Trust in your intelligence, don’t trust in philosophies of life; otherwise you will remain stupid. The major part of humanity has remained unintelligent because it has trusted in philosophies of life – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan.Again, something of very great importance to be remembered: each child is born intelligent. Intelligence is not something that a few have and a few don’t have. Intelligence is the fragrance of life itself. Life has it – if you are alive you are intelligent – but if you never trust in it, it starts slowly, slowly disappearing from your life. If you don’t use your legs, you will lose the capacity to run. If you don’t use your eyes for three years and you remain with a blindfold, you will become blind. You can keep your senses alive only if you go on continuously using them.Intelligence is a natural phenomenon, every child is born intelligent. Very few people live intelligently, and very few people die intelligently. Ninety-nine point nine percent of people remain stupid their whole life – and they were not unintelligent in the beginning. So what happens? They never use their intelligence. When they are small children they trust their parents and their guidance.In a better world the parents, if they really love their children, will teach them to trust their own intelligence. In a better world the parents will help the children to be independent as soon as possible, to be on their own.Then they have to trust the teachers in the school, then the professors in the college and in the university. By the time one third of their life is gone, they come out of the university utterly stupid. One-third of their life they have been taught to trust somebody else; that’s how their intelligence has been prevented from functioning.Look at small children, how intelligent they are, how alive, how fresh, how tremendously ready to learn. And look at older people, dull, insipid, not ready to learn a thing, clinging to all that they know, clinging to the known, never ready to go on any adventure.In a better world children will be thrown upon themselves as fast as possible; the whole effort of the parents should be to make the child use his intelligence. And the whole effort, if the education is right – if it is education and not miseducation – will be to throw the child again and again to his own intelligence, so that he can function, so that he can use his intelligence. He may not be so efficient in the beginning, that is true – the teacher may have the right answer and if the student has to work out his own answer, the answer may not be so right – but that is not the point at all. The answer may not be so right, it may not correspond to the answers given in the books, but it will be intelligent. And that is the real crux of the matter.A teacher told his students, “Make some pictures, paint something about Jesus,” and the children painted. The teacher had been talking about Jesus, it was a Christian Sunday school.One child painted an airplane – it was a very haphazard effort, it only possibly looked like an airplane – and it had four windows.The teacher was intrigued. He asked, “Who are these people looking from the windows?”The child said, “One is God the Father, the other is Jesus Christ the Son, and the third is the Holy Ghost.”Certainly the teacher was even more curious. “And who is this fourth?” Three are okay, but who is this fourth?And the child said, “He is Pontius the Pilot.”The question may not be answered rightly – that is not the point – but look at the intelligence. Now, the teacher would have never found it on his own: “Who is the fourth?” Only a child can have such an intelligence, so fresh. Who bothers about your trinity? Just see the child and his intelligence.Watch children and you will be constantly surprised. But we start destroying their intelligence because we are just too concerned with the right answer – not the intelligent answer, but the right answer. That is a wrong concern. Let the answer be intelligent, let the answer be a little bit original, let the answer be the child’s own. Don’t be bothered about right, don’t be in such a hurry; the right will come on its own. Let the child search for it, let him stumble upon it on his own.Why are we in such a hurry? We simply drop the growth of the child’s intelligence, we supply the right answer. Just think: the whole process is that the child is never allowed to find the answer himself. We give him the answer. When the answer is given from the outside, intelligence need not grow – because intelligence only grows when it has to find the answer itself.But we are so obsessed with the idea of right. No wrong should ever be committed. Why not? And the person who never commits any wrong never grows. Growth needs that you should go astray sometimes, that you should start playing around, fooling around, that you should find original things – they may be wrong – and you should come to the right by your own efforts, by your own growth. Then there is intelligence.To be simple means to be intelligent. Simplicity is intelligence, living without ideals, without guides, without maps, just living moment to moment without any security.Our concern with the right and our fear of the wrong is nothing but our fear of the insecure. The right makes us secure, the wrong makes us insecure, but life is insecurity. There is no security anywhere. You may have a bank balance, but the bank can go bankrupt any day. You may have the security of having a husband or a wife, but the wife can leave you any moment. She can fall in love, or the husband may die.Life is insecure. Security is only an illusion that we create around ourselves, a cozy illusion. And because of this cozy illusion we kill our intelligence. The man who wants to live simply will have to live in insecurity, will have to accept the fact that nothing is secure and certain, that we are on an unknown journey, that nobody can be certain where we are going and nobody can be certain from where we are coming.In fact, except for stupid people nobody has illusions of certainty. The more intelligent you are, the more uncertain you are. The more intelligent you are, the more hesitant, because life is vast. Life is immense, immeasurable, mysterious. How can you be certain?Living in uncertainty, living in insecurity, is simplicity. And that’s what I mean by sannyas: a life of insecurity, a life without ideals, without character, a life not rooted in the past, not motivated by the future. A life utterly herenow.The second question:Osho,I am a very curious person. That's why I have come to you. What do you say about curiosity?Curiosity is good, curiosity is beautiful, but don’t stop at it. It is a good beginning, but not the end because curiosity always remains lukewarm. It is intellectual gymnastics. It is good to be curious because that is how one starts the journey of inquiry into existence, but if one simply remains curious there will be no intensity in it. One can move from one curiosity to another; one will become a driftwood from one wave to another wave, never getting anchored anywhere.Curiosity is good as a beginning, but then one has to become more passionate. One has to make life a quest, not only a curiosity.What do I mean when I say you have to make your life a quest? Curiosity creates questions, but your life never becomes a quest. Questions are many, a quest is one. When a question becomes so important to you that you are ready to sacrifice your life for it, it is a quest. When a question has such importance, such significance that you can gamble, that you can stake all that you have, it becomes a quest.Curiosity is good as a triggering point for a quest, but there are many people who simply remain curious their whole life. Their life is a waste. They are rolling stones, they never gather any moss. They remain childish, they never become mature. They ask a thousand and one questions, but they are not really interested in the answers. By the time one has answered them, they have prepared another question. In fact, when the master is answering the question, if the disciple is only a curious one, he is already thinking about other questions to ask. He is not listening to the answer at all. He is not interested in the answer, he has enjoyed asking the question.And then your curiosity can get you hooked onto something utterly nonsensical. There are people who are curious as to who made the world. Now this is utter nonsense. Buddha said it so many times: “How is it going to affect your life? It is not going to deepen your meditation. It is not going to help you become enlightened. It is not going to give you freedom. It is not going to give you any light. Why are you concerned with who made the world?” Whether it was A or B or C, a Christian God, a Hindu God or a Mohammedan God, why does it matter to you? Even if it is decidedly known that A made the world, what are you going to do then? You will start asking something else; that question is finished.But those questions are never finished – because those questions are utterly meaningless, absurd, so they are never finished. You can go on asking and asking and asking, and your whole life can become just a waste.It’s good to be curious as a beginning, but don’t remain curious forever. You will need some more passion in order to grow. Curiosity is not enough to transform your life. It is superficial, shallow. You will have to create a longing to know truth, an immense, intense passion for truth. Because that needs courage – because risk is involved – people go on thinking about questions. That is their substitute for the quest.And this is the difference between philosophy and religion: religion is a quest, philosophy is only curiosity. The philosopher is never transformed by whatever he finds. He remains the same. For example, if you meet Aristotle you will not find any impact of his philosophy in his life, no, nothing of it. He will be as devoid of his own philosophy as you are. He only thinks, he does not live it. But if you meet the Buddha, then whatever he says, he lives it. He says it only because he lives it, saying comes later on. Living comes first, living precedes it.Make your life a quest. It is good that you have come here, but don’t go as you have come. Go with a passion, a fire in your heart. Otherwise curiosity can be dangerous too.I have heard…Sam Jones, the most inquisitive man in New Haven, was riding down a branch line from Storrs, when an Englishman came into the car with a crutch and only one leg. After a long pause in which he was consumed with growing curiosity, Sam began talking: “Guess you were in the army, stranger?” looking down at the leg.“Oh, no, I have never been in the army.”“Fought a duel somewhere, maybe?”“No, sir, never fought a duel.”“These streetcars are dangerous things,” hazarded Sam.“I was never in a streetcar or railroad accident,” the Englishman expanded.All of Sam’s leading questions got him nowhere. At last he asked outright just how the man had lost his leg.“I will tell you,” said the Englishman, “on condition that you will promise not to ask me another question.”“Very well, just tell me how you lost that leg and I won’t ask another question.”The Englishman regarded him agreeably. “It was bit off,” he said.“Bit off!” exclaimed Sam. “Well, I declare. I should like to know what on earth…”“No, sir, not another question,” glared the Englishman. “Not one.”Sam Jones reached New Haven with a sick headache. He died within a week, of unsatisfied curiosity.Let your curiosity be transformed here. Let it become a flame in your being, a quest. You have come here philosophically. Go from here as a religious person.Religion is the quest for truth. It wants to know it, and not on somebody else’s authority, not borrowed from scriptures. Religion wants to know it on one’s own, and to have that quality is one of the greatest blessings of life.I create inquiry here, not an inquiry that can ever be satisfied by anybody else – even I cannot satisfy it. I simply give you a thirst, I make you more and more thirsty. One day that very thirst will take you into your innermost shrine. There truth waits for you. There godliness abides.The third question:Osho,Shree Morarji Desai, Prime Minister of India, told a group of your sannyasins who met him at Surat the other day that he did not like your thinking, your philosophy of life, and your work. He also showed a strong dislike for our ashram and its activities. Osho, would you please comment?Morarji Desai has the mind of a fascist. How does it matter whether he likes my philosophy of life or not? Who is he? By being the prime minister of this country, it does not mean that everybody has to agree with him, that only that which he likes can exist or has the right to exist. If he does not like my work, my activities, my philosophy of life, that is his problem. He should try to understand more. He should try to be a little more intelligent, a little more aware and meditative.That does not mean that he has to prevent my work, but that’s what he is doing, trying to do. And the strange thing is, he has come to power in the name of democracy. What is democracy, then?Democracy means everybody has the right to think in his own way, to live in his own way. Democracy means that the government will keep away from interfering in people’s freedom, that the government is not going to impose its own ideology on everybody.What I am saying, what I am, has nothing to do with him or his government. But this is how it happens to every politician: when he is out of power he talks about democracy, when he is in power he becomes a fascist. Morarji Desai is another illustration of Lord Acton’s famous statement: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Just within one and a half years he has forgotten all about democracy. It always happens.It is something strange that power changes people. My own observation is that power does not change them, in fact, but only exposes them. It brings whatever is real in their being to the surface. When a person is not in power, he cannot be fascist, he has to hide that trait. He cannot be arrogant, he has to create a facade around himself so nobody comes to know about it; otherwise he will never be able to get into power. Once he gets into power, there is no need. He is no longer afraid of the people, now he is in power. Now he can do whatever he always wanted to do but was not capable of doing.Morarji Desai has been against me all along. The conflict has continued at least for fifteen years, but because he was not in power, he could not do a thing. Now he is in power, so the fascist in him surfaces.A group of former schoolmates had a reunion and were talking about old times.One of them, a great politician, said, “When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a pirate.”“I am glad one of us has fulfilled his ambition,” said somebody.Politics is the last shelter of the scoundrels. Why do people seek power? Somewhere deep down there is a great desire to dominate, that’s why they seek power. So naturally, when they have power, they want to dominate, they want to dominate each and every phenomenon that is happening.My work is not political, not at all. Why should he be worried about my work? What I am doing is something psychological. It is none of his business, but the power wants to express itself. A deep desire has always been in him to prevent my work, but up to now he was not capable of doing it. Now he is capable of doing it, and he cannot resist the temptation.Once, when I started criticizing Mahatma Gandhi, Morarji Desai wanted that my entry into his province, Gujarat, should be prevented – even my entry – but he could not do a thing about it. Now he is in power, and he has had this wound about me in his heart for fifteen years. But his dislike is not a criterion. If he dislikes, he is perfectly free to dislike. My own feeling is that he does not understand what I am doing here.In the first place, I have no philosophy of life. All that I am teaching to my people is to live without a philosophy of life, to just live. I am teaching life, not a philosophy of life.Secondly, I am not teaching any doctrine, any dogma. I am not teaching how to think. On the contrary, I am teaching my people how to be without thought, how not to be in the thinking, how to disappear from the world of thinking, how to be utterly silent so not even a single thought moves in your mind. When the screen of the mind is utterly empty, when the projector of thinking has stopped functioning, meditation arises. And meditation is the door to God.I am not here teaching people how to think. This is not a school of philosophy. I am not trying to give you better minds. This is not a place to cultivate mind and knowledge, this is a place to drop all mind and all knowledge. This is a place where you learn how to be a no-mind. I teach no-mind.So my feeling is that he does not understand a bit what is happening here. But he is a very prejudiced man and he thinks he knows. He thinks he knows all that is worth knowing. And all that he knows is just playing the games of politics and nothing else.You say he said that: “…he did not like your thinking, your philosophy of life, and your work. He also showed a strong dislike for our ashram and its activities.” He is obsessed with me and with my ashram. Why should he have a strong dislike for me and for my ashram? He must be having great nightmares about me and my people. You must be doing Kundalini Meditation in his dreams, and Chaotic Meditation. This dislike shows that somewhere deep down there is a like. This enmity shows that somehow deep down he is interested. If you hate somebody so much, that is an indication that you are attracted, that you are magnetically pulled.And I know there is a reason for that magnetic pull. He cannot come because of his arrogance, but the pull is there. His whole life he has tried to meditate and he has failed. Hence the attraction. He wants to meditate, but it is difficult for his egoistic pattern of life to come here as a disciple, to come to learn. It is difficult.But the pull is there, and whenever you are attracted and something prevents you, attraction becomes repulsion. When love starts being blocked, it becomes hate. Hate is nothing but love doing shirshasana – love standing on its own head. He is immensely attracted; that’s why he goes on making statements about me, goes on criticizing me, without any understanding at all.He also said somewhere, just a few days ago, that he is willing to appoint a commission to inquire into the activities of my ashram, of this commune. But he said, “That is not going to profit Osho and his work.” Now what kind of commission will it be if he has already decided that it is not going to profit the ashram? A commission means an open inquiry. If the decision has already been taken, if he has already concluded that it is not going to help my work, that it is going to harm my work, what kind of inquiry would it be?That’s what he is doing with other people, with Indira Gandhi. He already decided, and then a commission was made. The commission only went through empty gestures; the conclusion had already been reached. The commission only had to make a show that justice was being done.This is not the way of a democratic person. This is the way of a fascist. There is only one hope, that he is very old. It is good that he is not young; otherwise this country would suffer a very long time.It is very difficult for Indians to be democratic because India has lived in a very fascist way down the centuries. The Hindu mind is fascist. The Hindu mind believes that Hindus are the purest people in the world; that they are the highest people of the world; that they are the most religious people of the world; that God has chosen them specially; that their country is not ordinary earth, it is divine land; that their scriptures are not ordinary scriptures like other scriptures of other religions – they have been written by God himself.The Hindu mind is fascist, it is not religious, and the Hindu mind has lived with this attitude for at least five thousand years. It has crushed the downtrodden, the poor; they have not been treated as human beings. They are called untouchables – they cannot even be touched. Not only can they not be touched, the Hindu mind has not even tolerated their shadows to fall upon them. When an untouchable in the ancient days used to pass, he had to shout, “I am passing through this street. Please, move yourself away from me.” Otherwise who knows? If even his shadow touched you, you would have to take a bath, you would have to purify yourself. And naturally, if you had to take a bath, if unnecessarily you had to go back to the river and you had to do the whole ritual, prayer, etcetera, and then do your purification, you became annoyed.Untouchables have even been killed just because their shadow has touched a brahmin, the highest Hindu caste. And even today they are being killed. Since Morarji Desai has come to power, in this one-and-a-half years, more untouchables have been killed than ever in the thirty years’ history of Indian freedom. Their houses are being burned, right now, to this day, the twentieth century. People are treated like cattle – not even like cattle, worse than that. People are treated as things. People are being burned and killed, their women are being raped for no other reason, just because they are untouchables.And small things annoy the Hindu mind. If an untouchable wants to go into the temple he cannot. If he tries he will be killed. These are the people who think they are religious, and even the temple is not democratic. If an untouchable goes to the well, he is not allowed to draw water from the common well because the well will become impure. If an untouchable wants his children to be in the same school, it is difficult, and so on, so forth.So, small things annoy the Hindu mind, they have been fascist all along. And Morarji Desai is a Hindu chauvinist.Hindus have been against women down the ages. No other country has repressed women like this. The woman has been condemned as the door to hell. The woman is the source of all sins; the woman is the source of all degradation, immorality. The woman is the source of all that is bad in the world, all that is evil. She is the agent of evil.Now, what kind of mind is this? And these people brag about their purity, their religiousness, their spirituality. Now, these are the things that are creating trouble about me in Morarji Desai’s mind. I respect woman as much as I respect man. To me, they are equal. And I condemn all those scriptures which have condemned women as the source of evil. Those scriptures are the source of evil!To me, the brahmin and the untouchable are the same. I don’t believe in any castes. I don’t believe in any distinctions between people – black and white, Hindu and Mohammedan, Christian and Jew. And that is creating great turmoil in their minds. What am I doing? It seems blasphemous, it seems that I am betraying their tradition.I am not betraying their tradition, I am simply destroying it! It needs to be burned, it needs to be thrown to the dogs, this whole tradition.And then, the Hindus have been very much against life. Morarji Desai is a representative: he is life-negative. I am life-affirmative. My only sin is that I love life and that I teach my people to live intensely, totally, wholly.But in a democracy nobody can prevent me. Otherwise why go on bragging that this country is the greatest democracy of the world? Your actions show just the opposite. But the Hindu mind is hypocritical, it says one thing and does another. Even the so-called greatest Hindus are hypocrites, their saying and doing are never the same. They have said that only God exists and all is illusion. And still, the untouchable is not an illusion. The distinction between the brahmin and the untouchable is real – and all is illusion, only God is real.Even Shankara – the man who represents the essential Hindu teaching of God being the only reality and the world being illusory – even he was very angry one day when he took his bath in the Ganges in Varanasi. He was touched by an untouchable as he was coming up the steps. He started abusing the untouchable, and the untouchable said, “Sir, you have said that all is illusion, only God is true. Then why are you feeling so offended? One illusion has touched another illusion, and can there be a real touch between two illusions? The touch is also illusion. Why are you getting so annoyed? And if only God is real, and you say God is everywhere and all is God, am I not part of God? Only you are part of God? And if a God has touched a God, how can one God make another God impure?”But this is how the Hindu mind has functioned. It talks of great things and it lives in a very opposite way. That has become its habit.“Chandulal,” said a rich Hindu grocer in Ahmedabad to his assistant, “have you mixed the glucose with the syrup?”“Yes, sir.”“And sanded the sugar?”“Yes, sir.”“Dampened the lettuce and mushrooms?”“Yes, sir.”“And put water in the milk?”“Yes, sir.”“Then you may come in to prayers.”This has been the way. Life is one thing – and Hindus live it as disgustingly as anybody else in the world – and philosophy is another. They are beautiful talkers, immensely articulate, very philosophical and logical, but that seems to have nothing to do with their quality of life.With me they are all angry because I am not a hypocrite. I live the way I like to live. I say things that are in tune with my life. For example, I am not against life and its joys: that’s what I say, and that’s how I live. They would have loved me very much if I was living like a beggar on the surface, if I was standing naked on the road, and carrying a deep desire inside me to reach sooner or later to heaven and enjoy all the joys there.And what joys are these so-called saints thinking to enjoy in heaven? The same joys they are renouncing here. They renounce love here, they renounce the woman here. And they are waiting for paradise where they will get beautiful women whose bodies are of gold; whose bodies don’t perspire and who never age, who remain stuck at the age of sixteen. They are waiting for heaven because there are trees – they are called kalpavrikshas, wish-fulfilling trees. You sit underneath the tree and any wish that arises in you is immediately fulfilled, immediately. Not a single instant passes between the wish and its fulfillment.But here, live a pretentious life. Don’t enjoy, don’t love, renounce everything, and wait for eternal pleasures. Those people think they are renunciates? What kind of renunciation is that? They are simply living a double life. Their inner life remains that of desire, longing, lust, and their outer life remains that of an ascetic.I am not an ascetic. I am living in paradise herenow. And I teach you also to live in paradise herenow: this very earth the paradise, this very body the buddha. I am not against life’s pleasures, they are beautiful. I am not against all that life can shower on you. Its beauties, its joys, its blessings have to be received gratefully. I am not in any way condemnatory of anything.I am not a worshipper of poverty because poverty is the source of all sins. I would like the whole earth to become richer and richer, more and more affluent. I would like everybody to have all that technology can provide now. Nobody need live starved, beggarly, dirty.This is possible now. Technology can make this earth better than any paradise that you have invented in your scriptures.But the Indian mind is against all joys. And deep down, there is a great desire to have them too – which is natural. I am not saying that it should not be there inside you. I am saying you should not live against it. It is natural, it is God-given. Everyone wants to live a life of pleasure and not of pain. This is natural, and I don’t see that anything is wrong in it. Everybody would like to have a beautiful house surrounded by beautiful trees, and this is natural. The person who does not want it that way has something wrong in his head. He is neurotic.Once a Hindu sannyasin came to see me. He saw all the beautiful trees and many flowers, and in the grounds where I was living I had a small pond, and there were lotus flowers.He looked all around and he said, “Why all these trees? Why all these flowers? A man like you should live an ascetic life.” He was angry.From where was this anger coming? He was living a neurotic life. To live with lotus flowers is beautiful, it is prayerful, it is meditative. Everybody should have a pond with lotus flowers.But in India, people are even against flowers. Then they think they are great spiritualists, they think they are not hedonists. Their hedonism is only postponed, that’s all. And because of that postponement they live a double life.I am teaching my people to live a single, unitary life. There is no need to postpone. Be natural. I want Buddha, Gautam the Buddha, and Zorba the Greek to come closer and closer, to become one. My sannyasin has to be “Zorba the Buddha.” Bring earth and heaven closer; let God and his world be joined together. Let your body and your soul be one, a song sung in togetherness, a dance where body and soul meet and merge.I am a materialist-spiritualist. That is their trouble: they cannot conceive of it. They have always thought that materialism is something diametrically against – opposite to – spiritualism, and I am trying to bring them closer. In fact, that’s how it is. Your body is not opposed to your soul, otherwise why should they be together? And God is not opposed to the world, otherwise why should he create it?There is tremendous harmony between the creator and his creation. In fact, when you attain the space in which I am, you will see the creator has become his creation, he is not separate at all. He has become the trees and the birds and the animals and the mountains and the rivers and the people. God has become his world.This is my fundamental: I am in tremendous love with existence because it is God’s manifestation, in all its forms. There is nothing lower and nothing higher, all is one. And the “lower” and the “higher” have to be bridged – because, down the centuries, you have been taught that the lower is far away from the higher – so they have become unbridged. A gap has come into your being and that gap has to be bridged.That’s my whole work here, and I can understand why Morarji strongly dislikes it. He is a traditionalist, an orthodox Hindu, with no vision, with no insight into life. He is just a fascist Hindu, and my approach toward life is that of individual freedom, utter freedom for the individual. The individual should not be interfered with unless he becomes dangerous to other people. Unless he starts interfering with other people’s freedom, he should not be interfered with. Each individual has to be himself and has to be given space enough to be himself. That the fascist mind cannot allow.They have already decided against me. They have not come here, they have not seen what is happening here. Morarji is not ready to appoint a commission so that our people can explain to their so-called experts what is happening here, so they can have a more realistic approach. He is not willing to appoint a commission. He says if I go on insisting on a commission, he will appoint one, but he wants it not to be helpful in any way; it can even harm. Why? A commission has to be open.I am not worried whether his commission harms or helps. We will have a good time, it will be fun. We will share a few jokes, that’s all. I am not worried whether his commission helps me or harms me. What can his commission do? But his commission may be helped. They may start thinking anew, it may be a blessing for them.The politicians go on thinking that they are creating great order. That’s what Morarji Desai thinks, that he is creating great order in society, that I am dangerous, that I am creating disorder. I am not creating disorder. The society is in disorder. The society is already dying, it is rotten. You have become accustomed to its rottenness, that’s why you can’t see it. Just look around. What kind of society is this? Everybody is against everybody else, everybody is at each other’s throats. Everybody is jealous, violent, angry, full of hatred. Everybody is trying to dominate and kill the other in some way or other. And everybody is suicidal. Nobody seems to be dancing with joy, nobody seems to be in a state of celebration.What more disorder can there be? The whole country is suffering from violence, hooliganism, murders; the whole country is in chaos. And these people think that I will destroy the order of the society.I am trying to bring real order. Real order comes from within, it comes out of understanding. Real discipline is not that which is imposed from the outside.That’s the difference between religion and the irreligious mind. The irreligious mind is always behavioristic. The irreligious mind is represented by Pavlov, Skinner, and people like that. The Skinnerian approach is that you change the behavior of the person and that will change his inner being. The religious approach is, you change his inner being and his behavior will follow. The outer is a shadow, it is not the center.That’s what I am doing here. My work is utterly religious. It is against Skinner and the behaviorists. I don’t believe that you can change the person’s soul by changing his outer behavior. You can change his outer behavior and he can pretend, he can act – and deep down he will remain the same because the center remains unaffected by the circumference.You can start being outwardly simple – you can drop your clothes, you can renounce your home – but sitting in a Himalayan cave, what will you think? How is your thinking going to be different? How will your mind be different just by moving from the house to the cave? The mind does not change so easily. And if the mind changes, you are alone even in the crowd, you are in meditation even in the marketplace.I am trying to make people aware that change, real change, comes from within and spreads outward. But they are afraid that I may create chaos.A surgeon, an architect, and a politician were arguing about which of their professions was the oldest.“Mine is,” said the surgeon. “It began when God removed Adam’s rib to make Eve.”“My profession is older,” said the architect. “It began when God created the world out of chaos.”“Yes, “ said the politician, “but who created the chaos?”Do Morarji Desai and company think I am going to create chaos? I am trying to bring order, real order. Their anger, their annoyance, is natural. If I am right, then they are wrong. And not only that they are wrong, but their whole tradition is wrong, their scriptures are wrong. They have lived up to now in illusions, without taking any note of reality.I am bringing a new vision, a new religion into the world, a religion which is wide enough to contain the world and God together, a vision big enough to contain both the soul and the body. Up to now, the materialist was thought to be irreligious. He lived half, he lived the body part, and the spiritualist lived the other half, the soul part. Both were ugly because both were incomplete. Both had wounds because both needed the other to be whole and the other was missing. Both were unbalanced, both were neurotic.Man can become sane only when man becomes whole. How to make man a perfect circle, a wholeness? The only way is to bring materialism and spiritualism closer and closer – so close that their boundaries disappear, that matter becomes divine, that God becomes matter. Only in that state will man be able to be sane.When traveling all over the country, while I was preparing for you people, I was studying all kinds of people, neurotic, psychotic – all kinds of people, spiritualists, materialists. Once I saw Morarji Desai too, just to see this kind of neurosis, to watch, to observe what kind of neurosis creates a politician. And watching him, I was so perfectly satisfied that I never went to see any other politician. Enough was enough.If I am right, they will have to drop many vested interests, and that is difficult. They would rather like to forget all about me. But I am not going to leave them so easily. I am going to insist, I am going to hammer the truth again and again.This time, something is bound to happen. The world is ready, it has prepared for many centuries for this revolution to happen. It has become tired of materialists, it has become tired of spiritualists. It needs a new vision. And this new vision is going to be against both. The spiritualist, the old spiritualist, is going to be against me. And you will be surprised; the old materialist is also going to be against me.Just the other day I was reading an article against me by Khwaja Ahmed Abbas. He is a communist, a materialist. Now, Morarji Desai and Khwaja Ahmed Abbas are strange bedfellows! Morarji Desai thinks he is a spiritualist. Khwaja Ahmed Abbas thinks he is a communist, a materialist, a Marxist. Both are against me. How can they both be against me? They can both be against me because the spiritualist will feel that I am betraying spiritualism by bringing materialism in, and the materialist will feel that I am betraying materialist philosophy by bringing spiritualism in.So you have to be aware of the fact that I will have more enemies than Jesus had, I will have more enemies than Buddha had. But I will also have more friends than Jesus had, and I will also have more friends than Buddha had. And this time the division will be such that all the neurotic people, spiritualist, materialist, will be against me – and all the sane people and people who would like the world to become sane will be with me.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Once upon a time there was a fox who met a young rabbit in the woods.The rabbit said, “What are you?”The fox said, “I am a fox, and I could eat you up if I wanted to.”“How can you prove that you are a fox?” asked the rabbit.The fox didn’t know what to say because in the past rabbits had always run from him without such inquiries.Then the rabbit said, “If you can show me written proof that you are a fox, I’ll believe you.”So the fox trotted off to the lion, who gave him a certificate that he was a fox.When he got back to where the rabbit was waiting, the fox started to read out the document. It so pleased him that he dwelt over the paragraphs with lingering delight.Meanwhile, getting the gist of the message from the first few lines, the rabbit ran down a burrow and was never seen again.The fox went back to the lion’s den, where he saw a deer talking to the lion.The deer was saying, “I want to see written proof that you are a lion.”The lion said, “When I am not hungry, I don’t need to bother. When I am hungry, you don’t need anything in writing.”The fox said to the lion, “Why didn’t you tell me to do that, when I asked for a certificate for the rabbit?”“My dear friend,” said the lion, “you should have said that it was requested by a rabbit. I thought that it must be for a stupid human being, from whom some of these idiotic animals have learned this pastime.”Man is continuously preoccupied with inventing a self for himself, but the invented self can never be the real self. There is no possibility that the invented will ever be the real. The real self has to be discovered, not invented. The invented self becomes our ego. The real self is not in any way the ego. The real self is not a self at all; it is utter emptiness, and the silence of emptiness, and the joy of emptiness.If you want to invent a self you will have to ask others. That’s the only way to invent it, to gather opinions of what people think about you. That’s what you go on doing your whole life. That’s why you are so afraid of people’s disrespect. That becomes your bondage. You want to be respectable – because if you are respectable people’s opinion about you is beautiful. They praise you and you can have a better self.If you are not respectable people condemn, and then you will not ever have a beautiful self, you will have an ugly self. Your self consists only of the opinions of others, it is a patchwork. A has said something, and B has said something else, and C… And so on, so forth. You collect all these things, these paper cuttings. Then you make an image out of them; you fix them together, you glue them together.From the very beginning the child starts collecting this rubbish. The mother says something, the father, the brother, the neighbors. If it is gratifying he starts feeling proud, if it is not gratifying he starts feeling depressed. To avoid depression he goes on flattering everybody that he meets. The flattery is nothing but an arrangement: “I will flatter you so that you can give me a good certificate. I will flatter you more if you are willing to give me an even better certificate.” But all these certificates are just from the outside, and nobody knows you, who you are – not even you yourself.So what others say about you is almost irrelevant to your reality. They only know your appearance, and appearances can be very false. A person who looks very gentle on the outside may be very egoistic inside. That gentleness may be just a camouflage, a protection, an armor. A man who looks very clever on the outside may be just the opposite, he may be utterly stupid. The stupid person has to pretend cleverness; it hurts to know, “I am stupid.”The man who goes on bragging about his knowledge is bound to be ignorant, but who wants to be known as an ignorant person? He collects some information and goes on broadcasting that information to people. Slowly, slowly he gathers a reputation that he knows, but this knowledge is false, this reputation is false. These certificates are given to you by people who don’t know you, who can’t know you. There is no way for anybody else to know you except yourself. And whatever they are saying, they are saying it only so that you can give them a good certificate.So it is a mutual conspiracy; people are deceiving each other. Somebody says, “You are beautiful,” and of course you have to return the compliment. Somebody says, “You are so intelligent,” and you have to return the compliment: “You must be a very intelligent person, otherwise you would not have known about my intelligence. You must be a man of great understanding – you are the first man who has understood me.”This constant preoccupation with inventing one’s own self has to be understood. Why is it there at all? It is there because you are feeling a constant gnawing emptiness within your heart. You don’t know who you are, and it is very difficult to live without knowing who you are. Unless you know who you are, whatever you do is going to be a failure, a frustration.You can succeed in being fulfilled only if you know who you are. Then you will choose your life in such a way that it becomes a fulfillment to your real needs. Otherwise, not knowing yourself, whatever you do remains accidental. Maybe once in a while your arrow may reach the target, but that is accidental and it will happen only once in a while. You are shooting in darkness, without knowing who you are, without knowing where the target is. It is almost impossible that sometimes it may hit the target; ninety-nine percent is the possibility that you will remain empty and you will die empty. Your life will be a tragedy. That’s why people carry such a tragic sense on their faces, in their eyes.Watch people, watch yourself, and you will see – people are living a very tragic existence. Their whole past has gone in vain and they know that today is also slipping out of their hands. And deep down the suspicion that whatever they have been doing in the past they are going to do in the future too. So it is all a meaningless journey: “a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing.”And unless significance is felt, how can you be joyous? Unless your life throbs with significance, how can it become a song? Only a significant life becomes a song. When you start feeling there is meaning, when you start feeling that you are fulfilling something very essential to existence – that you are needed; that you are part of this cosmic drama, this cosmic play; that without you something will be missing; that without you the drama will not be the same at all – great respect arises toward yourself and in that very respect, gratitude, prayer, thankfulness arise toward existence.But the most fundamental thing is to know oneself: Who am I? And to know oneself means to discover – because you are already there, you are not to be invented. Whatever you invent will be a fiction, will not be the truth. And how can you delude yourself? Maybe for one day, for two days you can delude yourself, but for how long? Delusions wear out. They cannot remain against reality forever. Reality goes on asserting.There are only two kinds of people in the world: the majority consists of those who invent the self, and a very small minority consists of those who discover the self. And the difference is vast, the difference is tremendous. The two are worlds apart. A Buddha, a Jesus, a Bahauddin, a Rumi, a Mansoor: they discover.What do I mean by discovery? The first thing to remember is that you already have the self. You are. That needs no proof. That is indubitably there, you cannot even doubt it.The great European philosopher, Descartes, says, “The only indubitable fact about life is that I am.” Only this cannot be doubted; everything else can be doubted. You can doubt the world; it may not be, it may be just a dream, as Hindus say – that it is maya, an illusion, a dream in God’s mind. Maybe, possibly, it cannot be denied, there is no way to deny it. That’s exactly what Berkeley says: the world is not a real world, it is a fantasy, a thought, not a thing. Nobody has ever been able to refute Shankara or Berkeley. It cannot be refuted. How to refute it?Berkeley was walking with Doctor Johnson. Doctor Johnson was a realist. He was very offended by the Berkeleian idea that the world is only a thought, not a thing, that it is just a fiction, a mind projection: there are no trees outside, there are no people outside, only I am. Johnson, being a realist, was getting very angry, the more so because he could not find how to refute the man logically. How to prove that the tree outside is really there?How to prove it? Because in a dream we also see trees, and they look almost the same as these trees. And in the dream also we think that they are there. Only when we wake up in the morning do we find that they were not there. Who knows, when death comes and we finally wake up, we may come to know that all those trees, and the people, and the world, and the earth, and the moon, and the sun, were just a long, long dream. How to prove it?He took a rock from the road and hit Berkeley’s feet with it. Blood started oozing. Berkeley was in great pain and very angry too. He said, “What kind of behavior is this? What wrong have I done to you? Why have you hit me with the rock? I don’t see the point.”Johnson laughed and he said, “This is to refute your so-called idealism. Now, if the rock is unreal, why are you crying? Why are there tears in your eyes? How can an unreal rock hit you?”Berkeley started laughing. He said, “But my pain is unreal too, and my tears are unreal too. Only I am real. Who knows that the tears are flowing, that the blood is oozing, that my feet are hurting like hell? Only the I who knows, the witness, is real. Everything else, Doctor Johnson – you and your rock and the world – is all unreal.”Now, how to prove it? Johnson was not capable of proving it. His realistic argument had failed, utterly failed. No, it cannot be proved, it is always doubtful.For example, you are listening to me – maybe you are just dreaming. Maybe many have fallen asleep, maybe you are asleep with closed eyes and you are having a dream. The other cannot be proved.The only indubitable phenomenon is my own existence. That cannot be doubted. Why can you not doubt it? – because even to doubt it, it will be needed. If I say I am not, even to say this – that I am not – I have to be there. So to doubt oneself is the only impossible thing.We don’t know who we are. The only indubitable fact has not been discovered, and we have been struggling to discover many dubitable things. And the irony is that we go asking others, whose existence is dubitable, “Who am I?” Whatever they are going to say will remain only their opinion.They cannot penetrate your being, nobody can penetrate anybody else’s being. In your innermost core you are ultimately celibate, alone. Nobody has ever walked into that solitude, into that shrine of your being, and nobody will ever walk there. Even lovers cannot penetrate each other’s core. The core remains beyond. Only you, and only you, can know it.But people go on asking, “Who am I?” Watch yourself: directly, indirectly, that’s what you are trying to do. How much you hanker for a compliment! How much you long for somebody to say that you are beautiful; that you are very intelligent; that “You have made my life worth living”; that “It is because of you that I have tasted something of meaning.” Just watch your mind – this is a constant preoccupation.And how worried you become when somebody says something that goes against your image, how you feel hurt, how you start defending, fighting, arguing. Why is there so much fear? Why is there so much longing to have good opinions from others? – because that is the only way to create a false self.The false self is cheap. It is very easy: it needs only a little sociability, it needs only a little cleverness, cunningness; it needs only to be formal, mannerly, it needs etiquette. It needs a little alertness about what people want: “Be that. If you cannot, at least pretend to be that.” If they respect a knowledgeable person, gather knowledge. Go to the university, have a few degrees so that you can write a few letters behind your name. If they respect character, cultivate character.It may be doing great harm to you, that is not the point. It may be going against your grain, it may be creating a division in your being, it may be creating a duality, a schizophrenia, but that is not the point. Respect has to be gained because only through respect can you have a beautifully decorated self, and everybody will be supporting it.A sannyasin has to be very much aware of this trap. You are not to invent your self. You have to discover it. And discovery means an inward journey. Discovery means not asking the other but asking yourself, “Who am I?” Asking in your aloneness, “Who am I?” letting this question penetrate deeper and deeper, like an arrow, so that it penetrates your very core – and there, one day, is the revelation.The moment you know who you are, your whole life is transformed. Your whole life becomes divine because you are gods. Your faces are different, your talents are different, your colors are different, your minds, your conditionings are different, but these are only layers around you; they don’t constitute your core. The core is your original face, uncontaminated by the society.When you come to know your original face – the face that you had before you were born and the face that you will again have when you have died, the face that has been given to you by God – that face is the greatest experience. Knowing it, you know all. Not knowing it, you can become very knowledgeable, but you are just hiding your ignorance.The people who are very concerned with inventing a self live a very mediocre life. They have to live a mediocre life because they have to satisfy the mediocre crowd around themselves.In India, if you want to be respected as a mahatma you will have to starve, you will have to fast. Unless you fast, nobody is going to respect you as a mahatma. If you want that identity, you will have to fast. You will have to adjust to the demands of a mediocre society.And society everywhere consists of mediocre minds – the middle class, the bourgeoisie – those who have known nothing except chasing after money and power, those who have never seen anything in depth, those who are not aware at all of the vertical dimension of life, those who go on running as fast as they can on the horizontal plane. Then, one day they fall in their graves without knowing at all what they have missed, without knowing the glory and the splendor of life and existence.Society consists of mediocre people, and to adjust yourself to mediocre people is to become mediocre on your own. Beware of it. Watch your steps. The trap is all around, and the trap is very alluring because it gives you the cheap satisfaction of being a certain self. And all kinds of selves are available; you can go window-shopping. If you want to become a mahatma, the mask is sold in the marketplace. You just have to know a few requirements of how to be a mahatma: what to eat, what not to eat; when to sleep, when not to sleep; how to move, with whom to move; what scriptures to read, what books to avoid. Just small things, trivia. Any stupid person can manage it. In fact only stupids can manage it.If you have intelligence, you would like to live your own life on your own terms. You will not compromise. You will live like a Jesus. Even if it means crucifixion, it’s okay. Jesus died on the cross, but died with a self, died with a discovered self. That’s why he was not angry with the people who were killing him – because now he knew nobody could kill. People can kill only the self that they have given to you. They are powerful about it; they can withdraw their support and you will start collapsing.People can only kill politicians, not mystics. People can kill the politician because the politician exists only on people’s votes, their opinions. They can withdraw their opinion and he is nobody. The throne of the politician is carried by the mediocre crowd; any moment it can change its mind, any moment somebody else can satisfy it more, can be more compromising with the mediocre people. It can change immediately.You cannot destroy a religious man; that is impossible. You can kill him, but even in your killing, he remains deathless.That’s the whole meaning of the resurrection. People crucified Jesus, but they could not kill him: that is the meaning of the parable. I am not saying that it is a historical fact that he walked again on the earth. People killed him, but people can kill only the self that they have given, they cannot kill the self that has been discovered. It is beyond their reach, it is beyond their vision. How can they kill it? They cannot even see it. The people who were crucifying Jesus were absolutely unaware of the person they were confronting. Who was this man that they were killing? They were killing God! They were killing one of the most significant expressions of God on the earth, but they were blissfully unaware.That’s why Jesus said, “Father, forgive these people because they don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know me, and what they are killing is their own idea of me. They cannot kill me.”That’s why people like Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, are not at all worried about what you think about them. They know themselves; your thinking makes no difference. Your thinking will make a difference to you, but it makes no difference to them. They go on living on their own; they live an authentic life.My sannyasins have to remember it: don’t hanker for a self from the outside. It is a waste of time, and people can withdraw it at any moment. Their minds are not very stable, they change constantly. Their minds are not very integrated, they cannot retain any state. They don’t know of any continuity in their being, they are fragments. One day they will support and praise you, another day they will pull you down and condemn you.That is what has been happening down the ages, the whole history is full of it. One day they call you great, another day they start condemning you. In fact, whomsoever they call great they are bound to condemn. There is a rationale behind it because the mediocre person starts to feel inferior in comparison with whoever he has made great. Nobody likes to feel inferior. Then sooner or later he takes revenge so that he can pull you down and can show you, “You are made of mud as I am made of mud.” First they put you on great pedestals, only to pull you down. They enjoy the game very much.Beware of it: don’t depend on what others say. It is utterly irrelevant. All that matters in the ultimate sense is what you know about yourself.I am reminded of an incident…I had just passed my Master’s degree in the university and I was in search of a service, of a job. I approached the education minister, I talked to him. He said, “It will be possible, there is a vacancy, but you will have to produce two character certificates.”I said, “From whom?”He said, “You can ask your vice-chancellor to give you a character certificate. You can ask the chancellor, the proctor, or… There are so many famous professors in your university, you can ask anybody.”I said, “But that won’t do – because if the vice-chancellor of my university wanted a character certificate from me, I would not give it to him. How can I ask a character certificate from a man to whom I cannot give a character certificate? He is one of the most corrupted politicians of the country. He has become the vice-chancellor not because he has any abilities to be a vice-chancellor, but just because he is a politician. I will not ask a character certificate from him.“I cannot ask my professor either because I know him intimately. In fact he is afraid of me. I know all the ins and outs of his life. He is a very cowardly man, ready to bow down to any person who has authority and power. I have seen him flattering stupid politicians because he is also hoping to become the vice-chancellor of the university some day and the only way is to go on flattering the politicians, the powerful people. No, I will not ask for a character certificate from him.“All that I can do is: I am here. Look into my eyes, hold my hand. I will look into your eyes and you look into my eyes – I will know your character, you will know my character – and it is finished.”He became a little worried. He asked, “What do you mean?”I said, “This is my hand! Give your hand to me and look into my eyes.”And he started looking here and there. It is very difficult for cunning people to look into anybody’s eyes directly. They are so full of guilt. I could see perspiration coming on his head.I said, “Why are you getting in such a panic? Just look into my eyes and see. I am here, feel me. If you want me I can be here as many days as you want, sitting in this room. I will see your character, you will see my character.”He signed the papers. He said, “Go! You are appointed! And never come again. You are the only person who has frightened me.”Never depend on others’ opinions. Who are they? How can they give a character certificate?This whole parable is beautiful. It is a hit on human stupidity. Remember, if you are asking for a self to be invented with the help of others, you will remain mediocre. You will never be the flowering of intelligence.Intelligence comes only when you discover yourself. Intelligence is the shadow of that discovery – the great exhilaration that happens when you have stumbled upon yourself face-to-face, when you have encountered yourself, when you know who you are. Suddenly you are rooted in existence, suddenly you are beyond time. Even death cannot kill you and fire cannot burn you. You are eternal.In that eternity all fear disappears. And when there is no fear there is freedom. In that beautiful experience of oneself all hankering for possessions disappears – because you possess the very kingdom of God. Now nothing is of any worth. In that experience all doubts dissolve. You have come to an absolute rock, and only on this rock can the temple of religion be built. This rock is eternal. Otherwise whatever you are doing is just making sandcastles on the seashore – just a strong gust of wind and all those castles will disappear.All that you are doing is writing your name on the sand. Time is just sand and nothing else. Time cannot give you any taste of the eternal, and without that taste one remains frightened of death. The invented self is always afraid, continuously afraid. It lives in fear, it lives in paranoia, it lives in neurosis. The discovered self knows nothing of the abnormal, perverted, neurotic mind. It becomes simple, it becomes ordinary, but that ordinariness is luminous.Kierkegaard calls this attitude of constantly remaining preoccupied with inventing a self “philistinism.” This means a mediocre existence, living in the security of the womb, a superficial satisfaction with everything as it is. It means to live life on the surface and to never explore its deeper, psychic dimensions. It is the refusal to be born, the refusal to grow. It means being close-minded to passion, risk, and broader perspectives. It is a state of shut-upness.People are living as if they are closed off from everywhere. Their existence is a kind of shut-upness. Their existence is windowless: the sun never penetrates their beings, nor the wind, nor the rain. They simply live closed in themselves. They are afraid of coming into the open because if they come into the open, people may change their ideas about them. When they want to cry they laugh – because what will people think? Crying is sissy, people will condemn them.They keep a very strong face, a face of steel, and behind this is a child who wants to cry, who wants to play around, who wants to run in the garden after the butterflies, who wants to collect wildflowers. But that they never allow, they remain stiff. They go on repressing the child, and that child is far more valuable than what they are pretending to be because the child is real, authentic. The people who live in this kind of shut-upness cannot grow because growth means being in constant communion with existence, being nude with existence, hiding nothing, keeping no secret, remaining available and vulnerable, remaining open to all kinds of risks and dangers. Only then does growth happen.You see people all over the world growing old, but without growing up. Even in their old age they remain childish deep down because they have never allowed their own real self to grow. They have been piling upon the false self, decorating, bringing more ornaments for the false self, creating new props so it doesn’t collapse – but this false self cannot grow. Remember one thing: no false thing can ever grow, it remains stuck. Can you think of a plastic flower growing? The real rose grows, the plastic rose remains as it is. It is dead, how can it grow?The self that is given to you by others is a dead entity; it cannot grow, it cannot flow. It is a frozen thing! And with that frozen thing you will be imprisoned.When I look at people, watch their faces and their beings, I am constantly in deep pain seeing them. Great compassion arises. They could have been beautiful beings but they have remained retarded. They could have been glowing beings but there is no glow, there is no fire. And all that they think they are doing, and all that they think that they are living, is just so futile. It is futile because it does not bring growth.The most important thing in life is growth. Religion is the science of growth. And the beginning of growth is changing the gestalt from the false self to the real self. The real is already given, it is a God-given gift; the false has to be gathered from people, people who don’t know themselves. How can they give you any sense of reality? Beware!The beginning of the inner journey has to start with the question “Who am I?” It has to become more and more a quest than a question. A question means a superficial curiosity, a quest means a passionate love affair.It will be good to understand the word question and the symbol of the question mark. The symbol of the question mark is very significant. You may be surprised to know that it comes from the first incident in human history: the meeting of the serpent with Eve near the Tree of Knowledge. The serpent created the first question in Eve’s mind: to eat the fruit or not? The question mark is the snake standing on its tail. It represents the snake on its tail.History, the whole of human history, begins with a question mark. The serpent started it. It has remained in the symbol, the question mark, standing on its tail. It must have stood on his tail and must have talked to Eve, must have seduced her into eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.In another sense, properly understood, it is also the sign of how knowledge has come into being. All knowledge starts with questions. To ask is the beginning of any inquiry. But if the question remains only a question, you will remain Adam and you will never become a Christ. Hence another symbol has also to be understood: that symbol is the serpent eating its own tail.That symbol has been used by many ancient esoteric schools. It was used by Rosicrucians, and many gnostics have used the symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Then the snake becomes a circle. When the snake starts eating its own tail, it is a quest. Why is it a quest? When a question remains just a question, its interest is in an answer – verbal, intellectual – but no verbal, intellectual answer can satisfy it. New questions will arise out of the answer.This has been the path of philosophy. Philosophy is synonymous with the question mark, the serpent standing on its tail. Then what is the history of religion? Just the opposite: the question eating itself, the snake eating its own tail. In the religious quest, questions disappear; thirst remains. There comes a moment when nothing is in your mind, not even the question. The question has eaten itself up.That’s what happens in a Zen koan, an absurd question. Why absurd? – for this particular reason: if it is not absurd, the mind will supply an answer. And if the mind supplies an answer, out of that answer ten more questions will arise. Then it will be a regress ad infinitum, there will be no end to it. Hence an absurd question is given to the meditator so that the mind cannot supply any answer. If no answer is supplied how long can one go on asking the question, how long? – one year, two years, three years, four, five, six. One gets tired.A moment comes when you are so exhausted with the question and the futility of it all and you know there is no answer to it. One day, out of sheer exhaustion, the question slips out of your consciousness. You are left alone, a pure mirror reflecting nothing.The question has eaten itself: that is the koan. The snake has started eating its own tail; now the circle is complete, a perfect circle. The perfect circle has been the symbol of wisdom. The question is the beginning of knowledge, the circle is the symbol of wisdom.Adam is a question mark, Jesus is a full circle – so is Buddha, so am I, so can you be. You come to me as a question mark, but please don’t go from here as a question mark. And don’t go from here becoming a little more knowledgeable, gathering a few answers – because those answers will soon become questions. Go from here as a perfect circle – the snake eating its own tail – and then there will be no more questions.The state of mind which does not question is the state of mind which is the answer. Not that any answer comes to you; it itself is the answer – the silence, the stillness, the utterly contentless consciousness is the answer. It is samadhi. And only in samadhi do you know who you are.This small parable:Once upon a time there was a fox who met a young rabbit in the woods.The rabbit said, “What are you?”The rabbit must have been a philosopher.The fox said, “I am a fox, and I could eat you if I wanted to.”“How can you prove that you are a fox?”That’s what the philosophic mind always asks: “How can you prove that you are a fox?” People come to me and they ask, “How can you prove you are a bhagwan?” There is no need to prove it; I am. And I am very surprised – because you are also the same, but completely unaware. Maybe my declaring that I am God disturbs your sleep. You become angry. You start thinking, “If this man is God, then why am I not?” You start feeling inferior.In fact, that is not the purpose of my declaration. My declaration includes you. When I say I am God, I am saying every human being is God – and not only human being, every being is God. To be is to be God, there is no other way. God is the trees in the trees and the birds in the birds and the mountains in the mountains, the man in men, the woman in women. God has all these manifestations. All these beautiful waves arise in his ocean.When I declare that I am the ocean, the other waves are disturbed. They think that I am claiming some kind of superiority, that I am saying that you are only waves and I am an ocean. I am not saying that. By declaring that I am the ocean, I have declared that you are also the ocean.But if you don’t want to recognize it, it is your freedom not to see the truth. You can keep your eyes closed, you can remain blindfolded; that is your decision. If you have chosen not to be a God, you can go on pretending not to be a God – but I tell you it is only a pretension. God is your reality, and whatever else you are pretending is only just a belief. Even when you pretend that you are this and that and not God, then too you remain God deep down. There is no way of being anything else.Even the wave that says, “I don’t believe in the ocean, and I am certainly not the ocean. I can see my limitations: one day I arise, another day I am gone. How can I be the eternal ocean? I am not!” – still, even while she is declaring it, she is the ocean. She is part of the ocean. The ocean is underneath, but she has not looked into her own depths.Every day newspapers carry a criticism about me: that I am a self-appointed God. That means a committee is needed to appoint. Maybe a government has to issue certificates saying who is God and who is not God, or maybe a university has to issue certificates. The people who criticize me as a self-appointed God have taken it for granted that God should be appointed by others. Who are these others, what right do they have, and who has appointed them? Now it will be a regress, ad nauseam.Buddha declared himself, Krishna declared himself, Jesus declared himself; they were all self-appointed Gods. But there is no other way. When I have come to know, when I have come to see who I am, what can I do? I simply have to state the fact. It is a bare, naked truth – and it is not only my truth.If I were declaring that I am God and you are not, it would be just an ego trip. But my declaration includes you, includes the whole existence. It has nothing to do with me as such. In fact I am no longer there, and only God is. I have dropped the self that you are carrying: the self that is created by others, I have dropped. And in dropping that, the real self is discovered.The rabbit asked, “How can you prove that you are a fox?”The fox didn’t know what to say because in the past rabbits had always run from him without such inquiries.Then the rabbit said, “If you can show me written proof that you are a fox, I will believe you.”That is part of the human mind: anything written and people believe it. The written or the printed word has a hypnotic power over people. I say something and if it goes against your scripture, you come immediately to me to say that it is not written in the Bible, as if just by writing something it becomes true. If it is not written in the Bible, so what? So it is not written in the Bible! Improve upon the Bible: write it. At least you can write it in your own copy.But people believe the written word very much; it is almost hypnotic. That’s why you can go on believing even stupid newspapers because a printed thing, a written thing? – it must be true. All kinds of falsities and lies go on being circulated.Just the other day I was reading a German newspaper. It says I have two wives, one Indian, one Western. It looks very relevant, very… Because that’s why I say “the meeting of the East and the West”! And the more amazing thing is the picture that it has chosen to show of my two wives: one of them is Shiva! Shiva has long hair; he is standing, his back is toward the camera, so he is my Indian wife! It is really nice of these people.The other newspaper I was reading has written that I fly in a helicopter. I liked it. I never leave my room, and I fly in helicopters? True, I fly, but I fly without helicopters! And there is an even greater discovery, that I eat only eggs, meat, lobsters, and nothing else! Now, millions of people in Germany will believe it. After all, a written thing is a written thing.Another newspaper has a report that the reporter came to the ashram early in the morning, at five-thirty. He knocked on the door. A naked, utterly beautiful woman opened the door, hugged him, welcomed him, “Come in,” plucked a fruit from a tree – looked like an apple – gave the fruit to the reporter and told him, “Eat it. It rejuvenates sexual energy.”And you will be surprised – letters have started arriving. One man wrote from Austria, “I am sixty and I have a young wife. Please be kind to me. I can come to India. I have heard that in India things like that happen. Can you give me that fruit?” It is believed, and all kinds of rubbish, all kinds of falsities and lies go on being written. And many believe.Satyananda wrote from Germany – now he has come… He wrote from Germany, “So many lies are being printed in German newspapers. In Germany it is almost an Osho wave.” He wrote a letter to make us aware that many kinds of sexual maniacs and perverts will reach: “So be alert because many are preparing.” If such fruits are there, and such a commune exists where all is permitted, where all the people live in nudity – all you people are sitting nude, remember! – where clothes are not allowed… These reports are being published and many will believe. That’s how people believe.But I am happy. Let them come, for any reason. Then we will see. I have even written to the old man, “Come! Fruit or no fruit, but come!” Who knows? Doing Dynamic, Kundalini, he may go beyond sex. That is a possibility.…the rabbit said, “If you can show me written proof that you are a fox, I will believe you.” People believe only when something is written. Why do you believe in the Vedas? Why do you believe in the Bible? Why do you believe in the Gita? It is a written document, ancient, of great prestige. What else is there? – just a great tradition supporting it.If there had been no written record of Jesus, you would have forgotten all about him. There have been many teachers and masters of the capacity of Jesus, of the same caliber, but you don’t even know their names – at least six of the same caliber, of the same status – but you would not even know their names. One of them was Prakudda Katyayana, a rare gem. But he insisted that his words not be written so that no tradition would arise after him. Certainly his words were not written; no tradition has arisen, and people have even completely forgotten his name.There was another great teacher, Buddha’s contemporary, Purnakashyapa, but because no scriptures exist – they were written, but destroyed by the organized religion in India – nobody knows anything about him.People believe in the written word. People believe too much in their eyes. One should believe only in one’s own experience. Nothing else should become a substitute, otherwise one starts going false.So the fox trotted off to the lion, who gave him a certificate that he was a fox.When he got back to where the rabbit was waiting, the fox started to read out the document. It so pleased him that he dwelt over the paragraphs with lingering delight.You have also done it many times. If somebody writes a beautiful letter to you, you read it again and again and again. Why “with great lingering delight”? Somebody has praised you; it gives you a good sense of self. People are ready to die to be praised. People are ready to do anything.I have heard about a politician…There was a great ceremony, his birthday was celebrated. Hundreds of rose garlands were presented to him, but his secretary was a little puzzled because he was not looking very happy.When the ceremony was finished the secretary said, “You look a little sad.”He said, “Yes. Only a hundred garlands? And I had paid for two hundred.”You have to pay for your own garlands. People go on paying in subtle ways so that they can be praised. And there exists a mutual arrangement in the world: “You scratch my back, I will scratch yours” – and both enjoy.When he got back to where the rabbit was waiting, the fox started to read out the document. It so pleased him that he dwelt over the paragraphs with lingering delight.Meanwhile, getting the gist of the message from the first few lines, the rabbit ran down a burrow and was never seen again.The fox went back to the lion’s den, where he saw a deer talking to the lion.The deer was saying, “I want to see written proof that you are a lion.”The lion said, “When I am not hungry, I don’t need to bother. When I am hungry, you don’t need anything in writing.”You will know… This is the right approach, the lion’s approach: “Who cares whether you believe in me or not?”If somebody comes to me: “What is the proof that you are God?” who bothers? I am not here to collect stupid followers. My approach is the lion’s approach. He said: “When I am not hungry, I don’t need to bother. When I am hungry, you don’t need anything in writing.”And that’s my approach too. If just a curious person comes to me, I need not bother. I tell him, “Get lost.” If a disciple reaches me there is no need for any proof. In his very disciplehood he has the proof.The fox said to the lion, “Why didn’t you tell me to do that when I asked for the certificate for the rabbit?”“My dear friend, “said the lion, “you should have said that it was requested by a rabbit. I thought it must be for a stupid human being, from whom some of these idiotic animals have learned this pastime.”Except man, who is worried about inventing a self? Except man, nobody is neurotic on the earth. Except man, nobody has gone astray, so far away from himself that he needs certificates to prove his validity, that he needs certificates to prove his existence, that he needs certificates to prove his character, intelligence.Either you have intelligence or you don’t. No certificate is needed, your life will be its own proof. Your joy will be enough of a certificate, your bliss will show, will prove it. Nothing else is needed.The moment you come to me I welcome you, I invite you to come closer and closer to me so that sooner or later you start drinking of the nectar that has happened to me, that is flowing in me. That will be the proof, nothing else is needed.Mahavira had no proof, Bahauddin had no proof, Jesus had no proof, Buddha had no proof. They were proofs themselves. Those who have eyes will be able to see, and those who have ears will be able to hear, and those who have hearts will be able to feel.But the human mind has fallen into great stupidity. Humanity is living by words. Words have become too important. The word fire has become more important than fire itself. The word God has become more important than God itself. And remember, the word God is not God and the word love is not love. Don’t be deceived by the words, beware of the words. You can be lost in the jungle of words and you will be going farther and farther away from truth.Truth is a wordless experience. Truth happens only when there is no thought in you, when all words have disappeared and all the dust is gone from the mirror, when the mirror is simply mirroring, and mirroring nothing. No reflection is made, no wave arises in the lake of your consciousness. Then all is reflected, then you know what is – not only that you know who you are, you know what this whole existence is. Knowing oneself, one knows the whole.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,What is mysticism?Mysticism is the experience that life is not logic, that life is poetry, that life is not syllogism, that life is a song. Mysticism is the declaration that life can never really be known; it is essentially unknowable.Science divides existence into two categories: the known and the unknown. The known was unknown one day; it has become known. The unknown is unknown today; tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, it will also become known. Science believes that sooner or later a point of understanding will arrive when there will be only one category, the known: all will have been known. The unknown is slowly being reduced to the known.Mysticism is the declaration that life consists of three categories: one, the known; another, the unknown; and the third and most important is the unknowable, which has not been known and which will never be known – and that is the essential core of it all.That unknowable can be experienced but not known. It cannot be reduced to knowledge, although your heart can sing its song. You can dance it, you can live it, you can be full and overflowing with it, you can be possessed by it, but you will not be able to know it.It is like a river that disappears into the ocean. Do you think the river comes to know the ocean? It becomes the ocean, but there is no knowing. In fact, when you become one with something, how can you know it? Knowledge requires division, knowledge is basically schizophrenic. The object has to be separate from the subject, the knower has to keep a distance from the known. If the distance disappears, there will be no knowledge possible.And that’s what happens in mysticism: the seeker becomes one with the sought, the lover dissolves into the beloved, the dewdrop slips, falls into the ocean and becomes the ocean. There is no knowledge. In such unity, knowledge is not possible. In such unity there is only experience, and experience not of something outside you, but something inside you. It is experiencing rather than experience.The word mysticism comes from a Greek word, mysterion, which means “secret ceremony.” The people who have touched the unknowable gather together to share. The sharing is not verbal, it cannot be verbal. The sharing is of their being, they pour their being into each other. They dance together, they sing together, they look into each other’s eyes, or they simply sit silently together. That’s what was being done with Buddha, with Krishna, with Jesus, in different ways.The lovers of Krishna were dancing with him. That was a mysterion, a secret ceremony. If you looked from the outside at what was happening, you would not be able to know what was really the case. Unless you became a participant, unless you danced with Krishna, you would not know what was being shared because that which was being shared was invisible. It was not a commodity, it could not be transferred from one hand to another; you would not see anything like that happening. It was not objective, it was the flowing of one being into another, flowing of the presence of the master into the disciple.These kinds of secret ceremonies in India have been called ras; in the tradition of Krishna they are called ras. Ras means dancing with the master, so that one’s energy is flowing and the master’s energy is flowing. And only flowing energies can have a meeting. Stagnant pools cannot meet, only rivers can meet. It is only through movement that meeting is possible.The same was happening with Buddha too, with no visible dance. Buddha was sitting silently, his disciples were sitting silently; it is called satsang: “being with truth.”Buddha has become enlightened, he is a light unto himself. Others who are not yet lit – whose candles are yet unlit – sit in close proximity, in intimacy, in deep love and gratitude, coming closer and closer to Buddha in their silence, in their love.Slowly, slowly a moment comes, the space between the master and the disciple disappears – and the jump of the flame from the master to the disciple. The disciple is ready to receive it; the disciple is nothing but a welcome. The disciple is feminine, a receptivity, a womb. This too is a mysterion, a secret ceremony. It was happening again and again, with Zarathustra, with Lao Tzu, with Jesus, in different ways.This is what is happening here. While I am talking to you, if you are just a curious person who has come here to listen and to see what is happening, you will only listen to my words. You will miss the real treasure. The words are spoken only to those who cannot listen to silence. Those who have become intimate with me, those who have become sannyasins, are listening to the words, but they are not in any way intellectually dissecting, analyzing, arguing with the words. The words are heard as one hears music; the words are heard as one hears the wind blowing through the pine trees; the words are heard as one hears raindrops falling on the roof, or the roar of the waves in the ocean. And while the mind is hearing the music, the heart starts absorbing the being, the presence. This is a mysterion, this is a secret ceremony.But why is it called secret? It is not secret in the sense that we are hiding somewhere in a cave. It is secret because it is available only when you are related to the master in deep love. Others are allowed to come in, but for them it will remain invisible; hence it is called secret. When Buddha is sitting with his disciples, he is not hiding somewhere in the mountains – he is in the world, people can come and go and see – but still the ceremony is secret. This secretness is something to be understood. The people who come and see will only see a few bodies sitting silently, that’s all. They will not see the transfer of light, the transfer beyond the scriptures that is happening.That’s the case here too. Every day watchers, spectators come. They see you sitting here listening to me, or dancing, or meditating, and they think they have known. They go, and they start giving “authoritative” reports about the place. They may have been here just one day or two days and they become experts. They are being simply stupid. They don’t know a word, they don’t know anything about mysticism. All their reports are false, bound to be false.To know something of what is going on here, you will have to become a participant, you will have to fall in deep harmony with me and the space that is being created here. You cannot be a spectator, you cannot observe from the outside. These things are not observed from the outside, they are secret. You have to dissolve yourself. You have to risk. Only then, a taste on your tongue; only then, an experience in your heart; only then, a vibe that penetrates you and becomes part of your life.That is the meaning of “secret ceremony.” It is available for everybody to see, but only those who are initiated into it will really be able to see it.Mysterion in its own turn comes from another root, myein, which means “to keep one’s mouth shut.” Mysticism means you have seen something, you have experienced something, but you cannot express it. Mysticism means you have come across a truth which makes you dumb. It is so big, so huge, so enormous that it cannot be contained in a word. Not even the word god contains it. That’s why Buddha dropped the word god. It is bigger than what the word god can contain. Not even the word soul can contain it; that’s why Buddha dropped even that word. Those are just words, reality is far richer.Just watch in your ordinary life also. When you say something, does it really express it? You have seen a beautiful tree and when you say to somebody, “I have seen a beautiful tree,” what does the word beautiful tree contain? It does not contain the greenery of the tree; it does not contain the shape arising in the tree; it does not contain the roots that have gone deep into the earth; it does not contain the sun rays falling on the tree leaves and dancing. It does not contain the beautiful flowers of the tree, and the fragrance, and the smell of the wet earth that surrounds the tree, and the nests of the birds, and the song of the birds. What does the word tree contain when you say, “I have seen a beautiful tree”? It contains nothing. The word has no roots, the word has no wings, the word has no gold, no green, no red; the word is colorless. The word is very poor. Tree? It is only symbolic, but it is meaningful because we all know trees, so when somebody says, “I have seen a beautiful tree,” you can have a little understanding about it.But about God, even that little understanding is not possible, unless you have seen God. If I say, “God is,” you hear the word, but you don’t hear the meaning; you can’t hear the meaning. There is no response in your heart.When I say, “a beautiful roseflower,” yes, there is a little response – and if you close your eyes and meditate a little on the word rose you may start seeing a roseflower opening its petals in your being because you have seen roseflowers. If you are a really sensitive person you may even start smelling the rose and seeing the dewdrops in the early morning on the rose petals. A memory may be provoked, an experience may become alive, you may start reminiscing; but it is because you have known a rose. What about the person who has never known a rose? Then just the word rose will not stir any feeling in him, will not bring any pictures. The word will be heard, but will not be listened to; there will be no meaning behind it.That is the case when the word God is used, that is the case when the word prayer is used, that is the case when the word gratitude is used, and so on, so forth. You don’t have any understanding because you don’t have any experience.Those who have experienced become dumb. Not that they stop speaking, but they speak about the methods, they speak about the way. They don’t speak about the truth. They say how to attain it; they say how to avoid the pitfalls on the path; they say how not to go astray. They say, “This is the way, this is the direction.” They give you a few maps, road maps; they make you aware of a few signs that you will come across on the road so that you can be certain you are moving in the right direction. That’s all they can do. But about the truth, or God, they can’t say a single word.So that meaning is also beautiful: myein means “to keep one’s mouth shut.” It is from these two words: from myein comes mysterion, from mysterion comes mysticism.Mysticism is the very soul of religion.Hence my insistence: drop the mind that thinks in prose, revive another kind of mind that thinks in poetry. Put aside all your expertise in syllogism, let songs be your way of life. Move from intellect to intuition, from the head to the heart, because the heart is closer to the mysteries. The head is anti-mystery, the whole effort of the head is how to demystify existence.That’s why, wherever science has grown, religion has disappeared. Wherever the mind becomes trained in scientific ways of thinking and doing, religion simply dies; then the flower of religion blooms no longer. In the soil of the scientific mind there is some poison that does not allow the seed of religion to grow; it kills it. What is that poison? Science believes in demystifying existence.Religion says it cannot be demystified. The deeper your understanding goes, the more mystical it becomes, the more mysterious it becomes.Now there is a possibility that science and religion can be bridged – because the greatest scientists have also felt it, in a very indirect way. For example, Eddington, Albert Einstein, and others have come to a feeling that the more they know about existence, the more puzzled they become because the more they know, the more there is to know. The more they know, the more their knowledge seems to be superficial. Einstein died almost a mystic; that old pride that “One day we will come to know all” had disappeared. He died in a very meditative mood. He died not as a scientist, but more as a poet.Eddington has written, “First we used to believe that thought is just a by-product” – just as Karl Marx says that consciousness is just a by-product of social situations – “a by-product, an epiphenomenon of matter, a shadow of matter. Matter is substance; consciousness is just a shadow, very insubstantial.”Eddington says, “I was also perfectly convinced” – because that was the climate of those days. For three centuries in the West, science had been growing the climate. Eddington had grown up in that climate, but finally, ultimately, in his last days, he said, “Now things have changed. The more I inquired, the more I became convinced that the world does not consist of things, but consists of thoughts – and existence appears less like matter and more like consciousness.”This is good news: science is coming to a great understanding. That understanding is arising out of its failure to demystify existence.But I don’t see a similar understanding arising in the so-called religious people. They are lagging far behind, they are all talking in old, stupid ways. They are still obsessed with the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible. And not that the Vedas are wrong, or the Koran or the Bible are wrong – they are perfectly right – but they are expressed in a very, very ancient, primitive way. They are not capable of meeting modern science.We need contemporary religious mystics of the same caliber as Albert Einstein and Eddington and Planck. That’s my effort here, to create contemporary mystics, not only scholars who can talk like a parrot about the Upanishads and the Vedas. No, scholars won’t do. We need contemporary mystics; we need people in whose hearts new Upanishads can arise. We need people who can talk the way Jesus talked, on their own authority. We need courageous mystics who can say they have experienced God – not because the scriptures say God is, but because they have known God. Not just learned people, knowledgeable people, but people of wisdom.Enough of scholarship. Scholarship is just very mediocre, scholarship cannot bridge modern science with mysticism. We need buddhas, not people who know about Buddha. We need meditators, lovers, experiencers. And then the day is ripe, the time has come, when science and religion can meet and mingle, can be welded together. That day will be one of the greatest days of the whole of human history. It will be a great day of rejoicing, incomparable, unique because from that day, the schizophrenic, split humanity will disappear from the world.Then we need not have two things, science and religion; one thing will do. For the outer we will use scientific methodology, for the inner we will use religious methodology. Mysticism is a beautiful word; it can be used for that one science or one religion, whatever you call it. Mysticism will be a beautiful name. Then science will search for the outer mystery, and religion will search for the inner mystery; they will be the two wings of mysticism. Mysticism can become the word that denotes both. Mysticism can be the synthesis of both.With this synthesis, many more syntheses will happen on their own accord. For example, if science and religion can meet in mysticism, then East and West can meet, then man and woman can meet, then poetry and prose can meet, then logic and love can meet, then layer upon layer, meetings can go on happening. And once this has happened, we will have a more perfect man, more whole, more balanced.The second question:Osho,Is not man the purpose of all evolution?Evolution has no purpose. The very idea of purpose is mediocre; it comes from the marketplace. Existence is playful, not purposive. It is leela, it is not work. But we think in terms of economics, business; we think in terms of the marketplace. Everything has to be with purpose.People come to me and they ask, “What is the purpose of meditation?” They take it for granted that there must be a purpose behind it. There is none. Meditation is its own end, there is no end beyond it. What is the purpose of love? Is love a means to something else, or is love an end unto itself?Purpose means division, division between the means and the end. What is the purpose of these green trees, and what is the purpose of the bird singing, and what is the purpose of the sunrise, and what is the purpose of the starry night? What is the purpose? If there is a purpose, you would have a very ugly existence. And then the question will persist. If you say, “A is the purpose,” then the question will arise, “What is the purpose of A?” There will be no end to it. There is no purpose at all. That’s why life is so beautiful.Somebody asked Pablo Picasso, “What is the purpose of your paintings?” and he said, “Why don’t you go in the garden and ask the roseflower, ‘What is your purpose?’ Why don’t you go to a bird singing: ‘What is the purpose?’ Why don’t you ask the sun and the moon? Why do you bother me? If the rose can bloom without any purpose, why can’t I paint a picture? I enjoy painting, and that’s all.”But we have a very mediocre mind, we always think in terms of purpose. Purpose means “business,” purpose means “I am doing this for that.” And because of this purposive obsession, you never do anything totally – you cannot because you are not interested in doing it for its own sake. There is a purpose.You are painting to sell in the market to earn money. Then your painting cannot be great, cannot be because you will not be lost while you are painting. Continuously you will be thinking, “How much am I going to fetch? Will it be possible to sell it, and who are the potential buyers? Whom should I approach, how should I advertise?” And you are painting! Your painting may be a technically well-performed job, but it will not be art. You are not an artist, you are not a creator.The real artist disappears into his art. While he is painting he is not: he is in a state of fana, he is absent. The painting is happening on its own. He is not doing it, he is not a doer. Then great works arise. Whether the painting is sold in the market or not is a secondary thing. That is not the purpose, that was not in the mind of the painter. He also needs bread and butter and he will sell it; that is a thing apart. That was not the purpose of the painting, he was not thinking of bread and butter while he was painting it. If he was thinking that, he is not a painter, he is just a businessman.Remember the difference between a technician and an artist. The technician is one who works with some goal in his vision, and the artist is one who has no other goal: art for art’s sake.Why do you ask, “Is not man the purpose of all evolution?” Just go and ask the parrots. They may be thinking that they are the purpose of evolution. Look how green they are, and their red beaks. What do you have compared to them? And their beautiful wings, and the way they fly – zigzag, playfully – and the way they sing. They must be thinking they are the purpose of the whole evolution.Or ask the lion or the elephant. They must be thinking they are the purpose. Do you think the lion thinks man is the purpose of evolution? In the bibles of the lions it is written, “God made the lion in his own image.” This poor man is very poor, in fact. You don’t have the energy of a lion; you don’t have the capacity of the eagle to fly far away; you don’t have the grace of an elephant; you don’t have the beauty of a lotus flower. What do you have that you think you are the purpose of evolution, that God has created you specially?This is the way of an egoist, it is the way of the ego. The ego wants, “I am the purpose of the whole of evolution.” You have asked, “Is not man the purpose of all evolution?” Now think, whether woman is the purpose or man? If you are a man you will think man, if you are a woman you will think, of course, woman. Then think, if you are a man and you decide that man is the purpose, not woman, then black or white? If you are black you will think black, if you are white you will think white. If you go on searching deeply into it, finally you will arrive at the point, “I am the purpose of the whole of evolution.” Look at the absurdity.There is a Russian parable…A man was walking along and happened to spit three times, all in the same place. The man went on, the gobs of spit remained.One of the gobs of spit said, “We are here but the man is not.”And the second said, “He is gone.”And the third, “That is the only thing he came here for, to plant us here. We are the purpose of man’s life. He is gone but we remain.”Drop all kinds of egoistic ideas. There is no purpose, neither man nor woman, neither birds nor animals. There is no purpose, there is no goal. Existence is not moving toward something. It is sheer joy, exuberance, a ceremony, for no other purpose at all.Life delights in itself, energy delights in itself. It is like a child, jumping and dancing and shouting. If you ask him for what purpose, he will be surprised at your foolish question. Shouting, jumping, dancing is enough. What other purpose is needed? But as you grow older you forget this, you start doing things only if they pay. If there is a good payoff, only then do you do things.Otherwise, the question goes on haunting you: “What is the purpose?” You don’t sing a song without any purpose. You don’t dance, you don’t love, you don’t paint, you don’t sing. What is the purpose?Unless you are paid! So money seems to be the end of it all. And what is the purpose of money? You will be gone and the money will be left. And your hundred rupee notes will think, “So we were the purpose of this man. Now we are here and he is gone. He had certainly come here to collect us, what else?” You will be gone, your house will be here and the house will say, “Look! So we are the purpose of this man’s life.”There is no purpose at all. This understanding brings freedom, this understanding is what I call spiritual insight. The man who lives for some purpose is a materialist, and the man who simply lives for no purpose at all, the man who simply lives as if he is on a morning walk, not going anywhere, that man is spiritual, his life is holy. That is sacredness.The third question:Osho,You said the other day that you desire that all people should be rich and have lotuses in their garden ponds. Why then do many people not own houses and gardens and lakes and lotuses? The question is: why is there so much poverty in this country?The poverty is there because this country has behaved in a very foolish way. Nobody else is responsible for it. You are responsible for it. But you have behaved foolishly for so many centuries that not only do you continue to behave in the same way, you are even proud of it.This country decided to live a lopsided life. This country decided to be anti-life, anti-body. Now, if you are anti-life and anti-body, you cannot live richly, you are bound to remain poor. Unless you love life, how can you create richness? If you don’t love life, how will you love lotuses and lakes and gardens and beautiful houses? If you don’t love your body, why should you bother about the body? Let it go to the dogs. And that’s what has happened.In fact, for five thousand years, your so-called religious people have been teaching you the beauty of poverty, the spirituality of poverty. You have been praising poverty as the highest goal. Now you have attained it, the whole country has become “spiritual,” so who is at fault?Just think: why do you praise Buddha? Because he renounced the kingdom. Why do you praise Mahavira? Because he renounced the kingdom.People go on writing letters to me: “If you are a Buddha, why don’t you renounce and become a beggar?” They are against me. Morarji Desai said that I cannot be compared to Mahavira. Why? – because he renounced the kingdom. He became a beggar, a naked beggar on the streets, and I live in a palatial house, surrounded by beautiful gardens. How can I be compared to Mahavira?Just watch the logic. If you praise Mahavira because he renounced the kingdom and the joys of life, then those who are beggars are really very fortunate. They have nothing to do, they are already spiritual! Buddha had to do something. Buddha must have committed some sins in his past life, that’s why he became the king.And the beggar? He must have been living a very spiritual life all along down the ages for many lives. His beggary, his being poor, is the outcome of all the great deeds that he has done in the past. If to be a beggar is to be spiritual, then certainly this whole country is spiritual.Poverty has been praised, and if you praise poverty and if you worship poverty, how can you destroy it? How can you destroy something that you worship?Your whole mind is the cause of your poverty. I am against your mind, I want to destroy your mind because that is the only way to release your energies, to become rich.Do you think America has anything special, better land than you, a better climate than you? That is not true. You have one of the most beautiful lands in the world. You have all kinds of climates available to you. Your country is almost a miniature world. You have Switzerland in your Kashmir. You cannot find any country which is so rich, potentially so rich, but you are the poorest people in the world. It is a miracle how you have managed it!It is your mind. You are carrying a very wrong attitude toward life. You are against life, and if you are against life, life cannot be for you. You have never befriended existence. You have always praised the other world. Naturally, if you praise the other world, you will not use this world.You are just waiting. The Indian mahatmas go on sermonizing to their disciples and followers, “This life is like a waiting room at the station.” Who bothers about the waiting room? Your train will be coming and then you will be gone. So make it as dirty as you can. Who bothers? You are here only for a few minutes or a few hours, so do all the nasty things that you can. Make it unbearable for the others who will come, now that is their business. If life is thought to be just a waiting room at a station, then you cannot make it beautiful. Then you will not make it clean.The people who come from the West cannot believe how Indians are living, in dirt, dirtiness – and completely oblivious of the fact, completely oblivious because they have lived that way down the centuries. They know only this kind of life, they have known no other. There is no possibility of even comparing with anything, so they go on living this way. Just go into any Indian kitchen. It is not even as clean as Western toilets. In fact who bothers? And what to say about Indian toilets!This whole body is dirty, rotten, this body is your enemy. Everybody is waiting for when to leave this body; when the train arrives they will leave. This body is just a waiting room. It is none of your business to keep it clean, beautiful, healthy, lovable, no. Love is a four-letter dirty word. People are somehow dragging.And then you ask me why this country is so poor. It is because of you all. And you still persist in thinking that your mind is a great spiritual mind! You still persist in thinking that you have a message for the world.What really went wrong is, man has hitherto never been accepted in his totality. That has been the misery in the West, that has been the misery in the East. The West has chosen only the body part and has forgotten about the soul. The Western culture is the culture of the without, and the Eastern culture is the culture of the within. The East tries to live only as a soul, and the West tries to live only as a body.The West is rich, affluent, and will become more and more affluent, richer and richer. It has worked hard to make the world beautiful. The West knows how to live, but because the soul has been neglected, there is great tension inside. The West is poor inside – rich on the outside, poor on the inside. The East has tried to meditate, to pray, to search for the inner truth, and has neglected the outside. So the outer has become very poor, the inner has a richness. But both are suffering because both are half. The suffering means you are half – unless the circle is complete, unless you fulfill both… You are neither soul alone nor body alone. You are both together, you are a togetherness. Man is body-soul and both have to be contented, both have to be satisfied.That real man is waiting to be born. That real man, the future man, will not be otherworldly, will not be this-worldly either. The future man will not be religious in the old Indian sense and will not be materialist in the Western sense. The new man will be total: both religious and materialist, and more. That’s my vision of a new man.But there are difficulties. The new man will offend everybody. The new man will offend the religious people who have always been against the body. The new man will offend the materialists who have always been against the soul. The new man is really going to be a great rebellion in the world.My sannyasins are just the beginning of the new man. Hence you will be persecuted, you will be tortured. Nobody will agree with you, nobody will be able to understand you. In the East you will be a foreigner, in the West you will be a foreigner. To be with me means now you will be a foreigner everywhere.Even I am a foreigner in this country! My sannyasins are going to be foreigners everywhere because you can be at home only in a new world, where the duality between the body and the soul has been dropped. You are harbingers of a new concept of life, of total acceptance.You ask me, “Why is there so much poverty in this country?” This country has longed for poverty, has desired poverty, has worshipped poverty. But even if you worship poverty, desire poverty, your innermost longing remains to have a more beautiful life, more healthy, better surroundings. That is a natural inclination. So even after five thousand years of stupid antagonism toward life, still the desire to live beautifully has not disappeared.And the same is the case in the West. Even though for hundreds of years it has been taught that there is no soul, you cannot deny it just by teaching people that there is no soul, that the body is all and there is nothing else, that man has no psychology but only physiology. You can teach and you can create trouble in people’s minds, but the reality is the reality. Sooner or later the real will assert itself.It is asserting, you can see it happening. People are coming from the West to the East to learn more about meditation, and from the East people are going to the West to learn more about technology, science. The Indian youth has only one desire and one fantasy: how to get into Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, how to have a degree from the West. If he can have a Western degree, his hope is fulfilled.And now people who have degrees from Harvard and Oxford and Cambridge have come to me by the thousands, forgetting all about their degrees, just to sit here and to learn how to go inward. They are suffering all kinds of things in India. They have lived in a better world, physically, they have lived in better houses, with better medical facilities, with better everything; and now they are here, living in all kinds of difficulties. But still, the desire to meditate, to know something of the inner is so great that they are ready to sacrifice everything.You can see it happening. The East is turning more and more toward communism, a materialistic attitude, and the West is turning more and more spiritualistic.But the problem that I go on thinking about is that it may happen – seeing the unfortunate steps of man up to now, it is possible, looking at the unlucky state of man – it is possible, it may happen: the West may become the East, the East may become the West, and the foolishness may continue. That is possible. We have to avoid that possibility, we have to be very alert so that it doesn’t happen.That’s why I don’t want my sannyasins to live like poor people, like beggars. I would like them to live intelligently in both worlds, inner and outer. They should live beautifully, poetically in both worlds. They should live in synthesis.But that creates trouble. That’s why my sannyasins will not be accepted by the traditional Hindu mind: “What kind of sannyasins are these people? They live in good houses, they move in cars, they eat good food. What kind of sannyasins are these?” You are not going to be accepted by the old mind. Don’t feel hurt. That’s natural. We will have to create a new mind. Only then will you be accepted, not before that. We will have to create a new society. Only then will you be loved and respected, not before that. And it is a long, arduous journey.But Indians have this idea in their mind, as if somebody else is responsible for their poverty. That’s why they go on asking such questions. This question is from an Indian. They think that somebody else is responsible for their poverty. Nobody else is responsible for your poverty. You think because you were slaves, the country was not free for hundreds of years, that’s why you are poor. The truth is vice versa: you became dependent, you lost your freedom because of your nonsense mind. The people who had come to conquer you were in no way powerful, but you were lethargic. Your religions had taught you to be lethargic. You had become fatalistic. You had lost all joy of living. You had lost all will to live. You had become suicidal.So small tribes of Moguls, Turks, Mongols, Huns – anybody – came. They were less cultured, they were poorer than you, their armies were not better than your armies, but they had one thing: the will to live. And that was missing in you. This is a big country. Small tribes came with a few people and they conquered this country. How did it happen? Could you not resist them? You had forgotten how to resist. You were ready to be reduced to anything because you had lost the will to live.Your religious teachers were teaching you how to get rid of life, how to be free from life. The greatest goal in the Indian mind has been how to be free from life, how not to be born again. Now, just see: if this becomes your innermost foundation, you lose the will to live, anybody can conquer you. And that’s what happened. When the Europeans came, they conquered you.Now, England is a small country. We even have districts which are bigger than England. England is a small country. And the whole of England had not come to conquer you! And still, a continent like India became a slave. How did it happen? Something is wrong with you, something is fundamentally wrong with you. You don’t have the desire to live.Now medicine has discovered that if a person loses the desire to live, no medicine can help. If he does not want to live, that very idea is enough to kill him. If he has the desire to live, sometimes even if the disease is incurable, it is cured. And sometimes even without medicine it is cured if the will to live is strong enough.You can also experience such moments in your life. For example, one day you come home tired, utterly exhausted, you simply want to go to bed, to sleep. You don’t have even an iota of energy to do anything. Your wife wants to talk, but you don’t even have the energy to say yes or no to her, you simply want to go to sleep. Then suddenly your house catches fire. Then from where do you get the energy? All tiredness disappears. Suddenly you become young, from nowhere energy pours into you. You start fighting the fire. Maybe the whole night now there will be no rest, but not even for a single moment will you feel tired, not even for a single moment will the idea of sleep come to you. What has happened? The will that was dormant has become active.This country is poor because it has lost the will to live. And who is responsible? – your moralists, your priests, your so-called religious leaders. They are the cause of your misery because they go on supporting your rotten mind. Your mind needs a complete overhauling. It needs new visions. It needs new blood to circulate in it. It needs an infusion of life again, an enthusiasm to live and to love and to be again. It needs to look at the world again: this is God’s world, his creation.You need to celebrate life again. You have been against life, that has caused this situation. And now you go on shouting. Indians have become very expert in shouting – slogans, shouting – as if the whole world is responsible for your poverty. Nobody is, except you. Stop shouting. Stop all your nonsense slogans. Start doing something.And if somebody tries to do something, you go against him. Just a few days ago I have spoken and I have said that India needs a compulsory birth control plan: compulsory birth control. Many letters immediately arrived. Compulsory birth control? That means our freedom. What about our freedom? Then be poor and be free. Then choose. Then don’t shout, “Why are we poor?”Do you know, just one hundred years ago, if you had given birth to twenty children, even two might not have survived. So it was okay to give birth to as many children as possible because if you gave birth to two dozen children, two might have survived – that too was not certain, nobody could guarantee. It was perfectly okay to give birth to as many children as possible.Indian women, for centuries, have remained constantly pregnant. Their whole life has been destroyed. Their whole life has been nothing but a factory producing children. Now think of a woman producing twenty children in her life, her whole life is gone. She is constantly in pain, constantly heavy, constantly carrying a child, constantly ill – cannot paint, cannot read, cannot create poetry, cannot play music, cannot dance, cannot have anything. Her whole work consists in going on giving birth to children.But it was okay in the past because even two may not have survived. Now all twenty are going to survive.Letters to me have arrived: “You seem to be cruel. You say compulsory birth control?” I am not cruel. I am being compassionate. If you create twenty children, as you have become accustomed to, there will be real cruelty. By the end of this century you will not have any place to stand alone. It will always be crowded, everywhere. From where are you going to feed so many people? You are hungry already. Seventy-five per cent of Indians are starving already. By the end of the century, ninety-nine per cent of Indians will be starving. And when ninety-nine per cent of the people are starving, the one per cent who have enough to eat will not be allowed to eat. That is so simple. You will be killed, you will be looted, there will be murder and rape and violence and nothing else. That will be cruelty. And you write letters to me: “You are cruel because you are saying compulsory birth control is needed.”What was happening in the past? There was no birth control, but eighteen children out of twenty were dying. Do you think that was compassionate? And God was imposing war on you, great illnesses, calamities like earthquakes, fires, floods. Those were God’s ways in the past to keep your population limited, so that it did not go beyond the possible means to feed people.Compulsory birth control is very compassionate. If you want the world again to be a victim of floods and fires and earthquakes and great wars, it is perfectly okay; go on producing. Now, this is what I call the rotten mind: not ready to change at all, would like to persist in its old ways, and then shouting…And because of these long, long conditionings, you have started looking for false causes. For example, you think a few people are living in richness and that’s why you are poor. You are utterly wrong. You can distribute those few people’s wealth, you will not become rich. It will be like dropping a spoonful of sugar in the ocean to make it sweet, that’s all it will be. That will be utter nonsense. But this is how the Indian mind thinks: if everybody lives a poor life, the country will be rich.Just a few people, a few people, not more than two per cent of the people, are living a better life. I would not call it luxurious – nobody lives a luxurious life in India, cannot live – but better. You can distribute the things of the two per cent of the people, and foolish people are trying to do that. They call it socialism, communism, etcetera. Distribute it, it can be distributed. That is not going to help at all. It may help your jealousy. You may feel a little better that you have taken revenge, but that is not going to change your situation at all. You don’t have enough richness to distribute. All that you can do is, you can distribute your poverty. You have only poverty.That’s why I am not for communism at all – because communism does not know how to produce wealth, it only knows how to distribute wealth. But before you can distribute, you need to produce. I am all for capitalism. Capitalism knows how to produce wealth. And once the wealth is there, ways and means can be found to distribute it. But the first thing is to produce it. India is not concerned with producing wealth, it is concerned with distributing it – and you have nothing to distribute.Because of this nonsense type of thinking, Indian leaders and politicians go on consoling you. Some politician reduces his pay; he says, “I will take only half,” and all the Indians are happy and say, “Look – this is a mahatma: Mahatma Morarji Desai.” Just because he has reduced his pay to half, do you think India’s problem is solved? What problem is solved?From the front door he reduces his wealth to half, from the back door his son Kanti Desai brings in millions of rupees. That’s okay. Indians have become very accustomed to living double lives. That’s okay.Or, Morarji Desai starts flying in Air India’s airplanes, not using the special plane for the prime minister, and everybody, the whole country, is agog with joy. So your poverty is solved. In fact, he creates more trouble. It would have been better and less costly to use the private plane because now many seats have to be reserved for him. Other passengers suffer. His security officers and guards and secretaries… And unnecessary hassle is created for other people. But this is how India goes on thinking.Mahatma Gandhi used to travel in a third-class railway compartment and the whole country was happy: “Look. This is a great mahatma.” By his traveling third class, what happened?Then there was another prime minister who suggested that if every person fasted one day, that would help. So fast one day. And he started fasting. His fasting meant that he would take milk and fruit and dry fruits, which are more costly. But just the idea: “Our prime minister is fasting for one day. He loves the country and the poor people so much.” And the poor people were not getting anything.When a certain mind is created, many more things are created in its wake. These are all foolish attitudes, these are not solutions. But you are not ready for the solution. The solution is that you have to drop your anti-world attitude, that you have to drop your anti-body attitude, that you have to learn how to produce more wealth, and you have to drop your fatalistic attitude: “What can we do? If God wants us poor we will be poor. If God wants us rich we will be rich.” Don’t throw the responsibility on God. He has given you enough freedom to be rich or poor. Don’t bring these unnecessary things into your prayer. They destroy your prayer and they destroy your religion.Man has been given enough intelligence to be rich or to be poor. You have to drop your whole tradition of poverty-worshipping. If this mind disappears, there is no reason why you should be poor. You can be as rich as any country, in fact, richer than any country. You have a big country with great potential. But you go on shouting and you go on throwing your responsibility on somebody else; it feels good.And now you are in difficulty. When the British were here, you were happy, saying, “It is because of the British that we are poor. They are exploiting.” Now who is exploiting you? Now a government is there and you start throwing the responsibility: “This government is wrong.” Then you change the government. Then the next government, and you start throwing the responsibility on the next government: “This government is wrong.”But you never see the point that somewhere you are wrong. It hurts your ego. And you are wrong. That’s why people are angry with me – because I am simply stating the fact that you are wrong.A little baby boy and a little baby girl were playing together in a cot. All of a sudden the little baby girl screamed out, “Rape, rape!”The little baby boy turned around and said, “You silly little girl, you are sitting on your dummy.”Unnecessarily shouting “Rape, rape!” Just drop this old, rotten mind.The fourth question:Osho,The other day you said that you do fly, but without helicopters. Can you please do it in front of us?No, certainly no! Did you hear about the first enlightened human being ever to fly…?He was running down a hill, gathering up speed, his arms outstretched and flapping.Suddenly a man jumped on his back, put a gun to the flyer’s forehead and said, “Now fly me to Cuba.”I am not going to do any such thing.The last question:Osho,I am constantly chattering with people and this is driving me mad. What should I do?There was once a Jew, Ohrenstein, who used to go to the rabbi with all his problems…Periodically he would go to the rabbi and ask him, what shall I do about my wife, what should I do about my business, what should I do about this, what should I do about that? My son-in-law is misbehaving, what should I do about it, rabbi? And so on.Each time Ohrenstein came with one of his many problems, the rabbi would listen patiently and courteously, and then he would fulfill Ohrenstein’s eager expectations by giving him some advice or making a suggestion.Ohrenstein always went away beaming, invariably told his friends about the wonderful advice the rabbi had given him, and within a week was back with a new problem and asking for more advice.Finally, the rabbi’s patience began to run out. Enough is enough, even for a courteous and loving rabbi. But what to do about it? Ohrenstein was a perfectly good and sincere man.One day Ohrenstein came with an unusually big problem. He had fallen in love with a girl and his wife had found out about it. He could not leave the girl, but he did not want to disappoint his wife. On and on he went: the girl this, his wife that, and so on. He talked for two hours and finally, at the end, he asked, “Rabbi, give me some advice, what should I do?”“Hmm,” the rabbi pondered and tapped on the table as though he were deep in thought. Finally he said, “I have some advice to give you, but I am afraid it may hurt your feelings. You may feel offended by it, so I don’t know if I should really give you any advice this time.”“Hurt my feelings?” Ohrenstein exclaimed. “Rabbi, you can say anything to me!”“Okay,” said the rabbi, “then my advice is: convert to Christianity, let yourself be baptized and start going to confession.”“What on earth are you saying, Rabbi?” Ohrenstein exclaimed, shocked. “Have you gone out of your mind?”“Not at all,” the rabbi replied. “Let yourself be baptized and start going to confession, and then you can drive some stupid parish priest crazy and not me!”That’s good advice for you too. Become a Catholic and torture the priest! Don’t torture poor people.You say, “I am constantly chattering with people and this is driving me mad.” What about others? “What should I do?” Think of others too.The grizzled old beggar had chopped his quota of stove wood and the kind lady had admitted him to the kitchen for his meal. She was an inquisitive person and while the tramp made away with all the food placed before him, she set up an endless line of questioning.“And what was your occupation before you fell into this sad plight, my man?” she asked.“I was a sailor, mum,” said the bum between mouthfuls.“Oh, a sailor. Well, you must have had some exciting adventures then?”“That I did, mum. Why once, mum, I was shipwrecked on the coast of South Africa, and there I came across a tribe of wild women who had no tongues.”“Mercy!” exclaimed the inquisitive woman. “Why, how could they talk then?”“They could not, mum,” replied the man, reaching for his hat and the last piece of bread on the plate. “That’s what made them wild.”You must be driving people crazy, but I cannot suggest that you stop, otherwise you will go crazy. The best way is to become a Catholic. Confession is invented for people like you. Go and torture the priest. If you cannot do that, sit silently in your room and start talking to the walls, but don’t torture people. Start talking to the walls, do gibberish.Gibberish should be taught to every person. The world will become saner if you can simply sit in your room and talk loudly to nobody in particular for one hour. In the beginning it will look crazy. It is! But it will relieve you of much heat, steam, and after one hour you will feel tremendously quiet.And it is inhuman to force your gibberish on other people – because you can force it on them. Then they are in trouble, then whatever you have said to them goes on rumbling inside their heads. They have to search for somebody else, and on and on. This way the problem that could have been solved becomes a world problem! You may be gone, but the gibberish that you have put into other people’s heads will go on and on for centuries. There is no way to end it; the full point cannot be put on it.The only way to put a full point on it is either a Catholic confession… Because the priest does not listen to what you are saying – he cannot if he is to remain sane, he simply pretends.A young psychoanalyst was very puzzled by his older colleague. The older psychoanalyst was seventy. They both entered the same building, they both had offices in the same building. Sometimes they met on the elevator going to their offices, and sometimes coming back.One day the young psychoanalyst asked the old one, “How do you manage? I feel so tired, so dead tired, listening to all kinds of nonsense.”Because the whole work of a psychoanalyst is to listen. That’s why the patient has paid him. He is a professional listener; he sits by the side of the couch and the patient raves and goes on saying whatever he wants to say. Because nobody else is ready to listen in the West, professional listeners are needed. The profession of the psychoanalyst is growing because there is nobody else. The husband is not ready to listen to the wife’s nonsense, the wife is not ready to listen to the husband’s nonsense, so both go to a professional listener – one has to pay for it – and then he listens. But of course, listening day in, day out to mad people, all kinds of stupid things, their dreams – rubbish – one gets tired, fed up. One wants to beat the patient.But the younger analyst was very surprised because the old one was as fresh in the beginning as in the end. In the morning he would come fresh, jubilant, and in the evening also he was as radiant and fresh.He asked, “Sir, one thing I have to ask you. What is your secret? I am completely killed by these stupid, neurotic persons that come to me. You look so jubilant.”He said, “Don’t listen to what they say. That’s what I do. I learned it long ago. Just pretend that you are listening. Their purpose is served, they think they are being listened to. It is not harming them at all. The only question is that somebody is listening, somebody is attentive. That makes them feel very good, they are important people: look, one of the most famous psychoanalysts is listening so attentively, as if their words are of wisdom. They are happy, they are relieved of their steam. Don’t listen. Otherwise their steam will get into you and you will not be able to sleep in the night. And all that nonsense that they have told you, if you carry it in your head, sooner or later you will have to go to another psychoanalyst.”You will be surprised to know, psychoanalysts go mad more often than any other profession, twice as often. And psychoanalysts commit suicide more than any other profession, twice as much. And even if they don’t commit suicide, if they are not that brave and don’t go mad, they remain boiling within. They are continuously in a kind of fever, a delirium. They are of course paid well – so they have chosen the profession – but it is a dangerous profession.If you want to throw out your junk, please make it a point not to throw it on any other human being. People have their own already, and it is too much; don’t add to it.But you can go to the river and talk to the river. And the river won’t listen, so there is no problem, the river won’t go mad. You can go to a tree and talk to the tree, and you can talk to the stars, and you can talk to the walls, and that’s perfectly good. And if you feel it is too crazy, then write it down, make a diary and write all that you want.You have to get rid of your steam, but it should not enter anybody else’s being, otherwise you are violent. And if people learn this simple thing, the world will become saner.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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They asked Firmani, “How did you know that such and such a man was vicious? You refused to converse deeply with him while he was here, although everyone said that he was a saint.”Firmani said, “If a stranger comes to ordinary men and says, ‘Light is made by weaving. I wove all the light there is and was,’ what do they realize?”They answered, “They realize that what he says is untrue.”Firmani said, “Similarly, when a vicious individual enters the company of a man of knowledge, it is not difficult to judge his condition, regardless of what people imagine or say.”Truth needs no proof, it simply is. It cannot be proved or disproved. It is luminous, it is radiant. Its presence is immediately felt, but only by those who have the heart to feel. The sun rises every day in the morning, but not for blind people. For them the night continues; their night is forever and forever. Not that the sun does not rise for them, it rises for all. One needs eyes to see it. Even though it is there, if the eyes are missing, it is as if it is not there. Even the greatest music cannot be heard by the deaf.So is truth: if you have the eyes to see, you will be able to see it immediately. It is direct. No other medium is needed. If you have the ears to hear, you will hear it in your very heart. It is the still, small voice within. No other argument will ever be needed. Arguments are needed for the blind, proofs are demanded by the deaf.So when you come to a man of wisdom, he simply knows where you are, who you are, what you are. Not that he thinks about you, there is no thinking involved. Not that he looks into you, nothing of the sort. He is a mirror: you are simply reflected. There is no thinking, but only reflection. Being in the presence of a man of wisdom is to be utterly nude. You cannot hide yourself, there is no way. You cannot deceive. Even if you try, it is pointless because the mirror will reflect the reality. The mirror can only reflect the reality. The unreal you cannot be reflected. You can pretend, but the mirror will not reflect your pretensions. It will reflect only that which is the case.When you are in the presence of a man of wisdom, you are reflected not only as you are, but also as you have been, and also as you will be. Your present moment contains your whole past and your whole future. Standing before an enlightened man, you are known from the very beginning to the end. Nothing remains hidden.That’s the fear that people feel in coming. They avoid buddhas. They cannot cheat and deceive buddhas. They are able to cheat the whole world; they are not afraid of the world because there they are confronting blind people, but coming to a Buddha or a Christ or a Krishna, great fear grips their hearts. There will be no way to pretend, all their hypocrisies will fall. They will be utterly nude.Jesus knew Judas even before he had betrayed him. He must have known him from the very first day he had come to him, there is no other possibility. Buddha knew Devadatta before he betrayed him, he must have known from the very beginning. Still, the compassion of a master allows a Judas, a Devadatta, to remain with him. The mirror goes on reflecting, but the compassion is far greater than the reflection of the mirror. And even if Judas is going to betray Jesus, it doesn’t matter. Jesus is surrendered; whatever is going to happen will be good. If God wills it so, it has to be good. That is his trust. Judas also is part of the divine, so the drama has to be played. Jesus cooperates, in every way he cooperates – even with Judas.Millions of people avoid Jesus, Buddha, Krishna. They have a subtle intuitive understanding that in the ordinary world they are able to manage a certain image of themselves. That image will be shattered. They don’t want to come to the mirror to see their real faces.And when you face a master, he knows more about you than you have ever known about yourself because whatever you know about yourself is very partial, just a fragment of your reality, the tip of the iceberg – just a small part of your mind that has become conscious, that is one-tenth of it. Nine-tenths of your being is in deep darkness, you know nothing of it.The master will know your unconscious too. The master will know not only your thoughts, but your dreams too. The master will know not only your ideas about yourself, your illusions about yourself; he will also know your other side, the shadow of your being, which you have denied, which you have thrown into the basement of your being, which you don’t recognize at all as your being. He will know you in your totality, he will know you in your total neurosis. And he has to work with that totality – not with the you that you know you are, but the you as you are.Hence many times the disciple finds it very difficult because he thinks his problem is different, and the master goes on prescribing a different kind of medicine. The disciple thinks, “This is not my problem,” and the master goes on insisting on a certain medicine which looks absolutely absurd, irrelevant to the problem that he thinks he has. Great trust is needed, only then can the master function on you. The trust when you see, “The medicine doesn’t seem to relate to my disease at all”… Even then – because you don’t know what your real diseases are. You know only superficial things, and they may not be your real problems at all. They may be substitute problems, they may be tricks of the mind to protect the real problem.The mind plays a trick: if there is a problem and the mind does not want to solve it – because to solve it would be suicidal to the mind – the mind gives you a false problem. You become occupied with the false problem. The real problem goes on growing like a cancer within you and you remain occupied with the false problem. This is not the problem, just a trick of the mind.The master will not prescribe any medicine for your false problems. He will prescribe medicine for your real problem. You may be aware of it, you may not be aware of it; greater is the possibility that you will not be aware of it. People are not aware of what they have been doing with themselves, what they are doing with themselves. People are moving, working, doing things, almost unconsciously, like machines. Robotlike is your existence.This robotlike existence has to be changed, utterly changed. You have to be made a conscious being. All the devices that have been used in the past and are being used now are nothing but a single device manifesting in different ways, and that single device is how to destroy the idea that you are. You are not, God is. Only God is.This is the fundamental of Sufism: you are not, God is. And this is your fundamental illusion: “I am, and where is God? I don’t see any God anywhere.”If you are, you will never see God. The very existence of the ego prevents seeing. The ego functions like a blindfold on your eyes. Then the sun rises, but you remain in darkness. The music goes on and on, but you don’t hear a thing. You live in the ocean of love, but your heart is nonfunctioning, nothing is felt. No prayer arises, no gratitude, no ecstasy. You remain uprooted. You remain like a dying tree with no roots in the earth. You remain impotent; no fruits come to you, no flowers bloom. And then of course life looks like a long, long drawn-out tragedy, and you start wondering why you are alive at all; the whole thing seems to be so ridiculously meaningless.That’s what is being felt all over the world by all kinds of thinkers today. That life is meaningless, that man seems to be just an accident, that consciousness is just as accidental as any rock. There seems to be no meaning, no relevance. Not that there is no meaning, but man, as he is today, cannot see the meaning. Meaning is another name for God.The ego will not allow you to see the reality because it creates a separation between you and the reality. The ego says, “I am separate,” and you are not. The moment the tree thinks it is separate from the earth, it starts dying. It becomes suicidal, its whole being is poisoned. The tree has to know that it exists only as an extension of the earth, it is not separate. Then the shape of the earth rises in the tree. Then it is nourished, fed by the earth. Then it is nourished by the sun and the moon and the stars, and then the tree is at home; it is not an outsider.Man feels very much like an outsider, as if he does not belong anywhere. Nobody else is responsible except himself, and the very idea of “I am.” There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who think “I am,” and those who think “I am not.” Those who think “I am” are the irreligious people, and those who know “I am not” are the religious people.There is a great statement of Buddha. He says, “Samadhi is enlightenment, but before it is enlightenment it is an extinguishing.” That is tremendously meaningful, significant. Before you can become light, before you can become enlightened, you will have to completely extinguish the flame of the ego. First you will have to fall into deep darkness, and then that very darkness becomes light. This is the miracle of the inward journey.You fall into darkness. Because right now you have the small light of the ego to help you to see, to grope, to find your way – just the small light of the ego – and you are afraid to extinguish it because then you will fall into utter darkness. And that is true: you will fall for a time, while all light disappears from your life. That’s what Christian mystics call “the dark night of the soul.” The ordinary light that the ego gives you is not much, but still it gives you a little light. It is like a glowworm: it does not lead you anywhere, but at least, on a dark night, even a glowworm is quite a hope that light exists. And when you extinguish it, you fall into utter darkness.That is the beginning of the journey. That is daring: to lose that which you have for that which may be, may not be. And for the unknown, no guarantee can be given. Only in deep trust with a master can you move into this darkness, the womb of darkness, and out of this darkness arises a new light. In fact, the darkness itself proves to be a new light. Just because you are not acquainted with it, in the beginning it looks like darkness. As you become acquainted, attuned, as your eyes become accustomed to the new darkness, you are surprised – the darkness is turning into light, infinite light.Buddha is right: first you have to go through an extinguishing, and then that very extinguishing becomes enlightenment.That’s what Sufis say. Their words are fana and baqa: fana means extinguishing, baqa means enlightenment. Fana means falling into nothingness, disappearing as an ego; baqa means arising again not as an ego, but as divine, as God himself. Ana’l haq, I am the truth – there is no “I” in that experience; only truth is felt.And whenever there is a man of truth – who has dropped his ego, has dropped his mind, whose thoughts have disappeared – he becomes a mirror. To be with a mirror, to be in front of a mirror, is to be a disciple.It really needs courage to be with a master because you will be known in your nudity. You do not want to be known in your nudity. You want to hide, you want to pretend, you want to show yourself as you are not; that’s why you wear masks. And everybody is carrying hundreds of masks because each moment you need different masks. Each moment you encounter a new situation; a new mask is needed.Watch. When you are talking to your servant you have a different face – next time be aware – when you are talking to your boss you again have a different face. If you are talking to a person you have nothing to do with, who is not going to fulfill any of your desires, watch your face. And the next day you may be talking to the same person, but now you are in need and he can be of help: watch your face. When you need somebody’s help you smile, you are very polite, you are very seductive. When you don’t need somebody’s help you remain unconcerned, cold, no smile; you don’t even show formality, you simply ignore the person. The same person becomes powerful one day, and see how you start wagging your tail. If the person is no longer in power, again you don’t take any note of him. Just go on watching yourself.That is the meaning when I say to you, let your relationship be a mirror. Each relationship has to be a mirror. For the seeker, each relationship has to show something: how you are behaving, what you are doing. Are you wearing masks continuously? Is there a moment in your life when you drop all masks and you are simply yourself? Is there? If there is not, then there is no moment of love in your life. Even with your beloved you go on playing games. Even with your children you go on playing games.You say, “I love this woman, I am ready to die for her,” but even with her you are not true, not authentically true, not as you are. Watch. Love means a relationship when you need not wear any mask. And if you are wearing a mask even with your beloved, your lover, then you don’t know what love is.To be with a master certainly means that you will not wear any mask. In the first place it is meaningless because the master can know you as you are behind the mask. His eyes are penetrating. He goes to the very core of your being, he catches you there. He is not concerned with your circumference, he is only concerned with your center.Sometimes it happens that a person comes with a problem and I don’t answer him because it is not his problem. He believes it is his problem. I answer some other problem that he has not asked. Sometimes – you must have seen – when I am answering your questions, I turn and change the question in such a way that it becomes the real question, the one that you have not asked. I give you answers which you were not expecting. You feel a little bewildered too, you start thinking that maybe I have not understood your question. I have understood it, but I am talking to your core, not to your circumference.And sometimes I answer A, but my answer is for B – because many times it happens that when I am answering B directly he will not listen. He protects, he is not available. When I am answering A, B is perfectly there, vulnerable. It is not his problem, I am answering somebody else. He need not defend, he need not have his armor ready, he need not have a shelter. He is sitting there silently; it is none of his concern, so he remains more vulnerable.This has been my observation: listening to others’ questions being answered, you understand more than when your own question is answered. Because when your own question is answered you become too tense: this is your question, I may hit you. When I am hitting somebody else, you can enjoy. You can laugh, but you are unaware that in your very laughter, when you open your mouth, I have entered. In your very laughter, I have reached you – because the moment of laughing is the most vulnerable moment, the most undefended moment.Before a mirror, each act or absence of an act, each word or absence of a word, everything is significant, everything relates something about you. How you come to see the master, how you sit before him, how you talk, how you react and respond – each and everything is significant because these are all languages. You are not aware of these things, but the mirror reflects.Different people approach me differently, totally differently. Somebody comes crying in joy, utterly open, ready to be taken on any journey, ready to go on an adventure, whatever the risk. Somebody comes in a very defending way, protected, hard, with an armor all around, watching, on guard: he will go with me only if his logical mind is convinced. But then he cannot go for long because the logical mind has limitations, and existence has no limitations. The logical mind goes only so far and then it stops; it has boundaries.Unless you come to me through love, you will not be able to go to the ultimate end. Only love can take you to the ultimate end because love knows no boundaries.Somebody comes in love; then my mirror reflects the love and I know that he has come home. Somebody comes with logical, intellectual paraphernalia, protected, on guard, afraid, frightened, scared, only ready to go as far as his mind allows. He is not going with me, he is going with his mind. He is not a disciple. Even if he takes sannyas, he will not be a disciple. Even his sannyas will be his conclusion.Just the other day somebody has asked, “If I take sannyas, will it be the beginning of a new life?” Sannyas is the beginning of new life, sannyas is the new life. It is not that first you take sannyas and then sannyas prepares you to begin another life, no. Sannyas is the beginning of another life. You have lived with doubt, now you start living with trust. You have lived with logic, now you start living with love. You have lived with your own mind, with your own ego, now you live with surrender. Sannyas is the new life.Now, if somebody takes sannyas in order to start a new life, he has missed the whole point; the new life will never start. If sannyas itself does not become the new life, then sannyas will never start a new life. He will remain the same.Somebody else has asked, “Osho, you say, ‘Don’t think of the future.’ Then what about sannyas? I am thinking about sannyas, is that not thinking about the future?” Thinking about sannyas is thinking about the future, but thinking about sannyas, you will never take sannyas. Thinking has nothing to do with sannyas. Sannyas is a jump. It is not that you think, ponder over it, argue for and against, and then finally you come to a conclusion. If this is the way of your taking sannyas, you have missed it already! Before taking it, you have missed it.Sannyas is a jump, a quantum leap. It is not that “tomorrow” you will take sannyas. A moment arrives when the decision grips your heart. Not that you have pondered over it in a very syllogistic way, logically, rationally, thought about what will happen and what will not happen, what are the benefits and what are the harms, and what are the problems that you will have to face. Sannyas is not a calculated step. If it is, then you are thinking of the future and it has nothing to do with sannyas.Sannyas is a meditative jump, not a calculated step. It is a mad jump. It is like falling in love, it happens “at first sight.”The moment real sannyasins come here – they are here, many of you are real sannyasins – it has happened as a love affair. They have not thought about it, they have not prepared for the future. They have taken the jump, and then they will see whatever happens. They could not resist, there was no way to resist. They simply fell into it, they found themselves falling into it.When you come to a master be relaxed, be utterly open, be naked, don’t hide – because nothing is going to remain hidden anyway, so why bother? Why not show a gesture of trust? The master is going to know. If he is worth anything, he is going to know. Then why hide? Then why create unnecessary problems and wastage of time? Sometimes it happens that you say something and I have to listen to it just to be polite to you, just not to offend you unnecessarily, at least not in the beginning. Once you are trapped, it is another matter. But just when you are falling into the trap, I have to say yes to many foolish things, many false things. This is a waste of time. Things can be settled more easily and your growth can happen very fast, but you delay it.With the master, don’t be very verbal because words coming from an unenlightened mind don’t communicate. Rather, they camouflage. When you talk too much about something, that means you are trying to hide something. You go round and round, you create a great storm of words. You think you are trying to communicate. No, you are trying to hide behind the wall of the words. You are trying to hide something that you don’t want to say, that you are afraid may be known if you remain silent, may surface if you are silent.Watch yourself. When you are talking to people, what are you really doing? Are you communicating? Language is made to communicate, but is not used that way. Language is used to deceive, not to communicate. People are very afraid of being silent because if they are silent, then their faces, their very presence may say something which they don’t want to say. They feel it is better to go on talking so that both persons remain engaged in words and the realities remain behind the words, hidden.Be very telegraphic when you are with a master.Dr. Abernathy, the famous Scottish surgeon, was a man of few words, but once he met his match in a woman. She called at his office in Edinburgh one day and showed a hand, badly inflamed and swollen. The following dialogue, opened by the doctor, took place:“Burn?”“Bruise.”“Poultice.”The next day the woman called again and the dialogue was as follows:“Better?”‘Worse.”“More poultice.”Two days later the woman made another call and this conversation ensued:“Better?”“Well. Fee?”“Nothing,” exclaimed the doctor. “Most sensible woman I ever met!”Be telegraphic. Say only that which is really worth saying. Don’t ask unnecessary questions – time is precious – ask only the very necessary. Ask only that which makes a difference in your life.Watch each gesture because everything is reflected. The way you walk, the way you sit, the way you look at the master, each small gesture is indicative. It is all language. Your body has its own language.Sometimes I see a person walking toward me very arrogantly, and the words that he speaks are very polite. The way he walks is arrogant and that is far more true. He is not aware of that. The words that he uses are very polite, false. They are not true because they are not in tune with his body. The body is less deceptive than the mind. You say one thing through your mouth, and your eyes are saying a totally different thing, a different story. And your eyes are more true than your words.You say something, but the tone of saying is more relevant, more expressive than the actual words used. You may say yes in such a tone that it means no. You can say no in such a loving way that it means yes. Remember, words are not so significant.I have heard…Mark Twain used to infuriate his wife with his habitual foul language. One day she hit on an idea: she would cure him with a taste of his own medicine. Bursting into his study, she said, “Why the hell do you have to leave your goddamn cigar butts all over the place?”There was a pause, then Twain looked up from his writing and said, “My dear, you may have learned the words, but you will never get the tune.”And the tune is the real thing. It happens almost every day – somebody says yes, but his whole being is saying no. Whom to believe? His words or his whole being? And sometimes the opposite case also happens: somebody says, “No, Osho, no,” but his whole being is saying yes. Even the way he says no is so full of love that it doesn’t mean no, it doesn’t mean a negative. And sometimes someone says, “Yes, okay, yes,” but his yes is dull, dead. It really means no. He did not want to say yes, he was saying it under pressure. It is meaningless.My mirror goes on reflecting your totality, and I have to decide from there.One day, the conductor of a freight train sitting in the cupola of his caboose observed a tramp crawling up over a box car.“Say,” he said to the brakeman down in the caboose, “there is a bum down there on the sixth car. Run down and pitch him off.”The brakeman crawled out over the caboose and started running down over the tops of the cars. When he reached the car the tramp was on, he yelled, “Look here, bo, I have come down here to kick you off, and I don’t want no argument.”The tramp pulled a big forty-four out of an arm holster, saying, “That’s all right, buddy. I got a little friend here that does all my arguing for me.”This was not so good, so the brakie returned to his caboose.“Well, did you throw him off?” asked the conductor.“No. He turned out to be a cousin of mine,” said the brakeman, “and a man can’t kick his own relatives off the train.”“Then I will go down and throw him off,” said the conductor viciously.He ran down over the cars and in a few minutes he came back and took his place in the cupola.“Well, did you throw him off?” asked the brakeman.“No. He turned out to be a cousin of mine too.”The man who has passed through all the states that you are passing through and has reached the ultimate cannot be deceived. Whatever you say will be understood in its reality, not in the sense that you are saying it. Now, what will this brakeman understand when the conductor says, “No, he turned out to be a cousin of mine too”?The enlightened person is one who has lived through all kinds of states that you are passing through. He is fully aware of all possible human states. He has passed through all the agonies that you are passing through. He has been as deceptive as you are, he has been lying to the world as much as you do, he has been as much of a pretender, as much of a hypocrite as you are. He knows everything. He has lived all possible human existences, after thousands of lives he has arrived. Nothing is unknown to him.So whenever you face an enlightened person, he starts reading you like a book. Your whole biography is written all over you – in your body, in your mind, in your consciousness, in your unconsciousness. Your whole biography is available, and in a single instant it is available. You are mirrored in toto.The story:They asked Firmani, “How did you know that such and such a man was vicious? You refused to converse deeply with him while he was here, although everyone said he was a saint.”Firmani is a famous Sufi mystic, a great master; his disciples were asking him. Somebody must have come, a well-known saint, very much respected by people, worshipped. He had come to see Firmani, but Firmani did not pay much attention to him, did not even bother to commune with him deeply. The disciples were puzzled.They asked Firmani, “How did you know that such and such a man was vicious?” There is no method for knowing. The master simply reflects, just like a mirror. What is the method for a mirror to know your face? There is no method, the mirror reflects. If there is no dust on the mirror, it reflects perfectly. If there is too much dust, a layer of dust, it doesn’t reflect at all.A master is a consciousness without any dust, a consciousness without any content, a consciousness without a thought process.Thoughts are the layer of dust on your mind. It is because of thoughts, too many thoughts, that your reflections are not true to reality. They interfere, they continuously distort, they manipulate. They never allow the thing to be reflected as it is. Once your thoughts have been dropped, once you have come to a point when your mind is contentless, you just are, no thought moving in you, then nothing is distorted. Then the lake of your consciousness is absolutely still, no waves, not even ripples. Then the moon and the stars are all reflected in their great splendor. The lake becomes a mirror.The difference between an enlightened person and an unenlightened person is only of this: the unenlightened person has a mirror in himself, but the mirror is behind layers and layers of dust – thoughts, desires, imaginations, memories, words – so nothing reaches the mirror. And even if something reaches at all, it is no longer the same; all those layers distort it.Just watch yourself, just a simple thing: if somebody says, “This man is the president of India,” and immediately… He may be, he may not be, that is irrelevant, but somebody says, “This man is the president of India” just watch yourself, how you change immediately. Just the words “president of India” – and the man is the same!Once it happened…A very beautiful man, Mahatma Bhagwandin, came to the town where I used to live. He was making a small place for orphans, an orphanage. He wanted to collect some money, so he went to collect. The whole day the old man went from one shop to another shop, from one house to another house. He was a very simple man. All that he collected was not more than twelve rupees; he collected the whole day.When he came back, very tired, I asked, “Where have you been the whole day?”He said, “I have been collecting, but it seems impossible – in one day only twelve rupees. How long will it take for me?”I said, “Wait. This is not the way to collect.”He asked, “Then how should it be done?”I said, “Simply wait.”The next day I gave his picture to be published in the newspapers, saying that a great saint had come. Phone calls started coming: “We want to come for darshan.”I said, “It is very difficult. The saint rarely gives darshan, but I will see.” And many people came, but I didn’t allow them to see him. In two, three days, it was the talk of the town: “A great saint has come, and he is not seeing anybody.”Then I told a few of my friends, “Go with him,” so twenty or twenty-five persons followed him; there was a procession in the town. And wherever he went, the same places – and just three or four days before, the person had given him only four annas; now he gave him five hundred rupees. The same man, but now he was a great saint, followed by twenty-five followers, with pictures in the newspaper, and a very rare man because he never gave an audience to people. That day he collected near about eight thousand rupees. There is a lot of difference between twelve rupees and eight thousand rupees.People’s minds live through words. You live through words. Somebody says, “Watch! This man is a thief,” and immediately you are totally different toward the man, you are no longer the same. Just a minute before you were so loving, kind, helpful; now you are withdrawn. Just a small word has distorted the whole thing. He may not be a thief. He may not be a saint.But you live through words, you don’t see reality as it is. If a painting is hanging somewhere, you may not see it. You may pass through the room every day and you may not see it. One day somebody says, “This is a Picasso,” and just then you see how your eyes are shining and you are standing there in front of the painting, mystified! “Picasso? A million-dollar painting?” And it may be nothing. It may be just some madman who has painted it, but the idea that it is Picasso’s painting is enough – and it starts looking beautiful, it starts looking like something miraculous. That’s how you are living.You don’t reflect reality. Your mind continuously distorts it. Whatever you have been told and taught and conditioned for, your mind functions in the service of it.They asked Firmani, “How did you know that such and such a man was vicious?” There is no question of how. The master simply reflects. He has no method to know; methods are needed by blind people. All that the master is, is enough. He need not do anything else. You come before him, and he knows. Knowing and your coming before him are simultaneous, not even a single instant is lost.The disreputable-looking panhandler picked out an elderly gentleman of most benevolent aspect and made a plea for a small financial contribution. When he had finished his narrative of misery and woe, the elderly gentleman replied benignantly,“My good friend, I have no money, but I can give you some good advice.”The tramp spat contemptuously and uttered an oath of disgust.“Well, if you ain’t got no money,” he said, turning away, “I reckon your advice ain’t worth hearing.”Just a moment before, the man was immensely valuable, but now because he has no more money, no money at all, not even his advice is worth hearing; not even that much politeness can the beggar show.You behave only according to a certain pattern and gestalt of your mind. You behave through your desires. If somebody fulfills your desire, or you think can fulfill your desire, he is great.In India they have a proverb: When in need, one can even call a donkey “father,” bapu. When you are in need, then even if a donkey can fulfill your need, you have to call him bapu.Since Morarji Desai has become the Prime Minister, people have started calling him bapu! He feels very, very thrilled, he enjoys when somebody calls him bapu. He should remember this proverb. This country has its wisdom in its proverbs. The same people will not take any note of Morarji Desai once he is out of power – the same people that are calling him bapu, father.The mind lives through desires. The mind lives through greed, fear, jealousy, ambition. The mind distorts. Because of motivations, the mind distorts.The master is without any motivation. He has nothing to get from you. If the master desires something from you, he will not be a mirror, remember. If he desires anything, even respect from you, then too he will not be a mirror. If there is even a slight desire of any kind, there are ripples and there is dust and he will not reflect your true reality. Only the master who has no desire from you, who is utterly fulfilled, can reflect. Nothing is left that you can help him fulfill, that is needed, that you can give to him. And the reflection is simply a happening, there is no method.They asked Firmani, “How did you know that such and such a man was vicious?” It is simply known. Virtue is known, vice is known. The humble person reflects in the master, and the arrogant. It is simply known. There is no need to know, or any effort, any endeavor to know. It just happens.“You refused to converse deeply with him while he was here, although everyone said that he was a saint.” It doesn’t matter what ordinary people say, they are ignorant. In fact, whatever they say is bound to be wrong. They are blind people. What do they know about light? Whatever they say about light is bound to be wrong. Although the majority consists of ignorant people and the world is almost ruled by them – still, whatever they say is wrong.In the world of truth, democracy is not the deciding factor. Truth is not decided by votes. Otherwise truth would never win – if it were to be decided by votes.Truth happens to single individuals, rare individuals. They are always alone. Jesus was alone. Buddha was alone. Only very few people followed them. The mob, the crowd remained against them because whatever they were saying was not possible for the mobs to understand. Even to have a glimpse of it was impossible.Somebody was arguing with George Bernard Shaw, a Christian, and he was saying, “Christianity must be right because, look, one fourth of humanity believes in Christianity. How can it be wrong – so many people believe in it?” Do you know what Bernard Shaw said? He said, “How can it be right if so many people believe in it?” And he has a point there: how can it be right if so many people believe in it?Jesus was not believed by so many people. He had only twelve followers, real followers, and a hundred or so lay followers, and maybe a thousand or two thousand sympathizers, that’s all. When he was crucified, the followers were in such a minority that they simply escaped. They could not protect him. They could not even raise a protest. They were in such a minority that they could not even go and see what was happening to their master, they were afraid they would be killed themselves. Jesus remained alone.Truth rarely happens because very few people gather that much courage for it to happen. And what the masses say is almost always wrong; beware of it. If the masses believe that a certain man is a saint, beware. Every possibility is that he is a pretender. Because the masses believe in him is enough proof that he must be wrong. What is the logic behind it? The logic is that he is fulfilling the desires of the masses, and no man of truth can ever fulfill the desires of the masses.The man of truth has another devotion: his devotion is toward truth. He has to fulfill truth, not the ideas of the masses – and the ideas of the masses are the ideas of blind people about light, the ideas about music of those who are deaf, ideas about love of those who have never loved, ideas about God of those who have no notion of what God is. If these people are following somebody, one thing is certain: that man must be fulfilling their idea of saintlihood.If the masses think that a saint should eat only once a day and you eat once a day, they will worship you as a great man, a saint. All that you need is to fulfill their demand. And this is not very difficult, you can manage it. It needs only a little practice, you can eat only once.And you will be surprised: the saints who eat only once have very big bellies. It is bound to be so because they eat too much. They eat once, so they have to fulfill the desire for eating at least three times in one time. They eat thrice as much. If the belly goes on becoming bigger and bigger, it is natural.If you want to see a real picture of a belly you should look at Muktananda’s guru, Nityananda. He has the belly, just the belly. The man seems to be unimportant; the head and etcetera are just added to the belly. Nityananda is just belly, and people worship him like a paramahansa, a great saint.If you eat once you will eat too much because then for twenty-four hours you have to wait, or you will have to eat in the dark, when it is dark and night and nobody looks at you – but that is hypocrisy. I have been watching that happening too.Once a Jaina nun came to see me. I was puzzled because she was not stinking. Jaina nuns stink because they cannot take a bath. That is the idea – that a saint should not take a bath – because a bath means you are too attached to the body: “Why this cleanliness?” Hippies should be happy that there has existed a great tradition of saints who never take a bath, but then naturally they stink.The Jaina monks and nuns are not allowed to brush their teeth – because that too is a kind of beautifying your face, and they are against the body in every way – so when they talk, it is really difficult to face them.This Jaina nun came to see me, and she was sitting close. I was afraid, but I was bewildered also. No smell was coming, and she even talked and there was no smell.I asked, “What is the matter? Be truthful with me! You must be cleaning your teeth.”She said, “Yes, but I have to do it hiding.” She showed me in her bag that Jaina monks and nuns carry – all their belongings are just in their small bag – toothpaste and soap. She showed me. She said, “This is not to be told to anybody, but to you I can say it. I cannot tolerate that stink. Even if I have to go to hell, I will go. But please don’t tell anybody.”Now, what are the masses doing to their saints? They have a certain demand, and the saint has to fulfill it. Either he becomes a hypocrite, he has to do something else against the demands and hide it… And what a poor woman: she did not do any great crime, just having toothpaste. But it is a great crime according to the Jainas. And she takes a sponge bath, hiding; with just a wet towel she takes a sponge bath. She cannot go under a shower because her hair will become wet and people will come to know, and it will be difficult to maintain her image as a nun.I asked her, “Then why don’t you leave all this nonsense?”She said, “But what else can I do? I became a nun when I was twelve years old. I have never been to a school, college, university; I am absolutely uneducated. If I leave, who is going to feed me? Now I am worshipped. And these same people will not be ready to give me even an ordinary cleaning job in their houses. They will be against me, they will persecute me, and I don’t have any qualifications to earn my living. For almost thirty years I have lived as a nun. Every care is being taken of me. Now at the age of forty-three suddenly dropping it and becoming a laborer will be difficult. I have lived in a kind of luxury, I have never worked, so it is better to continue. At least in this life I have to continue in this hypocrisy.”The masses worship people as saints only because they fulfill their demands. And their demands are neurotic; only stupid people can fulfill their demands. A man of intelligence will never fulfill their demands. He will live in his own way, he will have the guts to live in his own way. Whether you think about him as a saint or not, who cares?The man of truth is satisfied with his truth. He does not need anything else.People think in their own way. The masses are ignorant, are stupid, their expectations are ignorant and stupid, but that is natural. The real thing is the people who concede to their demands, who compromise with the masses – them I cannot understand. They are selling their souls.An old Jewish grandfather was making a tour of Europe with his grandson, and like all tourists, they visited the churches. In this one particular Catholic church, they came upon a painting called “The Christ-child in the Manger.”The old man stopped in front of it and after studying it for ten minutes, turned to his grandson and asked, “So who is the woman in the picture?”“My grandfather, that is Mary, the mother of the Christ-child,” said the grandson.The old man just nodded and continued to study the picture and finally turned and asked, “So who is the man in the picture?”“My grandfather, that is Joseph, her husband.”Again the old man nodded and studied the picture and finally asked, “So how come a child has to be born in a barn?”“Well, grandfather, you know the story. Mary and Joseph came to the inn so poor that they had no money, and they could only afford the barn.”The old man nodded and turned to his grandson and said, “Tell me, isn’t that just like our people? Money for a hotel room they don’t have, but money for a family picture they manage.”People think in their own way. They can’t think beyond their own minds. Their minds are conditioned for generations.The disciples of Firmani said, “You refused to converse deeply with him while he was here, although everyone said he was a saint.” That doesn’t matter. Even if the whole world says he is a saint, the man who knows will not agree. He will agree only if his mirror reflects and his mirror says that he is a saint. There is no other way.People come to me, good people, sincere people, honest people, and they ask, “Why are you against Mahatma Gandhi – because the whole world thinks that he is a saint?” I say, “The whole world may think he is a saint, but my mirror doesn’t reflect that way and I have to be true to my mirror.” Even if I have to say things which go against the whole world-mind, I have to say them. My commitment is to my own consciousness, my commitment is not to anybody else. What others say is irrelevant.And the people who follow Mahatma Gandhi go on comparing him with Jesus, which is nonsense. What is the reason they compare? The reason is because Jesus was crucified and Gandhi was shot. But there have been many people who have been shot. Kennedy was shot; he does not become a Jesus just because he was shot. And the difference is so vast. Jesus was crucified by the society; only a few people were for him, the major part of his people were against him. Gandhi was shot by a single madman, and the whole society was for him. This is such a difference, so clear. Jesus was crucified by the society; only a few people, rare people, were with him. Just the opposite is the case with Mahatma Gandhi. The whole society was for him, only one madman shot him.Whenever there is a man of truth, the society is never with him, has never been with him. It cannot be. The society is with you only if you are very politically cunning, clever, if you somehow go on adjusting yourself to society. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi was doing his whole life, trying to adjust himself to society. Whatever were the demands of the society, he would adjust.The man of truth is always in rebellion. He is always maladjusted. The society is against him.And it doesn’t matter whether one fool is with you or one thousand fools are with you or one million fools are with you. The number does not matter. The number makes no qualitative change.Two Jews went into business together in a small town; one went to New York to buy the goods, and the other stayed at home. The one who stayed at home got the bills a few days after his partner was in New York. The bills were as follows:24 doz. neck wear, and 8 doz. ditto;24 suits and 4 ditto;18 pants and 12 ditto.This ditto bothered the one at home, so he telegraphed his partner to come immediately. When his partner arrived he showed him the bills and said, “What do you mean you shall buy ditto for a clothing business?”“I buy ditto?” asked the other.“Yes, here are the bills.”“Well, they stuck me in New York.”So he returned to New York and learned that ditto meant “the same.” He came back home and his partner, meeting him at the depot, said, “Well, Abie, did you find out what ditto is?”“Yes,” said Abie, “I find out what a ditto is: I am a damn fool and you are ditto.”One fool or one thousand fools, it makes no difference. The master is not concerned with numbers. He is not concerned at all with the quantity, but only with the quality. Firmani had refused to talk with this so-called saint.Firmani said, “If a stranger comes to ordinary men and says, ‘Light is made by weaving. I wove all the light there is and was,’ what do they realize?”They answered, “They realize that what he says is untrue.”Firmani said, “Similarly, when a vicious individual enters the company of a man of knowledge, it is not difficult to judge his condition, regardless of what people imagine or say.”If somebody said to you: “…Light is made by weaving and I wove all the light there is and was” what would you realize? You would know that it was all nonsense. Just the statement in itself is so false that you would not need to bother about it, you would not need to think about it. It is so utterly false that the moment it is made, it is known that it is false.Exactly that is what happens when you face a master: whatever you go on shouting about yourself, or others go on shouting about you, makes no difference. He simply sees to the very core of your being. You are reflected in your totality, and that is decisive.So it has happened many times that the traditionally accepted saints were not accepted by the enlightened people, and that created a problem. There were great rabbis in Jesus’ time. They were accepted by the people, respected by the people, but Jesus did not accept them. That created the trouble. Those rabbis were the conspirators, the real conspirators, in killing Jesus.When Buddha was here, there were many saints – this country is full of saints, it has always been full of saints – but Buddha did not recognize those saints as saints. That created trouble. And the moment Buddha was gone, all those saints gathered together and uprooted his whole tradition from India, threw all Buddhism out. Thousands of Buddhists were killed, their temples burned, their scriptures destroyed, and who was behind all this? – the so-called saints. When Buddha was alive they could not face him, but when he was gone, they jumped upon it. They all became united. Different kinds of saints who had always been fighting and quarreling were all together on at least one point: to uproot Buddhism from India.And this is the case again. You will be surprised. Against me, the Hindu saint, the Mohammedan saint, the Christian saint, the Jaina saint, the Buddhist saint, are all agreed. They don’t agree on anything else – their metaphysics are different, their principles are different, they don’t agree on anything – but on one thing they all agree: I am wrong. Why do they all agree on one point? Because if I am right, then all their saintlihood is just hocus-pocus, then their so-called saintliness is nothing but a traditional way of living which is accepted by the ignorant. If I am right, I am taking the very earth from beneath their feet. Their anger is understandable.It has always been so, and it seems it is always going to be so. Ugly people don’t like mirrors, they destroy mirrors because they think mirrors make them look ugly. They don’t change their faces because that is difficult and arduous. The easiest thing is to destroy the mirror and forget all about the mirror. Kill a Jesus, poison a Socrates, and you are free of the mirror. And then you can enjoy your illusory beauty, which is absolutely nonexistential.Firmani said, “Similarly, when a vicious individual enters the company of a man of knowledge, it is not difficult to judge his condition” – it is very apparent, it is obvious – “regardless of what people imagine or say.”A certain famous preacher, when preaching one Sunday in the summertime, observed that many among the congregation were drowsing. Suddenly, he paused and then afterward continued in a loud voice, relating an incident that had no connection whatever with the sermon. This was to the following effect:“I was once riding along a country road. I came to the house of a farmer, and halted to observe one of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen. There was a sow with a litter of ten little pigs. The sow and each of her offspring had a long curved horn growing out of the forehead between the ears.”The clergyman again paused and ran his eyes over the congregation. Everybody was now wide awake.He thereupon remarked, “Behold how strange! A few minutes ago, when I was telling you the truth, you went to sleep. But now when you hear a whopping lie, you are all wide awake.”People live in lies, and when they hear a whopping lie they are all wide awake. People live in lies, and whenever they find a saint who agrees with their lies, who agrees with their minds, who confirms them, they are all respectful. Great worship arises in their hearts and great gratitude; they all bow down. It is a mutual understanding. The so-called saint is bowing down to the people because he is following their tradition and their rotten minds. And because he is following their tradition – they think it is golden, they think it is the greatest religion – and because he is following their religion, he is proving that they are right. Their egos are fulfilled, they bow down to the saint. This is a mutual arrangement to fulfill each other’s egos.If Jesus had said, “I am just a Jew, a rabbi,” if he had only commented on the old scriptures and lived according to the rules and regulations that the Jews had always believed, he would have been thought of as a great saint. But he started behaving eccentrically.All masters have done that. They look eccentric because they don’t follow the settled path. They create their own footpath.He started behaving in his own way; he started breaking the laws and regulations and the rules. He cured people on the day when the Jewish law says nothing should be done – he cured people. Now, he did not commit any sin, but the mind who lives in rituals, the legal mind, is offended: “He has to be punished.”Whatever he was doing was true religion, but the true religion will always go contrary to the traditional religion. Why does it happen? – because the traditional religion is not created by enlightened people. It is created by the priests, as ignorant as everybody else.Jesus was killed by the priests, and then again priests gathered around Jesus’ words. They created another tradition: Christianity.Just the other day I received a letter from a Christian missionary, well-known all over the world. He wrote, “Whatever you say is beautiful, logical, appealing, but still, you are an evil force because you are not a Christian, and Christ has said that many false messiahs will come, and you are one of them. And they will be very convincing and their words will look like truth, but they will not be true.” The missionary asked, “Can you prove that you are the second Christ? If not, then you are a false messiah.”Then Buddha is a false messiah because he is not a second Christ, and Krishna too, and Kabir, and Bahauddin – all are false messiahs. That’s what Jewish rabbis were saying to Jesus, that he was a false messiah. “Can you prove,” they were asking, “that you are the messiah we have been waiting for?” They were asking for proof. Jesus was not proof enough; they wanted some proof, solid proof, maybe a written letter from God saying, “Yes, I appoint him. He is not a self-appointed messiah, he is appointed by me.”Jesus was present. They could not look at him, they could not feel him, they could not see him, they could not hear him, and they were asking for proof.Now the same thing again. I am not a Christian. Certainly, I am not a Christian. Why should I be a Christian? My whole approach is either be a Christ, or don’t be a Christ, but what is the meaning of being a Christian? Christ consciousness is one thing, being a Christian is just a plastic flower. I am not a Christian. And I am not the second coming of Christ! Why should I be anybody else’s coming? I come on my own. I am not anybody’s carbon copy.Now, the Christian is going to be against me, naturally. It always happens: the tradition is created by the same priests who kill, who destroy the truth when it is there walking on the earth. The same kind of priests gather together to make the temple, the church, the tradition, the scripture – and again they will be against it whenever truth walks on the earth.Remember, truth has no tradition. Truth is a revolution. Truth is never conformist, it is always a rebellion.When you come to a master you have come to a rebellion. You have come to fire! Be ready to be burned because only when you are burned will you be born. Like a phoenix you will be reborn, you will have a resurrection, a rebirth. “Die,” Mohammed says, “before you die, so that you can be reborn.”Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I keep meeting people who can see auras, and I feel I am missing. What can I do to share this sight?God is not an experience. No experience as such is spiritual, all experiences are mind games. Beware of it. Whatever can be seen will be part of the illusory world. The seer is the truth, not the seen. You can see auras and you can see angels and you can see kundalini rising and you can see inner lights – but they are all seen. They are not you.The seer is the witness, and only the witness is the truth. All else is a dream. And there are worldly dreams and there are otherworldly dreams; there are materialistic dreams and there are spiritualistic dreams. One thing has to be remembered always: whatever is seen is worthless – even if it is God. The God that is seen is worthless.When all experiences disappear and you are left utterly alone – nothing to see, only emptiness in the hands, no experience at all, suddenly you realize yourself. Then you turn upon yourself, then you fall into your source. And that is not an experience, it is a realization. That is the difference between the words experience and realization. It is not that you have seen something, experienced something. Now you know who you are.The great Sufi mystic Maghrebi says:Don’t speak to us of visions and miracles, for we have long ago transcended such things.We saw them all to be illusion and dreams, and dauntlessly we passed beyond them.You will meet many people here who will go on playing these games. They are simply wasting their time. Avoid their company. I am going to attract all kinds of people, and particularly the people who are interested in spiritualism. They will bring all their diseases here. They will talk nonsense; they will talk about miracles, psychic experiences. And naturally, when somebody talks about such things, you start feeling as if you are missing. You are not missing a thing because he is only dreaming.But he can create the feeling in you that you are lacking something, that your growth is not going well, that you are not growing as fast as you should grow. He will create the feeling of inferiority in you and that is dangerous. Once you start feeling inferior you become sad, depressed. You carry a heavy weight on your chest, and that will become a hindrance in your growth.And there is every possibility that if you desire, you will start seeing these things. Desire creates dreams. If you start thinking that you are missing, soon your mind will project. The mind is always ready to give you anything that you desire, and particularly such things. If you desire money it will be difficult because it is not only a question of your own mind. If you desire to become the president of a country it may not be easy because there may be much competition. But if you want to see auras there is no competition, and nobody can hinder you, and you are not taking somebody else’s auras; you are creating your own. It is a private, idiotic world. This is the meaning of the word idiot: it means having a private world of your own experiences, which do not collaborate with reality.I know a few people are here who enjoy a kind of leadership because they can gather a few people around themselves. They start talking about esoteric things. And whenever somebody talks about esoteric things, hidden truths that you are not aware of, he enjoys being a knower, and he reduces you to an ignorant person. It hurts. Soon you will also start talking and reading such nonsense books, and they are available in abundance.Here, you are not to be with me to see auras, or to see lights, or to see kundalini energy rising, or the chakras opening. I am trying to hammer this truth into your heart continuously, that the only thing worth attaining is enlightenment, is nirvana, is the realization of who you are. Everything else has to be bypassed. And these things come on the way.The mind tries to allure you to the very end. It gives beautiful psychedelic experiences, very colorful, enchanting. One can get stuck with them. LSD is nothing. If you go on working on your being you will find far deeper, far profounder-appearing experiences happening to you which no LSD can release.Then the desire is to cling to them, and that very desire keeps you away from the ultimate truth. For the ultimate truth, everything has to be sacrificed, all so-called spiritual experiences, esoteric knowledge, miracles. Everything has to be dropped. One has to come to the ultimate experience – which is not an experience.Language is inadequate to express it: that’s why it is called an experience. It is not an experience – because in an experience there is a division of the experiencer and the experienced, and in this experience, the ultimate, there is no division. You are the knower, you are the known, you are the seer, you are the seen, you are the experiencer, you are the experienced. Only you are.That absolute, still point of pure existence is the goal. All else has to be sacrificed for it. Beware of such things.I have heard…A man was telling his friend about his recent trip to Europe and said, “You know, I went to Europe with my friend Seymour – you know Seymour, the cripple, the one with the crutches under each arm? Well, first we went to London where we visited the Tower of London. I climbed to the very top of it but poor Seymour, the cripple, the one with the crutches under each arm, he could not make it.“Then we went to Paris, France, where again I climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower but poor Seymour, the cripple, the one with the crutches under each arm, could not make it.“But then we went to Rome and ended up with a private audience with the Pope. The Pope walked into the room, took one look at Seymour, the cripple, the one with the crutches under each arm, and walked over to him and placed a kiss on the right cheek of Seymour. As if by magic, Seymour threw his right crutch away.“Then the Pope came over to Seymour’s left cheek and gave him a kiss – and again as if by magic, he threw his left crutch down.”“What happened next?” his friend asked.“Well, Seymour is a cripple, you know – he fell down right on his ass.”The second question:Osho,Isn't what you say beyond the boundaries of human capacities?There are no boundaries to human capacities. All boundaries are our beliefs, there are no boundaries. Man is part of infinity, and the part is equal to the whole: that is the law of higher mathematics. In the world of lower mathematics, the part is never equal to the whole, the part is smaller than the whole, obviously. In the world of higher mathematics, the part is equal to the whole, never smaller than the whole – because the part is the whole. Just as the whole contains the part, the part contains the whole. They are not separate at all, nowhere separate. No boundary divides the part from the whole. It is one reality seen in two ways.When you see a dewdrop, it is one way of seeing the ocean, that’s all – because the dewdrop contains all that the whole ocean contains. If one dewdrop is understood, if you have analyzed one dewdrop, you have known all the secrets of all the oceans, not only of this earth, but wherever the ocean exists, on other planets, on other earths. Scientists say there are at least fifty thousand planets where water exists, life exists. Wherever water exists, that one dewdrop has revealed to you the whole secret of all possible oceans. Analyzing one dewdrop, you will come to the truth of H2O, and that contains all.Man is a dewdrop, man contains the whole. There are no boundaries.But if you believe in boundaries, then they are. Your belief creates them. You are as big as you believe yourself to be: “As a man thinketh, so he is.” And if you don’t believe in anything, you are infinite because no belief can be infinite. All beliefs are bound to be finite. The belief needs a definition, hence it will be finite – howsoever big, it will still be finite.That’s why I tell you again and again, drop all beliefs. In dropping beliefs you will be dropping all definitions, all boundaries, all limitations. When a person has dropped all beliefs, all thoughts, all desires, there is nothing to create a boundary. He is the whole.That is the moment when Mansoor shouted out of joy, “Ana’l haq! – I am the truth.”The third question:Osho,In a recent article in the International Herald Tribune, William Borders, a longtime observer of this country for the New York Times' office in New Delhi, wrote of how we are an embarrassment to “image-shy India.” What is it about India that makes Indians so concerned about their international image? And why cannot India be proud of you? Never has there been a religious leader in history that has received so much publicity abroad.India is a very poor country. It has nothing to claim except its so-called spirituality. That’s its only ego. And each country needs a certain ego, otherwise the country need not exist. Each nation exists as an ego, and the ego needs some supports.That’s why I am against all kinds of nationalism – because its root is ego. It divides people, it makes people fight each other. It creates antagonism, enmity. I am against all nationalism, against all nations.I would like to see one world where all these egos, the Indian and the Japanese and the German and the English and the French, have disappeared because these are illnesses. The ego is like cancer, but even cancer needs something to feed upon, it cannot live on nothing. The ego needs something to nourish it.The West can claim science, scientific knowledge, technology, great, beautiful cities, good roads, airplanes, man’s reaching the moon, and a thousand and one things. The West has many things to support its ego, India has nothing. It can only claim spirituality, and that’s its fear. That spirituality is also bogus.It is very much afraid. If that spirituality is exposed as bogus, it has nowhere to stand, no shelter; it will fall flat on the ground. It respects, feels proud of, the people who go on claiming its spirituality and its spiritual greatness. It is proud of Vivekananda because he helps its ego to be strengthened. It is proud of Radhakrishnan. It is proud of Mahatma Gandhi. They all give support to its illusory idea of being spiritual.How can it be proud of me? I am taking the last prop away from it. I am telling the world that this whole spirituality that India claims is bogus.Yes, there have been a few spiritual people in India, as there have been everywhere. There is nothing to claim, nothing special to claim about it. Yes, Buddha has been here and Mahavira has been here and Krishna has been here. But so what? Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu and Lieh Tzu have been in China, and Zarathustra and Moses and Ezekiel and John the Baptist and Jesus and Mohammed and Saint Francis… You can go on counting hundreds of names from all over the world. It is nothing special to India. This land is in no way more spiritual than any other land – but then it hurts. Then there is nothing left to claim, and the Indian ego feels hurt.They are angry with me because I am telling them, “Whatever you are claiming is just holy cow dung. You are not spiritual. In fact, you are only hypocrites, the greatest hypocrites in the world.” I have walked all over the country, from one corner to the other corner. I have watched the whole country very minutely. It is utterly materialistic, but it hides its materialism in a spiritual garb – and because of this spiritual claim, it cannot fulfill its materialist needs. Deep down it hankers for materialism and on the surface it goes on pretending. India has that haughty look of holier-than-thou. It goes on believing that it has the claim to being the spiritual master of the whole world. It is all nonsense.Spiritual people have been everywhere, spiritual people will go on happening everywhere. No society is spiritual yet, only individuals are. No nation is spiritual yet. That’s why it cannot be proud of me.Only one Western woman, Nivedita, had come with Vivekananda, and India was very proud. Now, thousands of women and men have come to me, but India cannot be proud of that. Why? – I am not supporting its chauvinistic claims in any way.I am for one world. I am not an Indian and I am not a German and I am not a Chinese. I claim the whole world as mine, and I would like nations to disappear.If India really feels it has some claim to being spiritual, then let India disappear first. That would be the proof. Let India disappear as a nation, let it become an international land. That would be the proof, the concrete proof. But people go on talking about nonviolence in India and go on preparing for war. They go on talking about brotherhood and the unity of all religions, and go on doing just the opposite of it.Because I am exposing things as they are, because I am functioning like an x-ray, they are angry. Nobody likes x-rays because they reveal your bones, your skeleton, your skull. You have been thinking yourself so beautiful and all that comes out is just a skeleton? So this is you? You become angry, you become annoyed. Their annoyance with me is understandable. I understand it perfectly.India has lived under slavery for a thousand years. It has become very, very afraid of becoming a slave again. It knows that it has the capacity to become a slave at any moment. One thousand years of slavery is enough to prove to the country that somehow we are missing some qualities. A great inferiority complex has arisen out of these one thousand years. And whenever a country or a man or a race suffers from an inferiority complex, it starts pretending to be superior. The superiority complex is a way to avoid one’s inferiority complex; it is a camouflage.That’s what India is doing now. It wants to pretend, claim, prove to the world that it is spiritually very superior. It is afraid. It has nothing to claim. It is afraid, very fearful inside, and out of that fear it has to create a very bold face on the outside. Deep down there is a trembling that every day the country is going more and more into darkness, more and more into poverty and starvation. The future is bleak, there seems to be no future.Now, how to avoid seeing this danger that is coming closer every moment? The only way is to look at the past; don’t look at the future, turn your back toward the future, look at the past. Talk of the golden days, ramrajya, when there were rivers of milk and butter and honey in the country – rivers! – and the whole country was a golden bird. Delight in that fantasy, which has no relevance to history, which has no truth in it. Yes, a few people have always been rich, but the major part of the country has always been poor.But you can create your own past, nobody can prevent you. You can glory in your past, you can magnify it as big as you want. India delights in magnifying its past, in making it bigger and bigger, more and more golden, just to avoid the future that is coming every moment. And any moment it will grip the whole country.It almost always happens that when a person is dying, he starts thinking of the beautiful old days of childhood just to avoid the death that is approaching. It is said that if somebody is drowning, he starts seeing his whole life revealed like a film. What really happens? He is dying, he is in pain, great anguish. He needs some consolation, he wants to forget about it all. Where to go? Except for the past, there is no other way.So India continuously goes into the past. When a nation is young it thinks of the future. When a nation is old and rotten it thinks of the past.And I go on saying continuously that the past the Indians think they had, they never had. They only believe in it, it is their fantasy; they paint it. They go on saying that in the old, ancient days people were so good that there was no need to lock their houses. There was no stealing, no thieves, no robbers. This is all nonsense. Then to whom was Buddha saying “Don’t steal”? Then who was he teaching? Us? Twenty-five centuries ago, was he talking to us? For forty-two years continuously, day in, day out, he was moving in the country and telling people, “Don’t steal. That is a great sin, you will suffer in hell. Don’t lie, otherwise you will suffer in hell. Don’t be violent. Don’t be jealous. Don’t murder. Don’t hurt. Don’t commit suicide.” To whom was he talking?And it is not only that Buddha was saying that. You can go as far back as possible; even in the Vedas the same teaching is available.When a teaching is there, it means it had some relevance. Just as people are now, they were then. Buddha was not mad, Mahavira was not mad. If people were already nonviolent, peaceful, loving, to whom were they talking about nonviolence, who were they teaching? And it was not just once in a while. Their whole life they were doing only one thing: teaching people nonviolence. People must have been utterly violent.Moral teaching has not changed, it is the same as it was before. That simply means people are the same as they were before. People were as possessive, as desirous of things, as they are now. Certainly, they desired different things because those things were available to them. They could not have desired an airplane, that is true, but they all desired beautiful golden chariots, they desired beautiful palaces. It is the same. The object of desire does not make any difference.As far as I see, the ordinary man has always been the same. And as far as those few people who became enlightened are concerned, they have also always been the same. A buddha happening twenty-five centuries ago or today; it is the same. And the unenlightened person of five thousand years ago and of today is the same; there is no difference at all. There are only two kinds of people, the enlightened and the unenlightened. The unenlightened has persisted in his own way. The enlightened persons have always been the same wherever they have existed, their taste is the same.But India is afraid of the future, which is coming with great speed. The population is growing every day. Each day brings more and more misery and more and more starvation, more and more people to be fed, clothed, sheltered. And the people who are already here are starving. The future seems to be absolutely dark.Now, what to do in such a situation? The easiest way – although foolish, but it is the easiest – is to glorify the past, to keep yourself intoxicated with the past. Hence they are angry at me because I destroy their fantasies. I say, if the future is coming and it is bleak, it is better to see it. The sooner you do see, the better – because something can still be done. I don’t think that nothing is possible, but this ostrich-type mind which avoids seeing it will not be able to do a thing.I want your eyes to be focused on the future. Forget the past; it is gone and gone forever, and there is no point wasting time with it. Stop reading your scriptures parrotlike. Don’t go on continuously repeating the old because it is not going to help in the future. For the future, you will need a new mind because the crisis that is coming on is so new. You will need a totally different approach.Nobody wants to see it, and I would force people to see it because the sooner it is looked into, the better. Something can still be done. I don’t think that it is impossible, I am not a pessimist. The situation is bad, but I am an optimist. I hope something can be done. And maybe these are the moments when countries change, when people change. When a crisis comes, the very challenge can become a breakthrough. This opportunity has to be used.But to face the future and not to be destroyed by it needs courage, needs intelligence, needs new orientations of the mind. That’s what I am trying to do. The Indian mind has to reorient itself.For example, it should stop talking about distributing wealth. There is no wealth to distribute. It should start creating wealth. How to create wealth? Open the doors of the country to all countries, to international sources of wealth, so they can start pouring in. For thirty years this country has been doing just the opposite: preventing foreign money from coming into the country, afraid. Invite foreign money, make every guarantee that their money will be safe. And the whole world is interested because much money is lying around the world uselessly. That money needs to be used. But in the West, in fact, now there is no scope for spreading it.India can become a really flowering country if wealth pours in from all the sources. But it is very afraid. It is afraid of America; if American wealth comes in, it is afraid that we may be overpowered by it. There is no need to be afraid. America is not interested in overpowering any country politically. America’s whole interest is how to create more wealth for itself. You can create wealth for yourself and for America too, both will be benefited.But this country has been following a foreign policy of remaining neutral, which is wrong. You need friends. If you remain neutral you will not have any friends. This country needs all the friends possible. Neutrality creates suspicion in people. That means you are with nobody and nobody wants to be with you. This country has become isolated; these thirty years the country has remained like an isolated part of the world, closed.Open your doors. Let the wind and the sun and the rain come in. Open your doors. Invite Western technology to help you to develop. Let the wealth pour in from every nook and corner, and make it certain that their wealth will be secure. But India is very much afraid and the fear is that if you take help from others, that again exposes your inferiority, so you have to do everything on your own. And this country has never been technological, so it has no technological mind. But you have to do it on your own. Even if you mess up everything you have to do it on your own, so you can keep a face in the world that “We are doing it on our own,” that “We don’t need anybody’s help.” This is an egoistic attitude.This whole world now has to be interdependent. All ideas of independence and dependence are out of date. Forget about them. The world is now one organic unity; it is already one organic unity. Your nations are just fading realities, overshadowing the present and the future unnecessarily, just dead bodies, stinking. They have to be burned and thrown away.This world now is one, and the question of dependence, independence does not arise. It is an interdependent world. Let this word become very significant; it is going to become significant in the future. The world is interdependent. There are a few things we can fulfill for others, there are a few things others can fulfill for us, and there is no question of ego involved.We know the technology of the inner. If the West wants to understand meditation, we can help. We can make them astronauts of the inner. But Indians trying to reach the moon on their own? It will never be possible. It is impossible; the only way for the Indians to reach the moon will be to stand on each other’s shoulders and try!Just as the West is ignorant of the inner world, the East is ignorant of the outer world. We can combine. A great friendship is needed. You can watch; it has happened already. Japan is more affluent than it ever was. Just because of the Second World War, it came in contact with American technology. Now it is one of the richest countries of the world. It is the richest in the East. It has happened very illogically because a country is destroyed in a war, and Japan was the first country in human history that was utterly devastated and destroyed. The atom bomb was tried on it. But out of that destruction Japan was born, a new Japan was born. America has helped it technologically.And that has been the case in Germany too. The part that has come under American influence has become very rich, one of the richest countries in the world, and the part that has gone to the communist bloc remains as poor as ever.I have heard…A Jew suggested in the Jewish parliament: “The only way for us to become rich is to declare war against America.”Now, Israel declaring war against America – the whole parliament laughed. “Have you gone mad?” they said. “How can we win?”The man said, “There is no need to win. If we are defeated, American technology will be available just as it has been available to Japan and Germany. If we are defeated, we will become the richest country in the world. And if by chance, by luck, we are not defeated and we become the winners, then certainly we will be the richest country in the world. So we have nothing to lose either way. If we win, we win. If we are defeated, then too we are victorious.”India needs Western technology, and India needs to be aware that you cannot become rich on your own. You don’t know how. For five thousand years you have become accustomed to poverty. You have taken it for granted, it has become your way of life. You have even started praising it. You think to be poor is somehow spiritual, to be ill is somehow spiritual.It happens: when a country has remained poor for thousands of years, it starts claiming something special in its poverty. It happens to you individually too. If a man is poor and cannot get rich, he starts bragging, “I don’t want to become rich.” The grapes are sour. “Who bothers to become rich? I am happy in my poverty; poverty has something special in it. In fact, you are missing something, I am not missing.” These are the rationalizations.I would like to see India holding hands with the West in deep friendship, helping it toward the inner search, which is becoming more and more passionate every day in the West, which always becomes so whenever a country becomes affluent. Now the West wants to know, “Who am I?” We have all the technology for it. For five thousand years we have done only that and nothing else. We can release a new energy, a new impetus and momentum for spiritual growth, just as the West can release a great energy to the East for materialistic growth.But for that you will have to drop your stupid anti-materialist attitudes. You will have to come down to the earth. You will have to become earthy, sensuous, intelligent. I teach a sensuous religion. That’s why Indians are against me. I teach an earthy religion, rooted in the earth. Yes, raise your branches into the sky, let your flowers bloom into the clouds, but get your roots deep into the earth, otherwise there will be no flowering. A real religion cannot be only of the sky, and it cannot be only of the earth. A real religion is always a meeting of the earth and the sky.I am a meeting of the earth and the sky, and that is the problem. They cannot be proud of me; they think I am a Charvaka, a materialist like Epicurus, that my philosophy is to “Eat, drink, and be merry.” Yes, that too is part of my philosophy, but just a part. I am not against eating, drinking, and merrying. Eat, drink, and be merry – but that’s not all. When you have eaten enough, and drunk enough, and you have “merried” enough, then something higher is waiting. And only then is something higher possible. When the earthly part in you is satisfied, contented, then the sky claims you, then the unknown claims you, then begins the real pilgrimage of the soul.I am earthy. I teach a sensuous religion, a religion which is not against the body, which is not against matter, which is not against the world. My religion is big enough; it contains all. It is inclusive, it includes all. It does not exclude anything. It is as inclusive as God himself.God includes all, certainly. The earth must be in God, otherwise how can the earth exist? And God must be in the earth, otherwise how can the earth remain alive?I am teaching a new religion because in the old days, India became too hung up in the sky, with the clouds. It forgot how to grow roots in the earth. It becomes angry, it is annoyed; it cannot be proud of me. I appear to be an enemy who is going to destroy its great tradition, as if I am against its spirituality. I am not, but the spirituality is possible only if it is based, founded, in a scientific materialism.And you ask why it is so “image-shy.” It is so image-shy because it knows its hypocrisies. Only a hypocrite is image-shy. The true person never is. The true person can stand naked under the sun; he is available, he has nothing to fear. He is as he is and he has never pretended otherwise. But a person who pretends is always afraid because his image is false. He is afraid: if somebody looks deeper, comes closer, the image will be gone, the reality will be found – and the reality is just the contrary.Only the hypocrite is afraid of being found out. India is very afraid – afraid that its image can be shattered very easily. It is a very poor, impotent image that can be shattered so easily. It seems it has no soul, no vitality in it. When you are true you are ready and available. You need not be worried. You are rooted in your being, you trust yourself. India does not trust itself, that’s why it is afraid.Just think: I am the only one of my type. India has thousands of mahatmas and they are afraid I will destroy their image – and what are your thousands and thousands of mahatmas doing? They are creating your image. Thousands of mahatmas are creating it, and only one madman is destroying it. Why are they afraid? How can I destroy it?But they know that even those thousands creating the image can be defeated by a single person because their image is just a dream. It is not true, it is not real. They are too apprehensive. If the world comes to know the reality of the Indian mind, what will happen to the bragging –what they have been doing down the ages, that “We are the most spiritual people of the world”?Why should they be afraid? Why should a single man like me be feared? But the reason is clear: when truth is there it can destroy lies. Even if the lies are repeated by millions of people, a single truth is enough to shatter those lies. Otherwise, give me freedom, as you have given freedom to your other mahatmas. Let me do my experiment, you go on doing your experiment, and whoever is true is going to win. Why be so afraid? If I am untrue, my untruth will undo me. If you are true, you will win.The Indian government has its motto: Satyameva Jayate – Truth Is Always Victorious. Then why be afraid? Truth will be victorious.Just the other day, Neervana received a letter from the Indian embassy in America. He had applied for a visa. The letter has refused the visa and the reason given is: “If you had asked for the visa to visit and stay in an institution other than the Osho Ashram, you would have received it, but we cannot give it to you for this. You have asked to stay in a wrong kind of institution.” Satyameva Jayate: Truth Is Always Victorious.Why are you so afraid? Let people come and see. It is better that they come and see the untruth of my being, and then they will not come to me at all.And you have thousands of others who are supported by the government, who are supported by the masses. I am not supported by anybody. Neither do the masses support me nor does the government. I am not supported by anybody, I exist on my own. My people exist on their own. We don’t live on anybody’s charity.Why be afraid of us? But the reason is there: even a small ray of truth is enough to destroy the whole ocean of darkness.The fourth question:Osho,Why are you so hard on politicians?I will tell you a story. That’s my answer.A man bought a very well-bred and expensive young donkey, but upon his return home with it, found it resisted all his efforts to saddle it, let alone carry his goods. Finally, in frustration, he took it to a donkey trainer of some renown.“This hayburner cost me a packet and won’t do a damn thing. You reckon you can help?”Without answering, the trainer seized a length of 3 x 2 and smote the beast squarely between the eyes, knocking it back on its haunches.“A thousand bloody dollars and you attack it with a piece of wood?” shrieked the distraught owner.“Listen,” replied the other calmly, “when you are dealing with a donkey, the first thing you gotta do is get his attention.”The fifth question:Osho,I frequently hear you speak about rebellion. The priests and nuns and relatives that shaped my training are now old and dried up. Most are dead. It seems worthless to rebel against those helpless old people.I am now the priest and the doctrines. I feel that to rebel against anything outside myself is a waste of time and just simply not to the point. This makes the situation much more frustrating and entangled. It seems the self must rebel against the self. I accept that it is not the essential self – the original face – that has to do the rebelling. It is the trained self – the subterfuge. But that is the only “self” I have or know with which to do the rebelling. How does the subterfuge rebel against the subterfuge?The rebellion I am talking about is not to be done against anybody. It is not really a rebellion, but only an understanding. You are not to fight with the outer priests, nuns, parents, no. And you are not to fight, either, with the inner priests, nuns, parents. Because outer or inner, it doesn’t matter, they are separate from you. The outer is separate, the inner too is separate. The inner is only the reflection of the outer.You are perfectly right in saying, “It seems worthless to rebel against those helpless old people.” I am not telling you to rebel against those old, helpless people. I am not telling you, either, to rebel against all that they have put inside you. If you rebel against your own mind it will be a reaction, not a rebellion. Note the difference: a reaction is out of anger, a reaction is violent. In a reaction you become blind with rage. In a reaction you start moving to the other extreme.For example, if your parents have been teaching you to be clean and take a bath every day, and this and that, and you have been taught from the very beginning that cleanliness is next to God, and one day you start rebelling, what will you do? You will stop taking a bath. You will start living in filth.That’s what hippies go on doing all over the world. They think this is rebellion. Now they have moved to the other extreme. They were taught cleanliness is next to God; now they are thinking that filthiness is next to God, dirtiness is next to God. From one extreme they have moved to another. This is not rebellion. This is rage, this is anger, this is revenge.While reacting to their parents and their so-called ideas of cleanliness, they are still attached to the same idea. It is still haunting them. It is still powerful over them, it is still dominant, it is still decisive. It still decides their life, although they have become the opposite of it, but it decides. They cannot take a bath easily; they are reminded of their parents who used to force them to take a bath every day. Now they don’t take a bath at all. Who is dominating them? Their parents, still. What their parents have done to them, they still have not been able to undo. This is reaction, this is not rebellion.Then what is rebellion? Rebellion is pure understanding. One simply understands what the case is. Then one is no longer neurotically obsessed with cleanliness, that’s all. One doesn’t become unclean. Cleanliness has its own beauty. One should not be obsessed by it – because obsession is illness.For example, a person continuously washing his hands the whole day: he is neurotic. Washing the hands is not bad, but just washing his hands the whole day is mad. But if he moves from washing his hands the whole day to non-washing – he stops washing forever – then he is trapped again in another kind of madness, the opposite kind.The man of understanding washes his hands when it is needed. When it is not needed, he is not obsessed with it. He is simply natural, spontaneous about it. He lives intelligently, that’s all.For example, if you don’t watch very minutely, there is not much difference between obsession and intelligence. If you come across a snake on the road and you jump, naturally you jump out of fear. But this fear is intelligence. If you are unintelligent, stupid, you will not jump out of the way, and you will unnecessarily invite danger into your life. The intelligent person will jump immediately – the snake is there. It is out of fear, but this fear is intelligent, positive, life-serving.But this fear can become obsessive. For example, you cannot sit in a house. Who knows? It may fall. And houses have been known to fall, that is true. Sometimes they have fallen, you are not absolutely wrong. You can argue, “If other houses have fallen, why not this one?” Now you are afraid to live under any roof; it may fall. This is obsession. Now it is becoming unintelligent.It is good to be aware that you eat clean food. But I know a man, a great poet…Once he traveled with me. His wife told me, “Now you will know how difficult it is to live with this man.”I said, “What is the matter?”She said, “You yourself will know.”He would not drink any tea, any water, anywhere. It was so difficult because he would say, “Who knows if there are germs in the tea or the water?” He would not eat in a hotel. It was such a problem. We had to travel for thirty-six hours in the train, and he was starving and thirsty, and he would not drink water.I tried in every way to persuade him.He said, “No. Who knows, if there are germs, then? It is better,” he said, “to starve for thirty-six hours and not to eat. I am not going to die, don’t be worried.”But I could see the man was torturing himself. It was hot summer and he was thirsty. And I tried in every station; I brought soda, I brought Coca-Cola, and everything.He said, “Forget all about it. I cannot take anything unless I am absolutely certain. What is the certainty? What is the guarantee?”And he is not absolutely wrong, that is true. You know India, and you know Indian stations and Indian hotels. You know. He is right, but now this is carrying the logic too far.Then I told him, “Stop breathing too!”He asked, “Why?”I said, “Who knows, what is the guarantee? Stop breathing! Either drink this water or stop breathing!” Then he was brought to his senses because I was really angry. “Why do you go on breathing? Who knows, there may be germs; there are germs everywhere.”He drank a cup of tea, but the way he drank! His face… I cannot forget. It has been ten years now, but I cannot forget his face – as if I was killing him! I was murderous – and he was obliging me.And at the next station, he got down and he said, “I cannot travel with you; I will go back home.”I asked, “What is the matter?”He said, “You were so angry, and it seemed that you would start beating me or something. And you said, ‘Don’t breathe anymore.’ How can I stop breathing?”I said, “I was just giving you an argument, that if you can breathe, then why not drink the water? It is the same Indian water as the Indian air. Don’t be worried.”He refused to travel with me. I had to travel alone. He went back, and since then I have not seen him.One can become obsessive about anything. Anything that may be intelligent within boundaries may become neurotic if you stretch it too far. Reaction is moving to the other extreme. Rebellion is a very deep understanding, profound understanding, of a certain phenomenon. And rebellion always keeps you in the middle, it gives you balance.You are not to fight with anybody, the nuns and the priests and the parents, outside or inner. You are not to fight with anybody – because in a fight you will not know where to stop. In a fight you lose awareness; in a fight you start moving to the extreme. You can watch it.For example, just sitting with your friends, by the way, you say, “That movie I went to yesterday was not worth seeing.” You may have mentioned it just by the way, but then somebody says, “You are wrong. I have also seen the movie. It is one of the most beautiful pictures ever made.” Now you are provoked, challenged; you become argumentative. You say, “It is worthless, the most worthless thing!” And you start criticizing. If the other also insists, you become more and more angry, and you start saying things you have not even thought about. And later on if you go backward and see the whole phenomenon that happened, you will be surprised that when you mentioned that it was not worth going to, it was a very mild statement – but by the time you finished with the argument, you had moved to the extreme. You had used all that was possible, all the nasty words that you know. You could condemn in any way; you used all your skill of condemnation. And you were not ready to do it in the beginning. If nobody had opposed you, you might have forgotten all about it, you might never have made such strong statements. It happens: when you start fighting you tend to move to the extreme.I am not teaching you to fight with your conditioning. Understand them. Become more intelligent about them. Just see how they dominate you, how they influence your behavior, how they have shaped your personality, how they go on affecting you from the back door. Just watch! Be meditative. And one day, when you have seen the working of your conditioning, suddenly a balance is attained. In your very understanding you are free.Understanding is freedom, and that freedom I call rebellion.The real rebel is not a fighter, he is a man of understanding. He simply grows in intelligence, not in anger, not in rage. You cannot transform yourself by being angry against your past. Then the past will continue to dominate you, then the past will remain the center of your being, the past will remain your focus. You will remain focused, attached to the past. You may move to the other extreme, but still you will be attached to the past.Beware of it. That is not the way of a meditator, that is not the way of a sannyasin. Sannyas is rebellion – rebellion through understanding. Just understand.You pass by the side of a church and a deep desire arises in you to go inside and pray. Or you pass by the side of a temple and unconsciously you bow down to the deity of the temple. Just watch. Why are you doing these things? I am not saying to fight. I am saying to watch. Why do you bow down to the temple? – because you were taught that this temple is the right temple, that the deity of this temple is the real image of God. Do you know? Or have you just been told and you have been following it? Watch!Seeing that you are just repeating a program that has been given to you, that you are just playing a tape in your head, that you are being automatic, robotlike, you will stop bowing. Not that you will have to make any effort, you will simply forget all about it. It will disappear, it will leave you without any trace.In reaction there is a trace. In rebellion there is no trace, it is utter freedom.And you also ask, “Who is to fight with whom?” That question arises only if it has to be a fight. Because it is not going to be a fight, the question does not arise.You have to be just a witness. And the witnessing is your original face, the one who witnesses is your real consciousness. That which is witnessed is conditioning. The one who witnesses is the divine source of your being.The sixth question:Osho,I want to give birth to a buddha. That's my only desire in life, to become the mother of a buddha. Is it possible?First become a buddha, then maybe a buddha will be born out of you. But the desire to give birth to a buddha is utterly futile. That is again an ego trip: “I should become the mother of a buddha.” The very desire will be the hindrance.Yes, you can become a mother of a buddha, but the first requirement is to become a buddha. It has also happened that a buddha is born to a woman who is not a buddha. But one thing is certain, she was not desiring it. She may not have been a buddha, but she was not desiring a buddha. A buddha can be born to a woman if there is no desire, if the woman is innocent. Desire makes you cunning.Now, this desire is again an ambition. Somebody wants to become the president of a country, somebody wants to be the richest man in the world, you want to become the mother of a buddha. Why? All becoming, all desire for the future, is an extension of the ego. If there is such a desire, it will destroy your whole life. And then it is futile too – because I have never heard, it is not reported anywhere in any scripture of the world, that a woman wanted to give birth to a buddha and she succeeded. Buddhas were born, but they were born to women who were completely innocent, unaware. If you deliberately want to do it, there is no possibility.Become meditative, become more silent, more still, more loving, more compassionate. Befriend existence, trust life, live in the moment, and then whatever happens is good. If God wills a buddha through you, good; if he does not will a buddha through you, that too is perfectly good.And even if a child born to you becomes a buddha, how is it going to help you? How is it going to make you free? It is not going to help you at all, you will remain in the same rut. You will go on moving in the same vicious circle of life and death. Gautam Buddha’s mother has not yet become a buddha; Mahavira’s mother is still moving in the same vicious circle, has not yet attained, so that is not going to help you in any way.Remember, when a soul enters a woman’s womb, it can enter only if the womb is suitable for it, if the womb is somehow harmonious with the rhythm of the soul. To give birth to an Adolf Hitler a different kind of mother is needed; to give birth to a buddha, certainly a different kind of mother is needed – because the womb attracts only something harmonious to it and the soul, a higher soul, can enter only in a higher womb.Drop all these desires. Start becoming a buddha on your own. And then it is possible because after all, buddhas need wombs. Nothing is wrong with your womb, but create a holy womb. Always remember the old proverb: “The tree is known by the fruit.” Only a mango tree can give mango fruits. You can know about the tree by the fruits. You cannot give birth to something which you are not.I have heard…An elderly widower had himself fitted out with a full set of monkey glands, and a short while later remarried.A year passed, and the night was an eventful one. Outside the bedroom door the rejuvenated husband paced up and down, up and down. At last a door opened and the nurse appeared, but before the man could stop her she had brushed past and was on her way downstairs. After a time the doctor came out.“Oh, tell me, doctor, tell me,” exclaimed the anxious husband, “is it a boy or a girl?”“We don’t know yet,” answered the doctor.“Don’t know yet?”“No, we have not been able to get the little devil down off the chandelier.”Now when you are fitted with monkey glands, what more can you expect? Create a climate within you, create a spring within you. Become meditative, more and more meditative. And the first requirement of becoming meditative is not to desire at all, not even for God. Not to desire at all – that is the most fundamental principle of meditation.Desire always leads you into tense states of mind. Desire is tension; non-desire is relaxation. Forget all about the Buddha, and giving birth to a buddha. Why should you get in such trouble? Become a buddha; you owe it to yourself. Your only responsibility is toward yourself. If a buddha wants to be born, he will find a way; that is his problem. He will find a way and a womb. Why should you be worried?But don’t waste your time in unnecessary desires. And watch. The mind is so cunning, it can give you such beautiful desires, such spiritual desires, that you almost forget they are also desires – and desires are desires. All desires are the same.Now, there are many women here – that’s why I have answered this question – who are hoping that someday I will permit my sannyasins to give birth to buddhas. They go on writing letters to me: “Osho, should I get sterilized or not? If someday you feel that I am ready to give birth to a buddha, then what, if I am sterilized? Should I wait?”Don’t bother. Buddhas will find their ways, and there are so many women in the world. If you feel that it is going to help you on your own spiritual path, in your own growth, then be sterilized. Nothing to be worried about. If you feel this will keep you away from unnecessary troubles and unnecessary responsibilities, it is perfectly good. Your only responsibility is toward yourself.Become a buddha! I am here to help you to become buddhas. Don’t bother about becoming fathers and mothers of buddhas. There are many other foolish people who can do this.The last question:Osho,Why do the Sufis dance?Yes, it is a pertinent question. Buddhists only sit silently. Why do Sufis dance? Zen people only meditate, sitting silently, not doing a thing, doing nothing. Just sitting silently, spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. But Sufis dance.These are the two different paths – because there are two types of energy in the world: the positive and the negative, male and female, yin and yang. Zen people use the negative energy, they use the passive path. Sufis use the positive energy, they use the active path. They are very vibrant people. Their meditation is not of passivity, their meditation is that of ecstasy.Both are ways you can reach the same goal because the goal is exactly in the middle. The positive is one extreme, the negative the other extreme. Between the positive and the negative there is a middle point, exactly in the middle, from where transformation happens – one transcends the world and everything – from where one enters God and becomes God.If you feel that you are on the negative pole already, a passive type, then follow Zen and start moving deeply into your passivity, and one day you will reach the middle. Or if you feel that you are an active person, full of energy, youth, positivity, that sitting silently is very difficult, unnecessarily a torture, then dance, follow the Sufis’ way.I go on speaking on Zen and Sufism again and again so that all kinds of people are helped here. You have to choose. You have to watch yourself, your energy, and then choose. Both are valid ways, both lead to the same goal.Rumi says:Hey! Drink this fire, drink this fine fiery wine,these needles of fire, and fall so drunkthat you will not wake up on the Day of Resurrection!The way of the Sufi is the way of the drunkard, the dancer, who becomes almost intoxicated in his dancing, who is transported through his dance. He is inebriated, his dance is psychedelic.It is said that Mohammed once said to Ali, “You are of me, and I am of you.” When he heard this, Ali became ecstatic and involuntarily started dancing. What else can you do, when a man like Mohammed says to you, “You are of me, and I am of you”? How to receive this? Ali did well.And remember, it is not anything that he did. It was involuntary. He started dancing, out of ecstasy the dance started flowing.Another time, Mohammed said to Jafar, “You are like me in both looks and character.” Here again, in wajd, Jafar started dancing. What else to do? When Mohammed looked into the eyes of Jafar, wajd, samadhi, must have been created, the transfer beyond the scriptures happened. How to receive this? How not to dance? It would have been impossible not to dance. Jafar danced.It is said…The enrapturing of the Sufi by God, or rather the “pull” of God, keeps the Sufi continually in spiritual, inner dance and movement.It is not that the Sufi dances; God keeps dancing in him. What can he do?Whenever a wave of such divine rapture strikes the heart of the Sufi, it creates great waves in the lake of his inner being.He is just a receptacle. To say that the Sufi is dancing is not right. The Sufi is being danced. He cannot help it, he is helpless. Something is pouring into him and it is too much, it starts overflowing in his dancing and singing.This, in turn, causes his body to move.Upon seeing such movement, non-Sufis have often supposed that the Sufi is dancing.In reality, however, it is the waves of the ocean of God that are tossing and turning the anchorless vessel that is the heart of the Sufi.On the surface, from the outside, the Sufi seems to be dancing. But he is not dancing because there is no dancer. It is pure dance. God has taken possession of him. The Sufi is drunk, intoxicated. His state is that of nonbeing. He is anchorless. The waves of the ocean toss and turn. First his inner being is stirred, great joy arises there, and then it starts spreading toward his body.That’s what you are doing with Aneeta, that’s what is happening to Aneeta. In Sufi dancing, you are participating in something immensely beautiful. Remember, forget the dancer and be the dance.The way of the Sufi is the way of dance, song, celebration.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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It is related that a man went to the assembly of the master Baqi-Billah of Delhi and said, “I have been reading the famous verse of the master Hafiz: ‘If your teacher bids you stain your prayer carpet with wine, obey him.’ But I have a difficulty.”Baqi-Billah said, “Dwell apart from me for some time and I shall illustrate the matter for you.”After a considerable period of time, the disciple received a letter from the sage. It said, “Take all the money you have and give it to the gatekeeper of any brothel.”The disciple was shocked, and for a time thought that the master must be a fraud. After wrestling with himself for days, however, he went to the nearest house of ill fame and presented the man at the door with all the money which he had.“For such a sum of money,” said the doorman, “I shall allot you the choicest gem of our collection, an untouched woman.”As soon as he entered the room, the woman there said, “I have been tricked into being in this house, and I am held here by force and threats. If your sense of justice is stronger than your reason for coming here, help me to escape.”Then the disciple knew the meaning of the poem of Hafiz: “If your teacher bids you stain your prayer carpet with wine, obey him.”Science is based on doubt: doubt is its method, its climate, its very soul. Science cannot exist without doubt. It is only through questioning, and constant questioning, that science comes to know about the facts of existence. Its world of inquiry is objective.The object cannot be trusted. The object is dead. You have to penetrate the object with as many questions and doubts as possible, only then will the object reveal its mysteries.Religion, on the contrary, is trust. Religion’s method is trust. Trust is its climate, its philosophy, its very being, because religion is not concerned with objects but with your own subjectivity. The journey of science is outward, the journey of religion is inward. Science means going outward, religion means going inward; their directions are diametrically opposite. Although they are diametrically opposite they are complementary too, as all opposites always are.There is a harmony between opposites. The inner and the outer are not enemies, they are in utter coordination. The body and the soul are not enemies, they befriend each other; in fact they cannot exist separately, they can exist only in togetherness. Man and woman, darkness and light, summer and winter, positive and negative; they are all together, although they are opposites. But they are not enemies. This has to be understood – opposites and yet complementaries – and there is utter harmony in existence.It is like inhalation and exhalation: you breathe in, you breathe out. When you breathe in, it is one process, the breath goes inward; when you breathe out, it is just the opposite process, the breath goes outward – but it is the same breath. Inhalation and exhalation are two aspects of the same phenomenon, opposites and yet complementary. So are religion and science, so are doubt and trust.Because it has not been understood in the past, a great calamity has happened to humanity. I call it the greatest calamity: the calamity that has kept religion and science not only separate but inimical. In the past we have not been able to bring a synthesis between science and religion. Because of that incapability the world has become split, and the man who is trained in science becomes anti-religious. And vice versa, the person who moves into the world of religion becomes anti-scientific. This need not happen, this should not happen.If you are really intelligent you will be able to coordinate between these opposites. You will be able to bring a harmony between these two, doubt and trust, and then arises the real total human being.What do I mean when I say a great harmony has to be achieved? I mean that when you are moving outward, use doubt as your methodology, trust doubt when you are moving outward. When you are inquiring into the world of objects, trust doubt. Doubt is beautiful, immensely beautiful. And when you are moving inward put your doubt aside: trust trust. The man who can manage this I call a really intelligent person.It is like you are seeing me, you are seeing me through your eyes. But you are also listening to me, you are listening to me through your ears. The ears cannot see and the eyes cannot hear, but still there is a tremendous coordination happening in you: you know you are hearing the same person that you are seeing. This is intelligence, this coordination is intelligence. Deep down a synthesis is happening constantly. The ears are pouring in one information, the eyes are pouring in another information. They are unrelated – as far as ears and eyes are concerned, they are unrelated – but your intelligence is creating a relationship between them: you are hearing the same person you are seeing.Exactly in the same way, doubt cannot know the subject and trust cannot know the object. Doubt can know the object, trust can know the subject – and intelligence is when both pour their information into one pool and truth is known in both its aspects, as inner, as outer.That is the real religion humanity needs now, or the real science, which will not divide man and which will not cripple man. Up to now, hitherto, man has been crippled.If you trust you forget the language of doubt. The society becomes unscientific, becomes incapable of tackling so many problems that man has to encounter, becomes poor, impoverished, ill, ugly. If you start only using doubt the society becomes better, scientifically better, technologically better, affluent, but the inner world simply is forgotten. Then you don’t have a soul; inward you remain fast asleep. In both ways man remains lopsided. In both ways man remains partial and cannot become total.The religions of the past have failed in creating a total man. And so has been the case with modern science; modern science has also failed in creating the total man. And the total man is needed because only the total man can be contented, only the total man can be richer inwardly, outwardly. Only the total man can be really in celebration – his body satisfied, his soul satisfied, his senses contented, his spirit contented.This small story is the story of trust because Sufism is an approach to the inner. This story is not meant to be understood as against doubt. It has to be understood as that – only as far as the inner journey is concerned – doubt is inadequate, only trust is adequate.If you want to see, see through the eyes, don’t try to see through the ears; the ears are not capable of that. If you want to hear, hear through the ears and forget all about the eyes; the eyes cannot hear. Both are right in their own dimension. Both are partial, and your intelligence has to transcend their partiality. Your intelligence has to create a synthesis.In the past your intelligence was not trusted, hence you were told either to doubt and become scientific, or to trust and become religious. Neither the so-called religious people have trusted your intelligence and its transcending quality, nor have the scientists trusted your intelligence and its transcending quality. Both were afraid of the other, afraid because the other looked opposite. All complementaries look opposite.There is no need to be afraid of the opposite. The opposite has to be absorbed, not denied, because whatever is denied will take revenge in its own time. Never deny anything: let that be a fundamental law. Absorb, go on absorbing, howsoever opposite something looks to you. Remember always, existence functions through opposites, it can only function through opposites. It is through the opposites that existence creates momentum, dynamism. It is by polar opposites that existence creates a dialectical process; otherwise there would be no dialectical process.Just think: a world only of men and no women. It would not be rich, it would be very, very flat. Or a world where only women exist. That too would be ugly; that too would be very, very stagnant. From where would the movement come? The opposite is the challenge, and because of the challenge, movement arises. Because of the challenge you cannot remain asleep, you are awakened.It is through the opposites that existence moves, grows, evolves. It is a subtle strategy, but only now is it possible to understand it in totality. Because we have lived the way of religion for centuries and we have also lived the way of science for a few centuries, now we know that both are complementary, not opposites.This story is a story of the religious investigation. It depends on trust. A few things before we enter the story:Says Hafiz, “Do not travel through these stations without the company of a perfect master. There is darkness. Beware of the danger of getting lost!” When you are moving outward you can move alone – because in the outer world you are never alone. Millions of people exist there. When you are moving outward the reality is not individual, it is not personal. The reality is objective, it is impersonal. If you see a rock, it is not only you who is seeing the rock; everybody who is standing there can see the rock. The rock has an objective existence. There is no danger of getting into hallucinations. The others’ presence, their witness, will keep you away from hallucinations.But when you start moving inward you are alone. Who is going to decide whether what you are seeing is true or just a fantasy? When you move outward there is light, the light of the sun and the moon and the stars; there is enough light outside. But when you move inward, first you will encounter great darkness because your eyes have become accustomed to the outer light and they don’t know how to look in. You will be falling into an abysmal darkness. You will need somebody who has traveled the inner path; you will need a master.In the outer world you will only need a teacher who can inform you. That information can be got from the library too, or from a computer. The teacher is just there to give you information, like the book or the computer. There is no need for any personal involvement with the teacher; the teacher is not there as a person, you need not be intimate with him.A master means you have to be very intimate with him – it is a love relationship – because in the inner world you will need him so deeply that unless you are very close to his heart and he is very close to your heart, it will not be possible to keep his company in the inner darkness. Great intimacy is needed, and intimacy arises out of love, out of trust. If you doubt the master, you will not be able to go on that dangerous journey of inner adventure. Only his love and your love for him will keep you alive, will keep you enthusiastic, will keep you nourished.Hafiz is right: “Do not travel through these stations without the company of a perfect master. There is darkness. Beware of the danger of getting lost!” In the outside world there is no danger of getting lost. There are milestones on every road, maps are available, guides are available, and there are always millions of people there who can help you. But in the inner world there are no maps because each individual’s subjectivity is so different that maps cannot be made, and each individual’s growth is so unique that milestones cannot be made, and each individual follows such different labyrinths that you will need somebody who is tremendously alert, aware, enlightened to help you on each step. Otherwise there is a possibility of getting lost at each step.And the greatest problem is: when you lose the outer world, you are left utterly alone. You are not able to make any distinction between what is fact and what is fiction. The boundaries between fact and fiction start dissolving.For example: in the morning when you wake up you relate a dream to your wife. You know it is a dream. How do you know it is a dream? – because only you dreamed it. Your wife was sleeping on the same bed and she had no awareness that you had been to the Himalayas, and you had been traveling in the mountains, and you had been visiting places. She had no awareness, and she was sleeping just by your side. In the morning if your wife says that she has also dreamed the same dream, that yes, the journey was beautiful and the mountains were beautiful, and “Think of that dark bungalow where we stayed”… Then you will become suspicious about whether it was a dream or a reality. And if your son comes in and says, “Daddy, where have you been the whole night? I came twice. Both of you were not present in the room,” you will become more suspicious: “Maybe it was real?” How do you judge reality? If others agree, you know it is a fact; if nobody agrees, you know it is fiction. The others’ agreement makes it a fact.But in the inner world you will be alone, totally alone. There will be nobody to agree or disagree. How will you know what is fact and what is fiction? If you see Buddha in your meditations, how will you know whether he has really appeared or you have simply been dreaming? That is the problem. You can easily get lost in your own fictions, and to be lost in your own fictions is madness: that is the danger on the inner journey. You will need somebody who can be present in your innerness.That is the meaning of trust: creating such a strong bridge with someone that even when you are alone in your meditations, he is there.The master is always with the disciple if the disciple allows him to be. The master is absolutely available until the very last moment – yes, to the very last moment, until God happens to you. The master disappears only when God has happened. Or, both things happen simultaneously, the disappearance of the master and the appearance of God. But up to that moment the master follows you like a shadow. He keeps you alert, he does not allow you to go astray.Rumi says, “Deadly poison looks like honey and milk. Wait! Do not journey without a master who knows.” The relationship between a master and a disciple is what is meant by the word trust. To others who have never known of it, it will look blind – just as love looks blind to people who have never loved. But ask those who have loved and they will tell a totally different story. They will say, “We were blind before we had loved. We became insightful only through love. We attained eyes through love, we had no eyes without love.” Ask the people who have known love and they will say, “People without love are all blind.”And that’s the case with the disciple who has known the love and trust for a master. He will laugh when you say, “You are blind.” He will laugh at your ridiculous remark – because now he knows what it is to have eyes, eyes into his own inner reality, eyes which can see inward. You have eyes which can see only outward, but the disciple starts having eyes which can see inward. He starts having ears which can hear inward. His senses are doubled. You live with only five senses, the disciple lives with ten senses: five for the outer journey and five for the inner. The disciple becomes utterly rich; just think, five more senses becoming available. You have the ears which can know and hear the music that comes from the outside, but you are deaf to the inner music – and there is an inner music which is continuously flowing in you.That inner music Sufis call sama. Once it is heard, all outer music just becomes noise and nothing else. You have an inner fragrance; once it is smelled all outer fragrances are no longer fragrances. They start stinking. When the inner eye opens you know a totally different vision of beauty, a new splendor, and before that splendor all outer beauties simply look pale, faint old photographs, reflections in muddy water. When you have known the inner crystal clarity, everything outside looks like chaos, confusion.The disciple becomes utterly rich. He starts growing inner senses: he has ten senses instead of five. And when all these ten senses fall into harmony, something immensely beautiful and blissful is created. That’s what God is.Hafiz says, “Stop this cleverness and planning, for love closes the gates of the divine to the heart of anyone who does not completely lose himself on the path of devotion.” The disciple has to lose himself in the master, that’s what trust is. Then there is no question of doubt. The surrender is absolute. Then the master becomes your inner voice, then there is no separation. You don’t think in terms of separation.The master is the Kaaba of his lovers – “Kaaba” is the name of the temple of God in Mecca. The master is the Kaaba to his disciples, the disciples don’t go to the Kaaba. That’s why Mohammedans, orthodox Mohammedans, have not been very happy about the Sufis.It is related that when the great Sufi, Junnaid, asked his disciple, Mansoor, to go on a pilgrimage to Kaaba because he was creating trouble… Whenever he would go into his ecstasy he would start shouting in utter joy, “I am God!” and that is sacrilege to the orthodox Mohammedan, that is arrogance.Junnaid told Mansoor, his disciple, many times, “Stop shouting that. I know you are, I know I am, I know everybody is – but stop! Don’t say it so loudly, keep it inside because people are foolish, they will start creating trouble for you.”Mansoor would always say, “Yes, sir.” Whenever the master would say, “Don’t shout!” he would say, “Yes, sir.” But whenever he would again be in his ecstasy he would shout, “Ana’l haq! I am God!”Junnaid said, “You promise me, and again and again you do the same.”Mansoor said, “What can I do? I promise you, but God does not promise you. And when I am lost, he declares; it is not me.”And Junnaid knew it, so he said, “It is good.”Just to avoid… Because rumors were spreading against Mansoor and Junnaid and their work, and were being reported to the king, and the prime minister was very much against… So Junnaid said, “Just to avoid trouble, go on a pilgrimage; go to Kaaba.” And in those days going to Kaaba meant years. You had to walk for thousands of miles.So Mansoor said, “Okay.” He stood up and he said, “Okay, so I am going.”Junnaid was very happy. He said, “I did not think you would leave so easily.”And what did Mansoor do, do you know? He just went around and around Junnaid seven times, and then he said, “I am back! You are my Kaaba!”To the disciple the master is Kaaba. To the disciple the master is his God, his temple. And he is also the qibla to the disciple. Qibla is the direction facing Mecca, toward which all Moslems pray. Whenever a Moslem prays he keeps his face toward Kaaba; that direction is called qibla.Now, Sufis are again very unorthodox; they don’t keep their faces toward the Kaaba, they keep their faces toward the master, wherever the master is. For the disciple the master is Kaaba and the master is the qibla. He is the temple and he is the direction to the temple. This is trust.In the hadith it is reported that God says to Mohammed, “Whoever seeks me will find me. Whoever finds me will know me. Whoever knows me will have love for me. Whoever loves me I will love. Whomever I love I will kill. And whomever I kill, his blood-money I will pay. I myself am his blood-money” – a tremendously important saying. God says to Mohammed, “Whomever I love I will kill.”The master has to kill the disciple. The disciple has to allow the master to kill him. The disciple has to be rejoicing when the master kills him.Just the other day somebody who was not yet a sannyasin asked, “It is said that if you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him. Then why is it not said if you meet Osho on the way, kill him?” Exactly that has to be done: if you meet Osho on the way, kill him! But that statement was made to the disciples; you are not yet a disciple. You will never meet me on the way in the first place. The question of killing me will never arise. I can meet you on the way only if you have first allowed me to kill you.That is the meaning of being a disciple: the master first kills the disciple – that is the beginning of the journey. Then finally the disciple kills the master – that is the end. Then the master and the disciple have both disappeared. Then only God is.That tremendously pregnant statement by the Zen masters, “If you meet the Buddha on the way, kill him,” is the last step of the journey, so whosoever has asked it has not understood it at all. Yes, you have to kill me, but you will meet me only if you allow me first to kill you. That is a pre-requirement. I will not come on just anybody’s way, Tom, Harry, or Dick, no. I will only come on the way when you have allowed me to destroy you. And then, certainly, the master has to be killed. The beginning is with the death of the disciple and the end with the death of the master. Then the separation is gone, then there is no disciple, no master. Then only pure energy is left. That pure energy is God.The disciple has to be in the state Sufis call the tavern of ruins – kharabat.It is said that Bayazid Bastami was in this state when someone knocked at his door.Bayazid asked, “Who do you want?”The man answered that he was looking for Bayazid Bastami.Bayazid replied, “Ah! It has been years since I have had any news of him.”The moment a person becomes a disciple he has chosen suicide. He has chosen to destroy himself because he has known that to be is to be in misery, that to be is to be in hell. Now he wants to learn the ways of not to be.Sufism leads to this state, the state of nonbeing, loss of self and passing away into the beloved. As Khwaja Abdullah Ansari has said, “Oh God! Nonbeing is an affliction for all, but a blessing for me.” Thus whoever enters the path of Sufism in order to achieve a spiritual station or high state of consciousness has taken the first step wrongly. The real Sufi is one who goes on the path in order not to be. The gnostic, arif, gyan-yogi, travels within himself, whereas the Sufi travels from himself. The gnostic says, “Know thyself in order to know God.” The Sufi, prem-yogi, the bhakta, says, “Let go of thyself in order to be free.” The goal of the Sufi is not self-knowledge but dissolution of the self. The goal of the Sufi is not self-realization but annihilation of the self, fana. And the first lesson has to be learned with the master.To be in a state of not-being in the presence of the master is called adab. Adab is a Sufi word: it means the art of being in the presence of the master. Literally it means etiquette, but it is not just etiquette. It means the art of how to be in the presence of a master. In fact, how to be there and yet absent, how to be as if you are not.The story is told of a disciple who was once in the presence of his master, the great Junnaid. He was standing with total reverence and respect, like one who is praying to God.The master said, “You are standing superbly, but it would be better if you were not to be at all.”That is adab: to be in the presence of the master as an absence, so his presence can fill you to all nooks and corners of your being. Not to give him any resistance, that is adab; not to have any armor around you, that is adab; not to defend yourself, that is adab.And that’s what we constantly go on doing – we are constantly defending ourselves. It is perfectly okay in the outside world, you have to defend. It is a constant struggle to survive and you have to keep an armor, otherwise you will be exploited; people will take advantage of your vulnerability, of your openness. So when relating in the world you have to keep a certain distance from people, and you have to keep a certain quality of resistance, you have to be on guard, and that’s okay.But if you have that same attitude and manner when you are with the master, then your being with the master is just pointless. There you have to surrender all your defense structures, strategies. You have to open your doors and windows so the master can flow in you like light and breeze and rain, so the master can simply penetrate you with no resistance from your side. You have to be just a receptivity, you have to be feminine. That is adab. And trust is the fundamental of adab.Now this beautiful story:It is related that a man went to the assembly of the master Baqi-Billah of Delhi and said, “I have been reading the famous verse of the master Hafiz: ‘If your teacher bids you stain your prayer carpet with wine, obey him.’ But I have a difficulty.”In the world of the Sufis, satsang is called the assembly of the master – darbar, the master’s court – because the master is a king as far as his disciples are concerned. In fact, who else can be a king? All other kings are just poor beggars compared to the kingdom of a master. His kingdom is the kingdom of God. He is really rich. He may be living as a beggar or as a king, that is irrelevant, but he is rich, and only he is rich. Sufis are right to call his assembly “the court,” darbar.The master is not just a teacher, it is not a class. The master is really a master. The disciples are those who have surrendered their whole being in totality. They no longer exist separately, they are just obedience and nothing else. They respect the master as the king, as the real king.It is related that a man went to the assembly of the master Baqi-Billah of Delhi and said, “I have been reading the famous verse of master Hafiz…” Reading never helps you to know the truth because in reading, you cannot understand what you read. The meaning is not in the words, never. You read the words, but the meaning is supplied by you. The meaning is always yours. Words come to you, empty, and then you pour your meaning into those words.To understand Hafiz you will have to be a Hafiz, to understand Jesus you will have to be a Jesus, there is no other way. If you think you can understand Jesus without becoming a Jesus, you are utterly wrong. This is not the way to approach great statements, the statements of the realized ones.Now this man said: “I was reading the famous words of the master Hafiz.” You can read it, but you will not understand it. In fact you will misunderstand it.The worthy shepherd of the Mission Methodist Church, in a burst of passionate eloquence in denunciation of the world’s wickedness, declared, “Hell is full of cocktails, highballs, short skirts, and one-piece bathing suits!”Voice from the gallery, “Oh, Death, where is thy sting!”You will understand in your own way. You will understand the way you can understand.A bibulous person issued from a saloon in a state of melancholy intoxication, and outside the door he encountered the parson of his church.The pastor exclaimed mournfully, “Oh, John, I am so sorry to see you come out of such a place as that.”The bibulous one wept sympathetically. “Then,” he declared huskily, “I will go right back.” And he did.This man said: “I have been reading the famous verse of master Hafiz: ‘If your teacher bids you stain your prayer carpet with wine, obey him,’ and I have a difficulty.” Naturally, obviously – because this can be one of the most sacrilegious statements possible, to stain your prayer carpet with wine: “Hafiz must be mad! What is he saying? He cannot be a Moslem. What is he saying? – staining your prayer carpet with wine?” Naturally, he has great difficulty in understanding it. He is puzzled, he has started doubting. He is still calling him “the great master Hafiz,” but now great doubt has arisen in him.Ninety-nine percent of our lives consists of doubts – because ninety-nine percent of our lives consists of going out, extroversion. We live in doubt, doubt has become almost our nature. Our first approach, attitude, tendency, is that of doubt. First we doubt – unless it is proved otherwise. We need proof to trust. For doubt, we don’t need any proof, doubting has become our habit.The disciple has to change that habit, he has to learn trusting. Trust unless proved otherwise, doubt only if it is proved. Otherwise don’t doubt; unless it is proved, don’t doubt. This is a great change. This is what makes an ordinary man a disciple. This is the transformation required.You see a stranger. The first idea is that of doubt – maybe he is a thief, a murderer, who knows? Unless proved otherwise, you carry doubt without any proof. You don’t trust him.The disciple has to change his attitude – at least with the master, and then slowly, slowly with the other disciples of the master. That’s how he becomes a part of the family of the master, of his commune, by dropping this ugly habit of doubt.It is good in the marketplace, but the marketplace should not be your total life. You should leave something for some other world, for some other dimension. You should leave at least a small corner of your inner being as a shrine for trust. If you become full of doubt, you are full of illnesses, you don’t have any source of well-being in you. Whenever you can trust a person you feel great joy. That’s why love is so joyous – because you can trust a person.It is said of Adolf Hitler that he could never love a woman because he could never trust anybody. He never allowed a woman to stay with him in his room, never. Why? And it was not that he was not having relationships with women. He was having relationships with women, but he would never allow any woman to stay in his room in the night. Who knows, when he fell asleep, she might have murdered him. Who knows, she might have poisoned him. Who knows, she might have been a spy. He was incapable of friendship. He was one of the loneliest men in the world.If you cannot love, if you cannot even trust a woman, certainly you will be living in a kind of constant paranoia, fear. He could not marry a woman his whole life – because if you marry a woman then you will have to trust her. Then she will stay with you, then she will prepare your food, she will sleep with you, and you are unnecessarily becoming vulnerable.He certainly did marry a woman, but only before he committed suicide, three hours before. When he had already decided, “Now I am going to commit suicide,” he married. Then there was no fear; what else could she do? He was already going to commit suicide, hence then it seemed logical to marry, there was no problem. What else could she do? At the most she could poison him; he himself was going to poison himself. Now there was no need to be afraid: death was coming. He married just three hours before it.In the middle of the night a priest was awakened from his sleep, brought to the basement where he was staying. Half asleep, not understanding what was happening, somehow he managed the ceremony. No friends were present, no relatives were present, just a few guards.And after the marriage what did he do? Did he make love to the woman? No, they both committed suicide. That was the only thing that he did after marriage. Maybe he wanted somebody to follow him in death, so he got married.Adolf Hitler may be an extreme case, but if you watch your own mind you will find that in each individual the same kind of doubt exists, more or less. Even if you live with a man or a woman for years, still the doubt persists there. You are always watching from the corner of your eye: “Who knows?” This is a way to create hell for yourself.Find at least one man in your life with whom you can be utterly open, and that will be your first lesson of love and your first lesson of God and your first lesson of transcendence.The man said, “Now, I am having difficulty.”The Scotsman entered the parlor of the painless dentist, nursing an aching tooth. The doctor examined the tooth and then announced, “It is badly ulcerated. I am afraid it will have to come out, and it will be necessary to put you under an anesthetic to do it.”“Anesthetic?” questioned the Scot.“Yes, gas, you know. It will simply put you to sleep for a few minutes, and in the meantime I will be able to extract the tooth without giving you any pain.”“Won’t I be able to feel anything at all when I am under the influence?”“No, nothing whatever.”The Scotsman thereupon pulled out his purse and began to count out some coins.“Oh, never mind paying now,” said the dentist. “Plenty of time for that once the tooth is out.”“I was not getting ready to pay you. I was just making sure how much money I had before you gave me the gas.”That is the way people are living. If you had come across this statement of Hafiz: “If your teacher bids you stain your prayer carpet with wine, obey him,” you would also have suspected, doubted. It goes against all your religious teachings. It goes against all your life experiences.You have been told to always be on guard; that’s why you are so tense, that’s why people cannot relax. If you cannot trust you cannot relax, and if you cannot relax you cannot know the taste of life.Baqi-Billah said, “Dwell apart from me for some time and I shall illustrate the matter for you.”Why did the master say: “Dwell apart from me for some time…”? Because when you are close to a master, many times you start having illusions of trust – because the very presence of the master goes on changing your inner chemistry. His very presence is alchemical. You start trusting not because trust has arisen in you, but only because the master is present there and his constant showering, his vibe, can give you the delusion that you trust him.Many times I send my sannyasins far away, for months, for years, just to give them a real experience of where they are. Here, you are riding on a wave. Here, my presence, and the presence of thousands of other sannyasins, is creating an energy field which can possess you, turn you, toss you, can create a dance in you, can bring a song to you. And naturally you will think this is your dance, this is your song, and it may not be. It may be just the impact, it may be just that you were caught by the momentum of the energy. It is sometimes good that the disciple goes far away – unless the master decides otherwise.So when I sometimes say to you, “Go away to the West for a few months,” don’t feel offended, don’t feel rejected. That may be a necessary step for you, a need of your being. You will come back enriched. You will come truer when you come back. You will know what is yours and what is not yours. And it is very good always to remember what is yours and what is just an impact of a great whirlpool of energy.Baqi-Billah said, “Dwell apart from me for some time…” because if the master had said something right then, there was every possibility that the disciple would have accepted it. He could not accept Hafiz’s statement because Hafiz was not his master. And Hafiz was dead; centuries divided him from Hafiz. He knew nothing of Hafiz – he had not tasted the wine of Hafiz, Hafiz was just scripture. But when his own master, Baqi-Billah, was there, if the master had said something he might have done it, believing that he trusted. He may not have doubted – although the doubt would have been there deep in the unconscious.The master sent him away so that he would become more normal, more real, more as he was; so the contact with the master would become loose, the impact of the master would fade away, wear down.“Dwell apart from me for some time and I shall illustrate the matter for you.” That is the way of the Sufis; they always illustrate. They are not very interested in answering intellectually. Their whole effort is to create situations so those situations can illustrate things to you.Just the other day somebody was saying that many doubts arise in him about me, my work, my people, the commune. I said, “It is natural, nothing to be worried about. Don’t repress those doubts – that is dangerous. Never repress those doubts. Watch, try to understand them, and don’t be worried because if trust is there, if tacit trust is there, then it is capable of transforming doubts also in its favor. It can use doubts also as steps. It can make doubts serve trust.”It is not a question of dropping doubts, it is a question of gaining more and more trust. Then the doubts can be transformed, can be used. And they are bound to be there because this commune is a situation. You go on thinking of it as an ashram as other ashrams are. All other ashrams are made in such a way that they create trust in you, they are arranged in such a way that they fulfill your demands; but then your doubt will never be transformed, remember – because your doubt will never be provoked, challenged.This is not an ordinary ashram as you come across in India. They fulfill all your expectations. They are perfectly aware of how you will trust them. This is just a totally different phenomenon that is happening here. I know all your expectations, and I do exactly the opposite. And this is going to happen continuously, more and more. The more people will be coming here, the more I will destroy all kinds of expectations. Whatever you demand is not going to be fulfilled, so that your doubt remains on the surface; you have to do something about it. If it moves into the unconscious, you forget about it. It is dangerous, it will remain forever.For example, you would like me to live in poverty. I can live in poverty very easily, there would be no problem in it. My whole life consists of sitting in my room. If the prime minister of India decides to put me in a jail, there would be no difference; it would be the same.You would like this ashram to function according to your ideas. Just the other day a German sannyasin was saying, “My girlfriend was to come, but she is put off because of your car. That’s why she has not come.” I am so grateful to her. Now, I can have a third-rate Indian car and that will not put you off, but it will put you on, and you will feel very, very great. In fact, I can just come walking because I don’t need the car at all! It is just a question of two minutes’ walk. I never go out, as you know. The car is not needed.So why is the car there? And why the costliest? Just to put your girlfriends off. I am tired of your girlfriends. It is very good of her that she has not come.Just think, if I were sitting in poverty, in rags, and in an Indian kind of dirtiness, your girlfriend would have thought, “Oh, here is the real master,” and she would have believed – but she would have believed in her own mind, not in me. She would have believed in her own expectations, not in me. I would have been secondary. Her expectations would be fulfilled: that’s why she would believe. She would believe in herself, not in me.I am going to flout all your expectations, and only then if you believe in me, do you believe. Then the trust is real.After a considerable period of time, the disciple received a letter from the sage. It said, “Take all the money you have and give it to the gatekeeper of any brothel.”Now what kind of advice is this? Just think of yourself, if I gave you something like this… And I go on giving something like this.The disciple was shocked…Naturally; you cannot be angry with the disciple. That’s how human beings are. They are always watching by the corner of their eye, they are always suspicious. Even if they believe, trust, it is only on the surface, only so far. They can go with you only to a certain extent and then their mind starts refusing: “This is too much. I cannot go beyond it. What do you think of me? Am I a fool?”The disciple was shocked… And when you are shocked, you think, naturally, that something is wrong with the master. This is sheer unintelligence because the master may be deliberately shocking you. The shock may be a shock treatment. You can ask the psychiatrists, who are slowly, slowly being known as shockiatrists… They have started giving electric shocks to people, insulin shocks to people. But the master has known it all along, that sometimes a real shock is very good for your system. It shakes you alive, it helps you come to your senses, it gives you vitality, it makes you again alert.The disciple was shocked, and for a time thought that the master must be a fraud.And you have to understand the disciple – because he is you! He is the quintessence of all so-called disciples in the world. Suspicion has arisen: “Now, this master seems to be a fraud. He must be having some illicit relationship with some brothel, now I have to pay. This is very tricky! What kind of order is this? And with no explanation attached to it.”The master never gives explanations. The master simply gives you an order and it has to be done. If you ask for an explanation you have missed the opportunity – because explanations can be given but they only satisfy your reason. And if your reason is satisfied and then you do something, it is not trust. It does not help your trust to grow.McGinnis was dying. The lawyer came to make his will, and his wife, Bridget McGinnis, saw to it that she sat in on this important ceremonial.“State your debts as quickly as possible.” said the man of law.“Tim Reilly owes me forty dollars,” moaned the sick man.“Good,” said the prospective widow.“Sean O’Neill owes me thirty-seven dollars.”“Sensible to the last,” beamed the wife.“To Michael Callahan I owe two hundred dollars.”“Blessed Mother of God! Hear the man rave!”Now the thing has changed. When it goes according to you, it is profitable to you. When it is fulfilling your expectations it’s perfectly good: “Sensible to the last.” But now? “Blessed Mother of God! Hear the man rave!” The man is mad; if you have to pay two hundred dollars to somebody, the man is utterly mad. This is the way the mind functions, and the mind thinks this is the intelligent way.The wedding ceremony was going on when finally the minister asked the bride, “Will you obey your husband?”“Do you think I am a fool?”This is becoming more and more a settled attitude in the world. That’s why religion has evaporated. It has become a settled thing in the minds of people that to believe is to be a fool, to trust is to be stupid; not to trust and to doubt continuously is the way of intelligence. It is not.Yes, if you are in scientific research work, doubt is intelligent, but if you are inquiring within your consciousness, then trust is intelligent. Intelligence knows what method is needed, and where. Intelligence never messes around with different methods which are useful in different directions. Intelligence knows what to do in a certain situation – when to use your eyes and when to use your ears, and when to use your doubt and when to use your trust.The disciple was shocked, and for a time thought that the master must be a fraud. After wrestling with himself for days, however, he went to the nearest house of ill fame and presented the man at the door with all the money which he had.Yes, there were many doubts, but deep down there was still some trust. That’s why the master had sent him away to struggle on his own – because if he could find some tacit trust somewhere inside himself, he would have found the rock on which the temple of life can be built. Had he been in the presence of the master, he would have immediately said, “Yes, sir.” He would have gone and given the money, but that would not have been of much help. It would have been superficial, and the doubt would have remained and would have come in some way or other – and with vengeance.It always happens. If I say to you to do something and you do it because trust is required – that’s why you do it – and doubt is there but you keep it repressed, sooner or later it will start coming in different ways. It will start finding new outlets. It will poison you.Trust is good if it comes without repressing doubts, if it gives doubts full expression and then surfaces, if it gives doubts all opportunities and then too, ultimately wins over. That was the device of sending the disciple far away for a long time.The disciple was shocked, and for a time thought that the master must be a fraud. After wrestling with himself for days…That wrestling was of importance. Now he was divided. A part of him was asking, “How can the master be a fraud?” He has known him, he has been in intimate closeness with the master, he has seen the man with his own eyes, he has felt his life, his light, he has understood what he was. A part of his heart went on saying, “Trust,” but the whole mind, the outward-going mind, created a thousand and one doubts.The struggle is between the mind and the heart, the outgoing energy and the ingoing energy. The struggle is between exhalation and inhalation. And it is good to go through this turmoil.The groups that I give to you are really devices to go through this turmoil: they create a thousand and one situations in which trust is needed. Naturally, all kinds of doubts arise and you have to wrestle, and you have to fight your way out of the mess. If you can fight your way out of it, if you can go through and through and come out of it intact, something tremendously valuable has been achieved.The purpose of the same groups in the West is different. The purpose here is totally different. The purpose in the West is somehow to help you to become a little more mature about your life, a little more accepting of your life, to make you a little more alert so that you can function in a better way, so that you don’t go unnecessarily into neurotic patterns. The purpose of these same groups in the West is psychological.Here it is not only psychological. Yes, it is that, but more is implied: it is spiritual. The psychological purpose is only minor, the spiritual purpose is major. The spiritual purpose is to bring your whole turmoil to the surface. All your doubts, all possible doubts that you may have carried for many lives have to be brought to the surface – because only from the surface can they evaporate and disappear. They have to be brought out of the basement, out of your conscious, unconscious, collective unconscious. From every level of your being they have to be brought to the surface where you can encounter them.And it is not only a question of becoming a little more mature, a little more accepting, a little less neurotic, a little more normal, no: the purpose is to help you to grow into trust. That is not the purpose in the West.God is not the purpose of all the humanistic psychotherapy groups in the West. God is the purpose here. That’s why sometimes it happens that when a therapist from the West comes, if he is very arrogant, egoistic, and if he thinks that he knows all about these groups, he is not benefited very much – because he does not know that we are using these groups as a means to some faraway end.That’s what happened to Geet Govind. When he came from Esalen and participated in two groups, he became very annoyed, angry. But he was cowardly too. He didn’t say anything to me; he should have said something. If he had any guts he should have said to me, “This is not the way to run the groups.” He didn’t say a thing, he simply escaped. And now he is trying to create anti-propaganda against me in Esalen.Here he was crying and weeping in front of me, tears were rolling down from his eyes, and now he is trying to create propaganda against me there. What happened? He had come with his fixed ideas – “This is the way an encounter group should be” – unaware that here things are being done in a different way, for a different purpose. If he had asked me, things would have been clear to him, but he was not even courageous enough to ask that. He simply escaped.Now, just the other day, Amit Prem received a letter from Esalen. Amit Prem runs a few therapy groups there in Esalen, and he introduces my methods, meditations, my ideas, my ways, into his groups. Now he has received a letter: “Osho has to be totally dropped; only then will you be allowed to run groups here. You will have to restructure your groups and their methods.” This is happening to a few others too.Whenever you come with a fixed idea, whoever you are, you are going to get into trouble with me. You are going to get into confusion here. You will have to be very, very available, understanding. You will have to put your expectations aside.Sometimes the same methods are used, but for a different purpose. Here the whole purpose of all the therapy groups is not only psychological. I am not much interested in your psychology. If I have to work on it, it is only because you are stuck there. My whole interest is in your spirituality.I work on your psychology so that you can be freed from the entanglements of your mind and you can become available to higher flights of spirit. I am not interested in the rocks, but I have to do something because the rocks are hanging around your neck, and they have to be dropped. Only then can you open your wings, and the flight from the alone to the alone can start.Geet Govind just missed the whole point. And now, the way he is behaving, he himself is closing the door to his ever coming back to me. I am available and will remain available. I see some potential in the man, something is possible in him, but he is missing an opportunity just by having been here for a few days without understanding anything, without talking at all to me. And I had asked him thrice, “How are you feeling?” because I continuously had the feeling that his crying and weeping was superficial, that the surrender that he showed toward me was only on the surface. Deep down he had a very egoistic attitude, sooner or later he would take revenge.And that’s what he is doing now – now he is taking revenge. Now he must be feeling very guilty that he cried and wept and touched my feet. Now he has to do something to satisfy his ego, that all that was wrong – “I was deluded,” “Forget all about it,” – it was just an episode. It didn’t matter much, it didn’t mean much: “What I am doing now is my reality.”I feel sorry for the man. If he had been a little more open and vulnerable here, this duality would have dropped. And this is my observation about him: he needs crying, he needs surrender, not only from the surface but from the deepest core. But he didn’t give an opportunity to me and to my people. We were trying to create turmoil in him. He had to wrestle, but he escaped, and now he is wrestling there, alone. And it is not of much use.After wrestling with himself for days, however, he went to the nearest house of ill fame and presented the man at the door with all the money which he had. Finally, the trust won over. And when trust wins over without repressing the doubts, it has a truth in it.“For such a sum of money,” said the doorman, “I shall allot you the choicest gem of our collection, an untouched woman.”As soon as he entered the room, the woman there said, “I have been tricked into being in this house, and am held here by force and threats. If your sense of justice is stronger than your reason for coming here, help me to escape.”Then the disciple knew the meaning of the poem of Hafiz, “If your teacher bids you stain your prayer carpet with wine, obey him.”Trust knows how to obey. Trust only knows obedience. And through obedience, the ego slowly, slowly disappears. The question is between ego and egolessness. The master’s whole function is how to help you to die as an ego, and all kinds of means and methods have to be used.Remember it. Don’t escape too early. Give a chance to this alchemical lab. All kinds of turmoils will be created, deliberately created. All kinds of doubts will be provoked, deliberately provoked. You will be given absurd orders to be fulfilled. Don’t escape like Geet Govind. He has missed an opportunity. He may not come across such an opportunity for many lives. It is still not too late, he can come. My doors are always open.But one has to remember: don’t come here to be supported in your ego and your expectations. Come here to die! If you love me, I am going to kill you. Only when you are killed, one day, will you have the opportunity to kill me. And that day is the greatest day: when the master and disciple are both killed – then only that which is, is left. God is in the master, God is in the disciple.When the disciple and the master have both disappeared, only God is left. And that is the goal of Sufism, and that is the goal of all religions, and that is the goal for which we are working here.Enough for today.

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

The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,To me, the future of the East appears bleak whichever way one looks at it – either poverty and starvation through fatalism, or Westernization through capitalism. For is it not necessary for the East to become West before people again become interested in their inner search? Is it not necessary for the people of the East to become materially rich before their spiritual poverty again becomes evident?But the burden of the West already lies heavy on the world: the atomic bomb; violence through frustration; the automatization of the soul; the destruction of the forests and the pollution of the air and sea so that it is uncertain whether the environment can maintain its delicate balance. Can the world support another West?The future only appears bleak; it has always appeared so. This is not anything new. You can go as far back as possible in human history, to the very first moment of human beginnings when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, and you will find the future has always looked bleak. Just think of Adam and Eve being thrown out of the garden of God and the doors being slammed behind them. How was the future? It must have appeared very bleak. All that they had known was being taken away. Their security, their safety, their world, everything was being taken away. What future hope was there? Only darkness, death. It must have been frightening.And this is not only a parable: each time a child is born the future looks bleak because again the womb – the safe, secure environment of the womb – is taken away from the child, and the helpless child is expelled. What do you think about the child? Psychoanalysts say that the greatest trauma is the birth trauma, and the person suffers it his whole life. The word trauma comes from a root which means “wound.” The birth trauma is the greatest wound; it is very rare to find a person whose birth trauma is healed.It heals only when a person becomes enlightened – because when a person becomes enlightened he is again in the eternal womb of God, otherwise the wound goes on hurting, on and on. Your whole life you try to hide that wound, but by hiding it, it cannot disappear. Each child being born, coming out of the birth canal, must be feeling the future is bleak, and each age has felt it. Because the future is unknown, that’s why it looks bleak.This is not something new that modern man is feeling, it is as ancient as man. You can go to the ancient-most records and it is always said in every ancient scripture, “The future is bleak.” And the corollary to it is that the past was golden, “and the future is bleak.” The past was good – Satyuga, the Age of Truth – and the future, Kaliyuga, the Age of Death and Darkness.This attitude is somewhere deep in your mind, it has nothing to do with time and the realities surrounding you. You have to drop this pessimistic attitude. It all depends on your approach.For example, it is so simple to say that “…the burden of the West already lies heavy on the world: the atomic bomb…” and nobody will argue against you, it looks so obvious. But I would like to tell you to think again, reconsider. In fact, it is the atom bomb which has made wars impossible. Now there can be no world war.In the past we could have continued wars because our wars were so inefficient, there was no danger. That’s why, down the ages, in three thousand years, we have fought five thousand wars. There was no problem, it was just a game. And the male egoistic mind enjoyed it very much, it needed it very much. Wars would have continued if there was no atom bomb. The atom bomb is the end of war.The future is not bleak. The very existence of the atom bomb means, now, if you decide for war, it will be universal suicide. Who is ready to take that risk? Nobody can win and everybody will die. Nobody can be the winner; then what is the point of the game?War is significant if somebody can win and somebody is defeated. War becomes absurd if nobody can win and both are destroyed. It is only because of the existence of the atom bomb that Russia and America are prevented from war, otherwise there seems to be no other possibility beside war. Both are ready, absolutely ready, but the atom bomb is making it impossible.It is now ridiculous to go to war. If both parties are going to be destroyed, what is the point? The atom bomb has made war pointless.When I think about the atom bomb I see great hope. I am not a pessimist at all. I believe things are going to be better every day, better and better. You will be surprised, but if you understand, it is so simple.It is because of the atom bomb that war has become total. Up to now it was a partial thing – a few people would die – but now the whole earth will die. We have attained super-kill. We have so many bombs ready that we can kill each person one thousand times, we can destroy one thousand earths like this. This earth is small now before our destructive powers; compared to our destructive powers this earth is nothing.Now, who is going to take this risk, and for what? You will not be there to gloat over your victory, nobody will be there. War is not going to happen. The Third World War is not going to happen, and it will not be because of Buddha and Christ and their teachings of nonviolence and love, no! It will be because of the atom bomb. Because death is absolute now, suicide will be complete. Not only will man be destroyed, but birds, animals, trees; all life on earth will be destroyed.This is the only possibility of dropping war forever. We have become too efficient in killing, now killing can no longer be allowed. Think this way and you will be surprised; then the future is no longer bleak.You say, “…violence through frustration…” That’s true. Whenever one feels frustrated… And the world is feeling frustrated, particularly the West. Frustration comes as a shadow of success. In the East there is no frustration because there is no success, so the shadow is missing. In the West there is great frustration because success has come; all that man ever needed is available, and there is no contentment. Success has failed: that’s the frustration.But that is also the point of sannyas, meditation, religion. Yes, either you become frustrated and you become violent because all that you have hoped for has failed… You have succeeded, and nothing has succeeded. Great frustration arises in you; you can become murderous, you can become suicidal. But there is also another possibility. You can start thinking in a totally new way – that success cannot be in the outer world, that success has to be something inner, that you were rushing in the wrong direction. Your direction was wrong, that’s why you have failed.Because of frustration, in the West people are becoming more and more interested in meditation, prayer, contemplation. That too is part of the same frustration. My own observation is, a person becomes a meditator only when there are only two possibilities: suicide or transformation.When there seems to be only suicide and nothing else in the outside world, one turns in. Only at that point, at that peak of frustration, does one turn in. The turning in cannot happen in a lukewarm person; it happens only when things are really hot and there is no way outside anymore, all ways have been proved false. When one has been frustrated totally by the outside world and all exterior journeys, when all extroversion seems meaningless, only then does the desire, the longing for an inner pilgrimage open up.It has always been so. It is only at the extremes, when life faces a crisis, that transformations happen. Water evaporates at a hundred degrees; that much heat is needed. The West has created that much heat of frustration. A few people will become violent, a few people will become murderous, a few people will become suicidal, but the major part of humanity will start turning in.You say, “…the automatization of the soul…” Industrialization and the growth of technology has not made man automatic, has not made man a machine. Man has always been a machine. Industrialization has only revealed the truth. It is a great revelation. Man has always lived in slavery, but the slavery was not so apparent, was not so penetrating; there was always an illusion of freedom.The mechanization of all you are surrounded by has made you aware that you are also nothing but a machine. You have always been that. Buddhas have always been telling you that you exist unconsciously, that you exist like a robot, that you are not yet a man, but illusions persisted. The modern world has taken the last illusion from you, it has revealed the truth to you: you are nothing but a machine – efficient, inefficient, but a machine.It had to be so because only when you live with machines, only then, can you become aware of your machinelike existence. You had always lived with trees and animals and people, and it had always given you the false idea that there is freedom.Freedom exists only when you are utterly conscious. Only a buddha is free. Freedom is in buddhahood: nobody else is free, nobody else can be free. But people can believe… It is a very consoling illusion. The modern world has taken your illusion away from you, and it is good – because now a great desire to be free will arise, a great longing to attain something beyond the machine.For example, the computer has proved that howsoever efficient you are in your mind, it does not really make you a man because that can be done better by a computer than by your mind. Now the people who used to do beautiful mathematics will be offended because the computer can do it in a far better way. And the work of the computer is so fast that they say, if a problem will take seventy years of his whole life for a great mathematician to solve, working day in, day out, the computer can solve it within a second.Now, what is the lesson to be learned? That the brain is nothing but a biocomputer. Without the computer it would never have been revealed to you that your brain is a computer. With the computer, now the people who think they are great intellectuals, mathematicians, scientists, specialists, are all reduced to machines. It was not possible two thousand years ago; there was no way to know that the mind functioned as a machine, that the mind is nothing but a machine.There is just one thing the computer cannot do. It can be logical, but it cannot be loving; it can be rational, but it cannot be meditative. A computer cannot meditate, a computer cannot love. That is the hope, and that is where man can still go beyond machines. You can love. Your love will be the decisive factor in the coming days, not logic – the computer is perfectly logical, more logical than any Aristotle. Not mathematics – the computer is more mathematical than any Albert Einstein.The computer is going to solve all problems. The computer will solve every problem that scientists used to take years to solve. It can solve them within seconds. Sooner or later science will go into the hands of computers; the scientist will be needed only to operate the computer, that’s all. The computer can do it far more quickly, far more efficiently, with less and less possibility of making any errors. This is something tremendously significant. It can make you very frightened, it can give you the idea that there is nothing left, man is a machine. But it can also fill you with great hope – now the computer has revealed that the head is not man’s real reality.Now we have to search for the heart – because the computer has no heart. Only by searching for our heart, only by allowing our heart to dance and sing and love, will we be able to retain the glory and dignity of being man; otherwise they are gone.The future looks bleak to you because you only see the darker side of the phenomenon. You are not aware of its lighter side. I see the dawn coming very close. Yes, the night is very dark, but the future is not bleak, not at all.In fact, for the first time in human history, millions of people will be able to become buddhas. It was very rare to become a buddha in the past because it was very rare to become aware of the mechanicalness of man. It needed great intelligence to be aware that man is a machine. But now it will not need any intelligence at all; it will be so obvious that man is a machine.And you say, “…the destruction of the forests and the pollution of the air and sea, so that it is uncertain whether the environment can maintain its delicate balance. Can the world support another West?” That is one of the most beautiful things about science and technology: they create problems just to solve them. And a problem can only be solved when it has been created; then it becomes a challenge. Now the greatest challenge before technology is how to maintain the balance of nature, how to maintain ecological harmony. It was never there before, it is a new problem.For the first time the West is facing a new problem. We have lived on this earth for millions of years. Slowly, slowly we had been growing more and more expert technologically, but we had not yet been able to destroy the natural balance; we were yet a very small force on the earth. Now for the first time our energy is bigger, far bigger, than the earth’s energy to keep its balance. This is a great phenomenon. Man has become so powerful that he can destroy the natural balance. But he will not destroy it – because to destroy the natural balance means he will be destroyed himself.He will find new ways, and new ways are being found. The way to regain the delicate balance of nature is not by renouncing technology. It is not by becoming hippies, it is not by becoming Gandhians, no, not at all. The way to regain the balance of nature is through superior technology, higher technology, more technology. If technology can destroy the balance, why can’t technology regain it? Anything that can be destroyed can be created.Now it is almost feasible to float cities in the sky, in the air, in big, enormous balloons! There is no need for man to live on the earth. And it will be really beautiful – floating cities in the air, and the green earth below you, huge forests again as the earth used to be before man started cutting the forests. The earth can become the same again. You can come back to the earth for holidays.It is possible now to float cities in the ocean, and that will be beautiful. It is possible now to make underground cities so the earth, its greenery, its beauty, is not destroyed. You can live in air-conditioned cities underneath the earth. You can come once in a while for your Sunday prayer to the earth, and go back. It is now possible for man to be transported to another planet. The moon may become our next colony, the moon may become our habitation.The way is not by regressing, it is not possible to regress. Now man cannot live without electricity and man cannot live without all the comforts that technology has made available. There is no need either – it would become so poor a world. You don’t know how man has lived in the past, always starving, always ill. You don’t know how man has lived in the past. People have forgotten. You don’t know how low the average age was in the past; if twenty children were born only two would survive. Life was very ugly.And without machines there was slavery. It is only because of machines that slavery has disappeared from the earth. If more machines come, more of this slavery will disappear. Horses will be free again if there are more cars; oxen will be free again if more machines are there to do their work; animals can be free again.Freedom was not possible without machines. If you drop machines, man will again become slaves. There will be people who will start dominating and forcing. You see the pyramids? They look so beautiful, but each pyramid was made in such a way that millions of people died in making it. That was the only way to make it. All the beautiful palaces of the world and the forts… Much violence has happened, only then could they be made. The Great Wall of China – millions of people died in making it. They were forced, generations of people were forced, to just make the China Wall. Now people go and see it and they have completely forgotten that it represents a very ugly chapter of history.For the first time electricity and technology have taken all the work; man need not do it. Technology can free man from work absolutely, and the earth could be playful for the first time. Luxury is possible for the first time. There is no need to go back. That’s why I am against the Gandhian approach toward life, utterly against. If Gandhi is believed, then the world will again become ugly, poor, dirty, ill. The way is ahead: one has to go to superior technology that can rearrange the balance. The earth can really become paradise.I am all for science. My religion is not against science, my religion absorbs science into itself. I believe in a scientific world. And through science a great religion, a greater religion than ever, is going to happen to man. Because when man will be really free to be playful and there will be no need to work, tremendous creativity will be released. People will paint, and people will play music, and people will dance, and people will write poems, and people will pray, and people will meditate. Their whole energy will be free to soar high.Only a small part of humanity has been creative because all the other people have been forced to do futile things which can be done by machines more easily and without any trouble to anybody. Millions of people are simply laboring their whole lives. Their whole lives consist only of perspiration, there is no inspiration. This is ugly, this should not be.And this is possible only for the first time. Just think: the whole of humanity freed from the imprisonment of labor. Then the energy will start moving in new directions. People will become adventurers, explorers, scientists, musicians, poets, painters, dancers, meditators. They will have to because the energy will need some expression. Millions of people can bloom like buddhas. I am tremendously hopeful about the future.You say, “…the future of the East appears bleak whichever way one looks at it…” It is not bleak. It can be bleak if stupidity wins over intelligence. If the old, rotten mind wins over intelligence, it is bleak. If Gandhi wins, it is bleak. If Morarji Desai and people like him win, it is bleak. But if I am heard and understood it is not bleak.You say, “…either poverty and starvation through fatalism, or Westernization through capitalism.” I am all for Westernization of the East, and I am all for capitalism too because capitalism is the only natural system. Communism is a violent, enforced, artificial system. Capitalism is a natural growth; nobody has forced it on anybody, it has come on its own. It is part of human evolution. Capitalism is not like communism – a few people trying to enforce a particular system, forcibly, on others. Capitalism has grown out of freedom. Capitalism is a natural phenomenon, and it fits perfectly well with human potential.I am all in favor of Adam Smith and all against Karl Marx. Capitalism means laissez-faire. People should be free to do their own thing, no government should interfere with people’s freedom. The government which governs the least is the best. That’s what capitalism is. The interference of the state, the nationalization of the industries, are all inhuman.Communism can exist only in a climate of dictatorship. Communism cannot be democratic, socialism can never be democratic. No socialist can have a democratic mind because socialism and communism mean to impose a particular system on people. How can they be democratic? They have to be forcibly imposed. The whole country has to be turned into a concentration camp.Capitalism needs no enforcement from above. Capitalism is a democratic way of life. And capitalism is also very true psychologically because no two persons are psychologically equal. The whole idea of equality is false, inhuman, untrue, unscientific. No two human beings are equal, people are unequal. In every possible way they are unequal. Their talents, their intelligence, their bodies, their health, their age, their beauty, their qualities: everything is different. No two individuals are alike or equal. And it is good. The variety makes life rich; the variety gives people individuality, uniqueness.Capitalism means freedom, it represents freedom. I am not against equal opportunities for all; please don’t misunderstand me. Equal opportunities should be available to everybody, but for what? – equal opportunities to grow to your unequal potential, equal opportunities to be different, to be dissimilar, equal opportunities to be whatever you want to be.Communism is an ugly phenomenon. It destroys human freedom in the name of equality. Equality can never be managed, there is no possible way. Even in Soviet Russia there is no equality; the classes have only changed their labels. First there used to be the proletarians and the bourgeoisie, now there are the rulers and the ruled. The distinctions are far greater than ever. And the whole country has fallen into a kind of dull state.Communism makes people drab and dull, placid – because nobody feels the freedom to be himself, so joy disappears from life. Nobody feels any enthusiasm to work for others. That is unnatural, inhuman. How can you feel enthusiasm if you are working for an inhuman state, a machinery called the state? When you work for your children, your wife, there is enthusiasm. If you are working for your wife and you would like her to have a beautiful house, a small cottage in the hills, you have great enthusiasm. You would like your children to be healthy, you have great enthusiasm. Who cares for the state? For what?The state is an abstraction, nobody can love the state. That’s why in Russia and in China you will find people dragging, dull. Their intelligence has lost color, they are no longer rainbows of life. Communism – in the beautiful name of equality – destroys the most valuable thing: freedom. Freedom is the ultimate value. There is nothing higher than freedom because it is through freedom that everything else becomes possible.Capitalism is a higher value system than communism, and communism will always remain dictatorial because it is afraid, afraid because something inhuman has been imposed on human beings. The moment you withdraw the structure of dictatorship, people will start becoming unequal again. Just give five years to Soviet Russia, five years of democracy and you will see: again people are different. Somebody has become rich and somebody has become poor and somebody has become famous and somebody has become something else. Just five years of democratic freedom and fifty years of dictatorship will go down the drain, hence the fear. This is an unnatural imposition on people, it destroys their spirit.I am all for capitalism. Capitalism is the system that produces capital. Communism is the system that reduces everybody to the lowest denominator. That is the only way to make people equal.For example, if somebody here is seven feet tall – there are a few Dutch sannyasins seven feet tall – and somebody is just five: now if you want to make these people equal, what can be done? The five-foot-tall person cannot be stretched to seven, but the seven-foot-tall person can be cut to five. That’s the only possible way.Communism reduces people to the lowest denominator. People are not allowed to have higher intelligence because that will make them unequal. They have to be reduced to the lowest intelligence.Capitalism functions in a totally different way. It helps you to express, to manifest, to flower in your totality.I am not saying that there are not wrong things in capitalism. They are there, but capitalism is not responsible for them. Human ignorance is responsible for them, human unconsciousness is responsible for them. Capitalism has many errors in it, it is not a perfect system. It is the most perfect in available systems, but it is not a perfect system because man is not perfect. It simply reflects man, with all its illusions, with all human errors, with all human stupidities, but it reflects perfectly well.Communism is against all that is good, valuable, all that takes you higher than humanity. Communism is an effort to live by bread alone. Bread is needed, but it is needed only so that you can pray, so that you can sing a song, so that you can fall in love, so that you can paint. Bread is needed, but only as a means. Communism has turned the means into the end.I am in favor of the East being Westernized because Westernization means nothing but modernization. Forget the word west. Westernization means modernization: more technology, more science, more industrialization – and higher technology so that we can save this earth and its delicate ecological balance. The East has to be modernized, and then the future is not bleak.But the greatest problem is that the Eastern mind is against modernization. Their old traditions are great blocks. Their conditioning of the mind is such that they are committing suicide. They think that they have great culture and great values and great ideas. It is all rotten! Because of that rotten past, they cannot understand the modern explosion of great knowledge that can transform this earth into a real paradise.These old patterns have to be destroyed. People ask me, particularly Indians, “What are you doing to help India to get out of its poverty?” That’s actually what I am doing – because to me it is not only a question of going and distributing clothes to poor people. That is not going to help. It is not a question of distributing anything, it is not a question of charity; it is a question of changing their mind and their structure of thinking. But then a problem arises: they will be the most antagonistic to me. This is how life is paradoxical.What I am saying can change the fate of the East, it can transform its whole ugliness into beauty, but Eastern people will be the most against me because whatever I will say will go against their conditioning, their ideas, settled ideas, of centuries. That’s why you don’t see many Indians here.The Western mind immediately feels a deep affinity with me. It is because I am always in favor of the modern, of the new. The Western mind can understand me immediately, it feels a great alikeness – but the Eastern mind simply feels agitated. The moment the Eastern mind hears what I am saying, he becomes annoyed, antagonistic; he starts defending himself. He has become too attached to his mind, and his mind is the cause of all his problems. He wants to change those problems, but he clings to the mind. And that is not possible. First the mind has to be changed, only then will those problems disappear.For example, the whole East suffers from repressed sexuality, great repression, but again and again they go on insisting that they have great ideas of celibacy, great ideas of character, morality. And those are the ideas which are making them repressed. Those are the ideas that are keeping them unflowing because once your sexuality is repressed, your creativity is repressed because sex energy is your creative energy. It is God’s way of helping you becoming creative. Sex is creativity. The man who has repressed his sex will not be able to create anything, he will be stuck.Now what to do with the East? If you tell them to become a little more loving, a little more sensuous, a little more sensate, they are immediately against you. They say, “Then why has Buddha said this, and Mahavira has said that? You are teaching materialism!”I am simply teaching you totality. And let me say it to you: Buddha’s approach is not total, it is partial. But I can understand him because if you are against me, now, twenty-five centuries after Buddha, if Buddha had said the things that I am saying to you, how much would you have been against him? I can understand why he never told you about the total growth of human beings, why he had to remain partial. Even that was too much for the Indian people, and Buddhism was thrown out of the country. Even that was too much; if he had talked the way I am talking, you would have immediately killed him. It was not possible, the climate was not ready for him to talk to you in total terms.I am taking the risk of talking to you in total terms – and creating unnecessary troubles for myself! I can also go on teaching that old, stupid kind of spirituality, and the country will be very proud of me and they will worship me. But I am not interested in being worshipped and I am not interested in India being proud of me. My whole interest is how to change this country’s rotten mind, how to give it a new vision. But they will be against me, although what I am doing is their only hope.India needs to become modern, it needs to become more capitalistic, but the very word capitalism frightens people. They start thinking of me as if I am working for the CIA. Foolish people. The CIA may be working for me, but why should I work for the CIA? But their mind is settled. Whatever you do, go on talking about socialism and they feel good. So in India everybody talks about socialism. People who are not socialistic at all also talk about socialism because that’s what brings votes.I may be the only person in this whole country who has the guts to say that capitalism is the only right thing. I may be the only person in this country who has the guts to say that India should become more and more friendly with America and drop its policy of neutrality. That is all nonsense; it is not going to help India. It is only through American capital and American know-how and American technology that this country’s problems can be solved.Don’t be worried that if we make this country industrialized, more technologized, that if more technology and industry is brought to the country, the ecology will be destroyed. Don’t be worried. Technology itself can find ways to overcome all those things.Technology is the only potential means in the hands of man to transform the outer world. The outer world can be transformed totally. We can bring it to an even better ecological balance than nature itself because nature’s ways are very primitive and rudimentary. And what is man really? – nature’s highest growth. If man cannot bring a better balance, who is going to bring it? Man is nature’s highest peak, it is through man that nature can resettle its own problems.I don’t think that the future is bleak. The future is very hopeful, very bright. It has never been so before because for the first time man is coming closer and closer to a point where he can be freed from all work. For the first time man can live in luxury, and to live in luxury is to be ready to move inward because then there is no hindrance on the outside. Then one can simply move inward, one will have to move inward: the outer journey is finished. All that can be attained in the outside world has been attained. Now a new adventure…What happened to Buddha can happen to the whole of humanity in the future. He lived in luxury – he was the son of a king – and because of that luxurious living he became aware. Because there was no problem on the outside, he could relapse into himself, he could find ways and means to enter inward. He became interested in knowing “Who am I?” What happened to Buddha can happen to the whole of humanity if the whole of humanity becomes rich, outwardly rich. To be outwardly rich is the beginning of inward richness.I teach you a religion which implies science in it, and I teach you a religion which is sensate, sensuous. I teach you a religion which accepts the body, loves the body, respects the body. I teach you a religion which is earthly, earthy, which loves this beautiful earth, which is not against the earth. The earth has to be the base of your heavenly flight.The second question:Osho,Many times when I see our friends hugging, kissing passionately, and caressing each other's bodies, I feel that it is this sight which offends Indian society in general and creates great misunderstandings about you and your teachings. With this particular type of behavior, if the society is offended and great difficulties are created for the world of our master, why shouldn't we simply correct our behavior when we are in society, whether in India, America, or Germany?This is what I have been talking about: the rotten mind. What is wrong in hugging a person you love, in kissing a person you love? Don’t enforce your hug on anybody, that’s true; then it is ugly – and that’s what Indians go on doing. And my women sannyasins are aware of it.If you are in the marketplace, Indians behave in a really ugly way. They pinch your bottoms. Now, that is ugly. They rub their bodies against your body. That is ugly. They look at you as if they would like to eat you. That is ugly. They look at you as if they would like to see how you are behind your clothes. That is ugly – but that is accepted, that is perfectly good.If you love a person and you hold hands and you hug each other and you kiss each other, it should be nobody’s business. Why should others feel offended? If they feel offended, something is wrong with them. Maybe they are feeling jealous, but they cannot show their jealousy, so they become angry. Maybe they would also like to hug somebody, but they don’t have the courage; they are afraid of the society. Hence they feel very angry at you. What they cannot do, they would not like anybody else to do either.And because they are so sexually repressed, whenever they see somebody hugging, kissing, holding hands, showering so much love on each other, their repressed sexuality starts surfacing. They become afraid of themselves.They are not offended by your behavior, they are offended by their own unconscious tendencies because they suddenly start surfacing! All their repressed sexuality starts coming up and they become frightened that, if it is allowed, they may do something. They are somehow controlling themselves. Now, here is a person who provokes them. Here are two persons in such a deep hug – they start losing control.The Indian mind has lived in control, discipline, character. It is a hypocritical mind. On the surface is control, deep down there are all kinds of things boiling. And when you provoke them they are offended – not against you: they are offended by their own unconscious, but they are not aware of that at all. They throw the responsibility wholly on you, that you are doing something wrong.And, although you are my sannyasin, still the Indian mind continues in you. It is a very deep-rooted thing, centuries and centuries of conditioning.You say, “Many times when I see our friends hugging, kissing passionately, and caressing each other’s bodies, I feel that it is this sight which offends Indian society in general and creates great misunderstandings about you and your teachings.” No, it is not creating any misunderstanding. Exactly, precisely, this is my teaching! It is love that I teach. It is loving behavior that I teach. You are not going against me when you are doing it.I would like the whole country to be in a hugging, kissing atmosphere. That climate is needed. People have forgotten how it feels to hug others’ bodies. People have forgotten the warmth, the flow of energy that comes from the other’s body. Indians have completely lost roots in their own bodies.Even husbands and wives make love so quickly, so fast, that there is no hugging, caressing at all. It is done almost as if it is a sin, in secrecy; nobody should know about it. Indians live as if there is no sex in their life. This has become their patterned way of existence; now you are disrupting it. I would also like them to learn a few ways of how to be loving. Love is not obscene, but that’s how they think: they think love is obscene.If two persons are fighting on the road, no Indian thinks it is obscene. Even if they murder each other, nobody thinks it is obscene. In fact, the crowd will gather to watch what is happening and they will be very thrilled. And if nothing happens, they will go away very sad: “Nothing happened, and we waited so long.” It was a kind of free entertainment. They are not offended. Even if knives are drawn, they are not offended. If blood flows, they are not offended, it is not obscene.In Indian films, murder is allowed, suicide is allowed; kissing is not allowed. Just think, and see the whole absurdity of it. Murder is allowed. Is kissing far more dangerous, far more dangerous than murder? What kind of valuation is this? Suicide is allowed. All kinds of sadistic, masochistic tortures are allowed, but kissing is not allowed. A certain distance has to be maintained between the lips – six inches, I think. The lips should not come closer than six inches; otherwise there will be an atomic explosion! It is just a very repressive society.There is no misunderstanding about me. I am very simple and plain. Whatever I say, I say, and I say it the way it is. I call a spade a spade. Then whatever happens, it is good, but I have decided to be utterly honest and truthful whatever the cost. So don’t think that “great difficulties” are created for me. Nobody can create difficulties for me. But if I have to say the truth, difficulties are bound to be there.And do you think if you stop kissing and hugging on the roads, streets, people will not have anything against me? Then why were they against Jesus? His disciples were not kissing and hugging. Why did they crucify him? Why were they against Socrates? Why did they poison him? Why were they against al-Hillaj Mansoor? Why did they kill him? These are excuses. Don’t be deceived by the excuses that people find. If they cannot find this excuse, they will find another. And whatever I am saying is such: it is explosive, it is dynamite.In that way, you need not bother about what you do. Whatever you do is okay. Even if you become absolute saints according to Indians, then too they will be against me because what I am saying and what I am trying to do is utter rebellion. It has never been done that way, it has never been spoken that way. But people find excuses; if one excuse is dropped, they will find another.The Western disciples have come only recently. Seven years ago they were not here, and people were against me as they are against me today. I had only Indian disciples, but still they were against me. So it is not you, it is me who is creating trouble for myself. You are not responsible at all. You are just an excuse, and they go on finding excuses; my every statement can become an excuse.In fact, your hugging and kissing and your caressing each other, embracing each other, has been a great help to me. Because of that they have forgotten everything else that I say! It is a protection. Now I have even been seeing editorials written, in which it is said, “What Osho says is right, his disciples are wrong.” I am so grateful to you. If you were not here, I would be wrong! Now at least because of your behavior I am becoming prestigious, respectable. Go on doing it. Soon they will throw the whole responsibility on you and I will be completely free of blame!Even the Municipal Corporation of Pune has passed a resolution in which it is said that, “We are not against Osho’s teachings – his teachings are perfectly true and right – but we are against the behavior of his disciples.” So beautiful! I enjoy how stupid people can be. They cannot fight with me, they cannot argue with me, they feel impotent against me; now they are finding scapegoats, now they are finding other excuses.Continue doing whatever you are doing. This is going to help my work. I am not here to compromise. Whether the difficulties are there or not, I am not here to compromise – not an iota of compromise. Even if they make my life impossible here, that is perfectly okay, but no compromise.You say, “With this particular type of behavior, if the society is offended…” The society is going to be offended if we want to change the society, if we want to change the mind of the society. People don’t leave their old minds easily. They have invested so much in it, how can they leave it so easily? They will be offended. You ask me, “…why shouldn’t we simply correct our behavior…?” Your behavior is already correct. If they are suffering, they have to correct their minds. If they are suffering, that is their problem. They will have to reconsider.I would like many more and many more sannyasins roaming around the country, hugging, kissing, loving. Make it a problem everywhere, so they have to understand that something has to be done. In the beginning they are always offended. Nobody wants to change. Even if it is for their benefit, nobody wants to change.Love is a religious phenomenon, the greatest religious phenomenon there is. It is love that becomes prayer.Sufis say… A great master is reported to have said:I must empty myself to othersin tears and in kisses, in hugs and smiles.That is the way one becomes emptyand ready for God to enter in.In a moment when one is empty, suddenly all becomes full of God. When you kiss somebody with deep love, you are emptying yourself into the other. When you hug somebody ecstatically, you are pouring yourself into the other. This is a way of emptying yourself. And when you are utterly empty, God comes in. To be empty is to be in meditation.The third question:Osho,I am a married man with three children and with all the problems of a married man's life. My wife is constantly at my throat. We are together only for the sake of the children; otherwise, each moment is a nightmare. Is there any chance of my escaping hellfire? I have heard other gurus say that only celibates go to heaven. Is it so, Osho?I will tell you a story…A man was arraigned before an Arkansas justice on a charge of obtaining money under false pretenses. The judge looked at him thoughtfully. “Your name is Jim Moore?”“Yes, sir.”“You are charged with a crime that merits a long term in the penitentiary?”“Yes, sir.”“You are guilty of that crime?”The man squared his shoulders doggedly. “I am.”“You ask me for mercy?”“No, sir.”The judge smiled grimly. “You have had a great deal of trouble within the last two years?”“I have.”“You have often wished you were dead?”“I have, please Your Honor.”“You wanted to steal enough money to take you far away from Arkansas?”“You are right, Judge.”“If a man had stepped up and shot you as you entered the store, you would have said, ‘Thank you, sir’?”“Why, yes, I would. But, Judge, how in the world did you find out so much about me?”“Some time ago,” said the Judge, with a solemn air, “I divorced my wife. Shortly afterward you married her. The result is conclusive. I discharge you. Here, take this fifty dollar bill. You have suffered enough.”You need not be worried about hell. You have suffered enough. You are already in it. You can only go to heaven because nothing else is left. Celibates may go to hell, but you cannot. You have suffered enough. Celibates may need a little taste of suffering, but not you.In fact, there is no hell somewhere else and no heaven either. Hell is here, heaven is here. Hell and heaven are your ways of being. They are your ways of living. You can live in such a way that your whole life is a benediction.But don’t go on throwing the responsibility only on your wife. In the first place it is you who have chosen her. Why have you chosen such a wife, who is constantly at your neck? And do you think, if you are divorced, you will not again choose another woman of the same type? If you ask psychologists they will say you will again choose the same type of woman. You needed it, it is your own choice. You cannot live without misery. You think your wife is creating misery? It is because you wanted to live in misery – that’s why you have chosen this woman. You will again choose the same type of woman. You will only become attracted to the same type of woman, unless you drop your old mind completely.Except our own minds, there is no other way to change or transform. You must be thinking that if you divorce this woman things will be good. You are wrong, you are utterly wrong. You don’t know a thing about human psychology. You will get trapped again. You will search for a woman again, you will miss this woman very much. She will miss you, you will miss her. You will again find the same type of person, you will be attracted only to that kind of person. Watch your mind.And then, she cannot only be at fault. You must be doing something to her too. It is your statement, I don’t know her statement. It will be unfair to the poor woman if I accept your statement about her totally. You may be fifty percent right, but what about the other fifty percent? You must be supplying fuel to the fire.And if life was so ugly, why have you given birth to three children? Who is responsible for that? Why have you brought three souls into the ugly world of your family, into the nightmare that you are living? Why? Can’t you have any love for your children?People go on reproducing without thinking at all of what they are doing. If your life is such a hell, at least you could have prevented your children from falling into the trap of your misery. You would have saved them! Now, those three children are being brought up by two persons like you and your wife. They will learn ways and means from you, and they will perpetuate you in the world. When you are gone, you will still be here creating hell in the world. Those children will perpetuate, they will keep the continuity of your stupid ways of living, miserable ways of living.Now, your boy will find a woman just like your wife – who else? – because he will know only this woman. He will love his mother, and whenever he falls in love with a woman, it simply means that woman reminds him of his mother. Now again the same game will be played. Maybe you have chosen your wife according to your mother; your father and your mother were playing the same game that you are playing, and your children will perpetuate the same structure and the same gestalt. That’s how miseries persist.At least you could have saved these three children’s lives, and you could have saved the future of humanity – because the ripple that you have created will go on and on. Even when you are gone it will be there. Whatever you do abides. Whatever ripples you create in the ocean of life remain, you disappear. It is like throwing a stone in a silent lake: the stone falls deep into the lake, disappears, goes to the bottom and rests there, but the ripples that have been created go on spreading toward the shores. And the ocean of life knows no shores, so those waves go on and on, forever and forever.At least you could have been a little more alert not to produce children. And it is never late. Still life can be changed – but don’t hope that your wife will change. That is the wrong approach. Change yourself. Change radically. Stop doing things you have always been doing. Start doing things you have never done. Change radically, become a new person, and you will be surprised. When you become a new person, your wife will become a new person. She will have to, to respond to you. In the beginning she will find it hard because it will be almost like living with another husband, but slowly, slowly she will see that if you can change, why can’t she? Never hope that the other will change. In every relationship start the change from your side.Life can still become a paradise, it is never too late. But great courage is needed to change. All that is really needed is a little more awareness. De-automatize your behavior; just watch what you have been doing up to now. You do the same thing, and the wife reacts in the same way. It has become a settled pattern.Watch any husband and wife – they are almost predictable. In the morning the husband will spread his newspaper and start reading, and the wife will say the same thing that she has been saying for years, and the husband will react in the same way. It has become almost structured, programmed.Just small changes, and you will be surprised. Tomorrow morning, don’t sit in your chair early in the morning and start reading your paper. Just start cleaning the house, and see what happens. Your wife will be wide-eyed, and she will not be able to believe what has happened to you. Smile when you see your wife, hug, and see how she is taken aback. You have never hugged her. Years have passed, and you have never looked into the poor woman’s eyes.Tonight, just sit in front of her, look into her eyes. She will think in the beginning that you have gone crazy, you have become an Osho freak or something, but don’t be worried. Just hold her hand and be ecstatic. If you cannot be, at least pretend. Be ecstatic. Sometimes it happens that if you start pretending, it starts happening! Just start smiling, for no reason at all, and watch. Your poor woman may have a heart attack!You have not been holding her hand – do you remember since how long? Have you ever taken her for a morning walk? Or when the moon is full, have you taken her for a walk in the night under the stars? She is also human, she also needs love.But people in India particularly go on using women as if they are just servants. Their whole work consists of taking care of the children and the kitchen and the house, as if that’s their whole life.Have you respected your wife as a human being? Then, if anger arises, it is natural. If she feels frustrated because her life is running out and she has not known any joy, she has not known any bliss, she has not known anything that can give meaning and significance to her life…Have you just sat by her side sometimes, silently, just holding her hand, not saying a word, just feeling her, and letting her feel you? No, that is not done in India at all.Wives and husbands have only one kind of communication: quarreling. I have been acquainted with thousands of Indian families, I have stayed with thousands of Indian families. While I was traveling all over the country, I was staying with so many families that I have come to know almost all kinds of families. But very rarely have I seen husbands and wives respectful to each other. Using each other, exploiting each other, reducing each other to things, but never respecting each other’s divinity. Then this hell is created.Don’t think that only your wife is responsible. She may be, but that is not the point – because she has not asked the question. You have asked the question. Start changing your life. Give the poor woman a little feeling of significance. Give the little woman a little feeling that she is needed. Do you know the greatest need in life is to be needed? And unless a person feels that he or she is needed, his or her life remains meaningless, desertlike.Laugh with her, listen to music together, go for a holiday in the Himalayas. Caress her body – because bodies start shrinking when nobody caresses them. Bodies start becoming ugly when nobody looks with appreciation. And then you think, “Why is my wife not beautiful?” You are not creating the climate in which beauty flowers, blooms.If you love a person, the person immediately becomes beautiful. Love is such an alchemical process. Look at a person with loving eyes, and suddenly you will see his, her aura changing, the face becoming radiant, more blood coming to the face, the eyes becoming shinier… Radiance, intelligence – and like a miracle. Love is a miracle, love is magical. It is not yet too late.But our ways of thinking are utterly wrong. We have forgotten how to live a really human life – warm, welcoming, sensate, sensuous. The words sensuous and sensate have become dirty words; particularly in India they are dirty words. I am using them knowing that people will be offended.Become sensuous. The senses are as divine as anything else. The whole existence is divine.And the last question:Osho,The other day in lecture for the first time I heard your song! It was so beautiful. Your words had no meaning, your voice was soft music that surrounded and filled me with such joy and delight. What a wonderful surprise!Dhanya, that is the way to hear me. It is for the first time that you have heard me. It is for the first time that communion has happened and not only communication. Communication is through words, communion is through music. Communication is an intellectual process; communion is that of the heart, when two hearts meet and mingle and melt.Dhanya, your name means “the blessed one.” You are. You are blessed. This is the way to be with me. This is adab, the way to be with a master – heart to heart, silence to silence, spirit to spirit.When my words start disappearing and you start hearing the gaps between the words, when you start hearing the gaps between the lines, you will be full of great music. That is my real message.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There were two men of great renown as teachers of the right path. Ibn Halim relates that when he went first to see one of them, whose name was Pir Ardeshir of Gazwin, he said to Pir Ardeshir, “Will you advise me as to what to do and what not to do?”The Pir said, “Yes, but I will give you such instructions as you will find very hard to carry out, since they will go against your preferences, even if these preferences are sometimes for hardship.”Ibn Halim spent some months with Pir Ardeshir, and found that the teaching was indeed hard for him. Although Pir Ardeshir’s former disciples were now famed throughout the world as enlightened teachers, he could not stand the changes, the uncertainties and the disciplines placed upon him.At length he applied to the Pir for permission to leave, and traveled to the tekkia of the second teacher, Murshid Amali.He asked the Murshid, “Would you place upon me burdens which I might find next to intolerable?”Amali replied, “I would not place upon you such burdens.”Ibn Halim asked, “Will you then accept me as a disciple?”The Murshid answered, “Not until you have asked me why my training would not be so onerous as that of Pir Ardeshir.”Ibn Halim asked, “Why would it not be so onerous?”The Murshid told him, “Because I would not care for you and your real well-being like Ardeshir cared for you. Therefore you must not now ask me to accept you as a disciple.”Religion is as simple as the fish swimming in the ocean, but man has become very complicated. It is because of man’s complexity that religion looks arduous. Religion cannot be arduous because it is our very nature. It is in our breathing, it is in our heartbeats, it circulates in our blood, it is our very marrow, our very soul. How can it be difficult? The very idea of difficulty arises because of a wrong notion.We have been taught down the ages that religion is a faraway goal and the journey is uphill. In fact, religion is not a goal at all, and there is no journey uphill or downhill. There is no journey possible. Religion is where you are, religion is what you are, religion is your being – there is nowhere to go. And those who go in search are moving farther and farther away from religion. To seek is to lose, to search is not to find.Seeking becomes more and more difficult; the farther away you reach, the more difficult it becomes, the more frustrating – because the more efforts you make to attain God, the less is the possibility of attaining him.God is already the case. God is the ocean, we are the fish. And there is no need for a fish to learn swimming.I have heard…Mulla Nasruddin was fishing on a lake. It was a private lake and fishing was absolutely prohibited. And just behind him there was a big board declaring in capital letters: “No fishing allowed. Trespassers will be prosecuted.” But he was sitting on the bank, fishing.The landlord came, caught him red-handed. He asked, “What are you doing?”Mulla laughed. He said, “I was teaching this fish to swim.”No fish needs any teaching to swim. No man needs any religion whatever. All that is needed is to become simple. Drop your complexities, drop your unnecessary mind games. Be silent and still and you will find it at the very core of your being; it is waiting there, but it is a very still small voice. Your mind is creating so much noise, that’s why you cannot hear it.I have heard…An Englishman and an Irishman were riding on top of a London bus, and the Englishman especially had been annoyed by the confusion, the bustle, the raucous din from all sides. They came in sight of Westminster Abbey, and at this moment the chimes burst forth in a joyous melody.The Englishman turned to his friend and said, “Isn’t that sublime? It is glorious to hear those chimes pealing to heaven, and doesn’t it lift one’s thoughts higher and higher to the Creator of all things?”Casey leaned over, hand to his ear. “Ye will have to speak a little louder, George.”“Those magnificent chimes, old top – don’t they imbue you with a feeling of reverence, of awe? Doesn’t that golden tintinnabulation reawaken golden memories of a happy past?”Casey leaned still closer, face still puzzled. “George, you have gotter speak louder, I can’t hear one word ye are saying.”The Englishman almost shouted in the other’s ears. “The chimes, old thing, the marvelous chimes! Right-o! Isn’t that pealing melodious? Doesn’t it take you back into the dim vistas of the past when the world was young, and man’s springtime heart faced with a sweet young reverence the awful miracles of godhead?”Casey stuck his mouth against the other man’s ear and screamed, “I can’t hear a damned word. Those damned bells are makin’ such a hell of a racket! I can’t hear me own self, drat’em!”The bell is ringing in you. You are the temple and the bell is continuously ringing in you – it is your life – but there is so much noise. The mind has become a marketplace. You have lost all contact with yourself, that’s why you have lost contact with God. It is not that you have to search for God. Where are you going to search for him? In what direction? You don’t have any address. You don’t know his form, his name. Even if you come across him you will not be able to recognize him, so please don’t start any journey toward God. That is utterly doomed from the very beginning.On the contrary, move inward, become more silent, become more relaxed, and suddenly one day you will start hearing those beautiful chimes ringing in you. You will start hearing that still, small voice. It is there, you have never lost it for a single moment. It cannot be lost.That’s why all the great seers of the world have insisted that God is your nature. God is within you, his kingdom is within you. There is no need to seek and search. Then what is needed? – to fall into silence, to fall into a harmonious, melodious state of being, to be a no-mind.That’s what Sufis go on doing: dancing, singing, hugging each other, kissing each other. They are pouring themselves into each other, creating an energy field in which silence easily surfaces. And in silence, God is found. Silence is his face. In the inner music God is found, music is his name. In an utterly lost state, when you are drunk, when you are not left at all, he is found. When you are not, he is. The seeker is too much, that’s why he goes on missing.It is said about the great Sufi mystic, Bayazid, that when Bayazid reached the station of nearness he heard a voice which ordered him, “Ask for something!”The state of nearness is the state when you are falling silent, when the voices in your head are disappearing, evaporating; when thoughts are leaving you, deserting you; when you are feeling utterly alone, not even shadows of others are present; when you are just on the verge of disappearing. That is called the “station of nearness.”When Bayazid reached the station of nearness he heard a voice which ordered him, “Ask for something!”“I have no desire,” he replied.But the voice insisted. It said, “Ask for something!”Again he said, “But there is nothing to ask because I have no desire.”But again the voice repeated, “Ask for something!”Bayazid answered, “Then I want only Thee!”The voice then said, “So long as even an atom of the existence of Bayazid remains, this is impossible.”Bayazid missed. He was just on the verge. He started asking. He came back – because with desire you are back, with desire the mind is back. Even if the desire is for God, that doesn’t matter. You would have thought it was beautiful that Bayazid desired God. But desire is desire, what you desire is irrelevant. Desire brings the desiring mind back. Bayazid had again entered the marketplace, that station of nearness was lost. The moment he said, “I want only Thee,” he was there. Again the “I” had gathered, and when there is an I, it creates a thou. When there is an I it creates duality, and all is lost in duality. When there is no I, then there is nonduality.Then you are one with existence, utterly one. Then you are nothing but a pulsation of existence itself, just a ripple in the lake of this infinite consciousness.The moment he said, “I want only Thee,” the voice then said, “So long as even an atom of the existence of Bayazid remains, this is impossible.”Man has to disappear for God to be. All that is needed is the simple phenomenon of disappearance. But because we don’t want to disappear, the whole approach becomes very arduous. Then we start playing games: on the one hand we want God, and on the other hand we want to protect ourselves.Again it is said of Bayazid that once he was walking along a road with his disciples when they came upon a severed head lying on the way. Upon its forehead was written this tremendously important sutra from the Koran: “He loseth both the world and the hereafter.”Bayazid picked up the head and kissed it. When his disciples asked who it was, who the man was, he answered, “This is the head of a Sufi dervish who gave up both worlds for God. I have not yet been able to do it. I reached to the point where it could have happened, but I missed.”On the severed head these words from the Koran were written: “He loseth both the world and the hereafter.” One has to lose all, only then is God gained.The people who are searching for God, the people who are searching for enlightenment, nirvana, moksha, or any other name, will go on missing, and their lives will become more and more complicated, and the journey will become harder and harder.But Bayazid had taken a lesson from his first experience. Soon he was again at the station of nearness. Again it was asked, “Bayazid, ask something!” This time he did not even bother to say, “I have nothing to ask.” Because even if you say, “I have nothing to ask,” you are. He simply sat there in utter silence. Again and again the voice provoked him, tempted him, “Ask something, Bayazid!” but there was no answer from Bayazid. Thrice it was repeated, “Bayazid, ask something!” And this voice was God’s voice, this was disrespectful! When God himself is telling you to ask, ask! But Bayazid was not there, there was nobody; so how to be respectful or disrespectful?This is what Sufis call adab: the way of being in the presence of a master, and ultimately, the way of being in the presence of God.There was no Bayazid, so even this provocation, “Ask, Bayazid! This is disrespectful toward God. I am God myself, asking you to ask something. I am happy with you. I am here to give you all that you want, all that you ask. Even if you ask me, I am ready to give myself to you.”But this time there was nobody, the silence remained undisturbed. There was no response from Bayazid. And he took the ultimate jump, it happened: he became God. This is the way one becomes God, this is the way one attains.It is said…“Who are you?” somebody asked Bayazid.He said, “I lost him years ago. The more I seek him, the less I find.”“Who are you?” the person asked again.Bayazid said, “There is nothing under my cloak but Allah. Except God, there is nobody within me, so the question ‘who are you?’ is meaningless. I am not, God is. And God is always blissful. God is blissfulness, so the question is irrelevant. There is nobody, nothing under my cloak, except Allah.”God is not there to be found somewhere else – in Kaaba, in Kailash, in Girnar, in Jerusalem. God has to be found under your cloak. And the reality is this: that there is nobody except God within you. But you have not turned upon yourself, your eyes are fixed at distant goals. Your eyes are roaming there somewhere in the future. God is here, and you are not here. Hence the meeting is difficult. Otherwise there is no difficulty at all.Sufism is the path of intense love, passionate love. As Bayazid has said, “The duration of Bayazid’s life of asceticism was only three days. On the first day he renounced the world, on the second day he renounced the other world, and on the last day he renounced himself.”Only three steps. The first step: becoming aware that this world is nothing but games, becoming aware that this world is nothing but our projections. And the second step, becoming aware that the other world, heaven, paradise, is also nothing but our unfulfilled dreams, our unfulfilled desires projected in time, in the future. And the third step, when this world is dropped and that world is dropped; all that is left is you. Then all that is left is the faculty of projection, the mind, the ego. The third step consists of dropping the ego.And suddenly you are back home. Suddenly nothing is needed any more, all is available. Then one starts laughing because this has always been so, all was always available. Just because we were searching and searching – and we were in such a frantic search that we never looked within; we never looked at the treasure that we were already carrying; we became too much obsessed with the outside world – we forgot the language of the inner, we forgot that there is an interior in us, and that interiority is God.Meditate over these beautiful lines of D. H. Lawrence:Are you willing to be sponged out,Erased, canceled, made nothing?Are you willing to be made nothing,Dipped into oblivion?If not, you will never really change.The phoenix renews her youthOnly when she is burned, burned alive,Burned down to hot and flocculent ash.The myth, the beautiful myth of the phoenix, the bird who becomes alive only through death, who renews itself by burning itself, utterly burning itself, whose death becomes resurrection… The myth of the phoenix bird is the myth of all the awakened people. Jesus is another representation of the same myth: crucifixion and resurrection.Bayazid says, “I am gone, I am no longer.” This is death. But out of this death something deathless arrives, is found.But people are cunning, they would like to have God also. Just as they have a good bank balance, they would like God also to be in their fist. They would like God to be their possession so that they can brag about and claim, “I know God.” But that ego will not allow them.God cannot be possessed. God is not property. You cannot own God. God is a love affair; you can only dissolve into him. And remember again: the dissolution is not into some thou, the dissolution is simply a let-go into your own being. When you disappear into your own being and there is no center left which can say “I,” you have known what God is.Man is like an ice cube, frozen. God is nothing but the melting of the ice cube. Then you lose your solidity, you become fluid. Then you lose your stagnancy and you become flowing. That flow, yes, that flow is another name for God. Life is another name for God.By creating the temples and the mosques and the churches we have deceived people. We have given them a wrong notion of God, as if God is something separate from life. It is not so. And it is because of this miseducation that has been perpetuated for centuries, because of this wrong conditioning, that whenever people think of God they think of a statue, a temple, a holy place; they never think of themselves.Standing before a mirror, looking into your own eyes reflected in the mirror, has the idea ever arisen in you that this is God? No, your priests have destroyed that possibility. And this is the real phenomenon: to recognize God as your own being, pulsating in you, in the very beat of your heart.So the first thing I would like to say to you: God is not difficult to find. The difficulty consists in losing yourself. And this is the statement not of one enlightened person, this is the statement of all the enlightened people of the world. They may have been born in India, in China, in Japan, in Israel, or anywhere else; about this they all agree.Rumi says, “In a court of justice requiring several witnesses to prove guilt, a prosecutor brought a few Sufis to bear witness with regard to a certain crime. The judge, however, refused to accept the testimony on the grounds that the prosecutor had only one witness, a thousand Sufis being the same as one.”It is a beautiful story that Rumi relates: the judge refusing to accept because many witnesses were needed. Many witnesses were produced but they were all Sufis, so the judge said, “One Sufi or many Sufis does not make much difference because whatever one Sufi says will be said by all the Sufis. So you can bring ten thousand Sufis; it counts only as one.”That’s a beautiful story. Buddha, Christ, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Mohammed, Bahauddin, Bayazid are not saying different things – maybe in different ways, but not different things. They are witnessing a single truth, and the truth is that the kingdom of God is within you.This story…There were two men of great renown as teachers of the right path. Ibn Halim relates that he went first to see one of them, whose name was Pir Ardeshir of Gazwin.Each word has to be tasted slowly so it melts on your tongue, so you can digest it and its beauty.There were two men of great renown as teachers of the right path. What is the right path? You will be surprised to know: the right path means no path. All paths are wrong because a path is needed if there is a distance between you and your goal. The path is relevant only when there is a distance. But there is no distance between you and God, so there is no need of any path. No path is the right path.It will look paradoxical, but nothing can be done about it, existence is paradoxical. All paths are wrong paths because a path will take you farther away. You are not to go anywhere, hence no path is required.You are being taught so many paths, and the people who teach you the paths look very logical. It appeals to your mind. Naturally you think, “We don’t know God, we don’t know where he is, so a path is needed. We don’t know where God is, so unless a path is given to us how are we ever going to reach?” But you are completely oblivious to the fact that God is not there but here, not then but now, that God is not the sought but the seeker. So any path is going to take you astray, any path will misguide you.The teachers who give you paths are pseudo teachers, they are dangerous people. They have created much chaos in the world, but they are very logical and they appeal to your ordinary mind.The real teacher is one who takes all paths away. The real teacher is one who takes all teachings away. The real teacher is one who unburdens you, who destroys all your knowledge and makes you again ignorant, innocent, like a child. The real teacher is very destructive. When all knowledge is taken away – all paths withdrawn, you don’t know a thing, you are left in your ignorance, naked, nowhere to hide – suddenly the great explosion happens. It always happens in innocence. That’s why Jesus goes on saying, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter my Kingdom of God.”The real teacher makes you like small babes. The real teacher does not teach you information. The real teacher does not inform, he transforms. He does not convey doctrines and dogmas; on the contrary, he takes a sword and cuts off your very head. He makes you headless.What is the right path? The right path means no path. But if somebody teaches no path, teaches no teaching, very few people are going to go to him because it will look so illogical. Only people of great understanding and intelligence will be attracted. That’s why false teachers attract great masses; real teachers attract only the chosen few.There were two men of great renown as teachers of the right path. Ibn Halim relates that he went first to see one of them, whose name was Pir Ardeshir of Gazwin. Pir is a Sufi word for siddha. Pir means one who has arrived, arrived to the place from where he has never gone in the first place, arrived home, arrived to that home which he has never left, which even if he had wanted to leave, he could not.To leave your nature is impossible. What happens then? People only dream that they have left their home. It is like in the night you sleep and you dream; you dream a thousand and one things, but in the morning you find yourself lying in your bedroom. All those dreams, that you have been to Beijing and to Philadelphia and to Timbuktu and to Instanbul… And you have been in Pune all the time and nowhere else, but only in the morning when you are awake, will you recognize the fact that all that was just dreaming. You had never left your bed, you were always here.That is the situation: nobody has lost God, nobody can. It is impossible. God is our very being, how can we lose him? And if we can lose him we will immediately die because he is our life. If we lose him there is no possibility of finding him; so the question is not of finding God, the question is only of remembering. We have only forgotten.That’s why Sufis say zikr, remembrance, is all. That is their very fundamental: just remember, just make yourself alert and remember. Just become more aware and you will start laughing – you had never left the place and you were thinking how to get back, what methods to use, what paths to follow, what maps were needed. And you were consulting maps and books and teachers and this and that, and all the time you were simply fast asleep in your own home.Pir means one who has arrived, one who has come to know that he has never gone anywhere else, that he has always been here – but now he recognizes the fact, that’s all.The moment I say I am God, I am not saying that I have become God; I have been God all along, just now the recognition has come. When I say you are God, I am not saying that you have to become God. If you are not you cannot become. You can become only that which you are, already are. You become only that which you are, never anything else. So it is not a question of becoming, it is only a question of awakening to your being, to your facticity, to your truth.Ibn Halim went to Pir Ardeshir of Qazwin.He said to Pir Ardeshir, “Will you advise me as to what to do and what not to do?”Now this is the beginning of a wrong inquiry. It looks so relevant, it looks so logical. Reading the story you will not see the point immediately, that it is irrelevant: you don’t ask a master what to do and what not to do.When you go to a master you simply surrender to him. Then it is up to him to tell you what to do and what not to do. When you go to a master, a siddha, a pir, all that is needed is trust. You simply sit silently by his side waiting for the right moment. He knows, he will tell you.When Bayazid lived with his own master, he lived for twelve years just sitting silently. The only thing he did was: the first day he came, he touched the feet of the master and sat silently for twelve years, never asking a question, never asking what to do, just waiting in tremendous trust: “If something is needed to be done, the master is there and he will tell me. If nothing is needed to be done, he will not tell me. If silence is needed from his side, I will go on drinking his silence. If a few words are needed he will utter the words, and he knows, so everything will be done in the right moment.”And it happened in twelve years. Slowly, slowly he became more and more silent. When you don’t ask anything, your mind is not fed by information. He just sat there. Thousands of people came and went, and they were asking this question and that, what to do and what not to do, and, “What is the meaning of the scripture, this passage particularly, what is to be understood by it? A few people say this and a few people say that.” Many came and many went, and Bayazid was just sitting there silently. Slowly, slowly he disappeared.What else can you do, just sitting silently by the side of the master? How long can your mind go on creating turmoil? When you don’t feed the mind every day, it starts dying out of starvation.This is a real fast that Bayazid did, this is fasting. Not eating food is not going to help; not eating information is going to help.After twelve years the master turned toward him, hugged him, and said, “Bayazid, now you can go. You have arrived.” Not a single word was uttered, no message ever given, no instructions, no guidance.This man, Ibn Halim, asked a wrong question: …he said to Pir Ardeshir, “Will you advise me as to what to do and what not to do?” First, to ask such a question is wrong. The disciple has to be there. His very being has to be available to the master. His very being will tell the master what is needed, what is not needed – and he will do it, or he will say it, or he will order you. But Ibn Halim must have been a very wise man; he was asking a wise question.Secondly, it is wrong because even if you want to ask, ask, “What should I be and what should I not be?” First, not asking anything is the best; the second best is asking, “What should I be, what should I not be?” The question should be about being, but he is asking about doing: “What should I do and what should I not do?”Remember: doing is the concern of morality, being is the concern of religion. Trust, silence, is the concern of spirituality. The best is to trust, to be silent, to wait in love, in hope, in patience. That is the spiritual relationship. If it is not possible then ask, “What should I be?” That is a religious relationship. The lowest, the third-rate, is to ask what to do, what not to do. That is a moral question. What is right and what is wrong, and what is virtue and what is sin – those are the most ordinary questions.Remember: morality is not religion. Religion is not spirituality, although spirituality contains religion and contains morality. Morality cannot contain religion and cannot contain spirituality. That’s why an irreligious person can be moral; there is no problem in it. In fact the irreligious person is found to be more moral than the so-called religious. The irreligious person can be moral, the atheist can be moral – one who does not believe in God, one who does not believe in any hereafter. He can be moral because morality is only a way of living in convenience with people. It is a calculated step, it is simply functional. It has no other truth.That’s why there are as many moralities as there are societies. One thing may be moral in India, may not be moral in Iran. Or sometimes one thing may be moral to the Hindu and may not be moral to the Christian, and the Christian may be living in the same neighborhood.Morality is decided by the society. It has no ultimate truth in it. It is all arbitrary. It is needed because man is not alone, man lives with so many people. When you live with so many people a few rules and regulations are needed, but those rules and regulations are just like the rules of traffic: “Don’t walk in the middle of the road.” They have no ultimate truth about them. Not that if you walk in the middle of the road you have committed a sin and you will be thrown into hell, but walking in the middle of the road, you create an unnecessary nuisance in the traffic. You may be hit. Keep to the left: but that too is not in any way moral, there are countries where you have to keep to the right. Both are good. Either keep to the right or keep to the left so that the traffic moves smoothly. The whole thing is arbitrary. It has a utility in it, but no ultimacy about it.When you ask what to do and what not to do, you are asking a very ordinary moral question. You are not yet religious. The religious person will ask what to be, what not to be. His concern will be with being, not with doing. Doing is an outer thing, being is inner.But the best is not even to ask that. If you trust, then it is the concern of the master. You have surrendered, you have opened all your cards before him. You are not even keeping a trump card, you have opened all your cards. That’s what surrender is. Now he knows everything about you; he will do whatever is necessary, or if nothing is necessary he will not do anything.Ibn Halim’s question is third-rate. It is because of the third-rate question that the Pir had to say:“Yes, but I will give you such instructions as you will find very hard to carry out, since they will go against your preferences, even if these preferences are sometimes for hardship.”If you simply surrender to the master, then life grows spontaneously. In his very presence life grows spontaneously, just as in the presence of the sun trees grow, they don’t ask how to grow; and the buds open and bloom, and they don’t ask how to open their petals and how not to open them, and what is the right way and what is the wrong way; and the birds start singing. As the sun rises on the horizon something starts happening all over the earth. Life is back, sleep disappears, a great awakening…Exactly the same is the case when a disciple surrenders to the master. He simply remains available to his presence and things start happening. The master functions as a catalytic agent. But that is the highest. It is very rare to have that much trust. It needs guts.Why can’t you have trust? Do you think you are very intelligent; that’s why you can’t have trust? No, you are a coward, full of fear; that’s why you can’t trust. It is fear that prevents trust. Only a fearless person can trust. You are afraid you may be exploited. You are afraid, “Who knows? This man may be a cheat, a fraud. Who knows where he is trying to lead me? Who knows? I should keep alert and hold myself back. I should always remain sitting on the fence so if something goes wrong I can jump out. I should always keep one foot out, so if there is any danger signal I can run away, I can escape.” This is out of fear.Remember, trust is possible only when you are fearless. Only a very brave and courageous person can trust. The world has become very cowardly, that’s why trust has disappeared, faith has disappeared.If it is not possible, then the second question has to be asked: “What should I be?” Then you are not asking about your character, you are asking about meditation. You are not asking what to eat and what not to eat; you are not asking when to get up in the morning and when to go to bed; whether tea is right to take or not: “Is coffee going to disturb my spiritual growth or not?” You are not asking those kinds of nonsense questions. You are simply asking how to be – how to be silent, how to be authentic, how to be still, rooted, centered. This is the second-best.Then the master will tell you: meditation, prayer. Then by his presence, the master will teach you meditation, prayerfulness, gratitude, thankfulness. He will give you a taste of the benediction that he has.To the first, all will be given. The master will pour his whole being. To the second, a few glimpses will be given, and those glimpses will prepare him to become the first. Then the master can pour his whole being into him. For the first, things will be absolutely easy, utterly easy. Just like the fish swimming in the ocean, the disciple starts swimming in the presence of the master’s being. It is so easy – as a dewdrop slipping on the grass-leaf, or the bird on the wing. For the first, it is so easy, it is so spontaneous.For the second it is a little bit difficult but not too difficult, just a little bit difficult – because he will have to struggle with the mind to drop the thoughts, to become a witness. To the first it is going to happen in effortlessness; to the second it will happen through effort, but it will happen. For the second the journey will not be uphill but will be downhill. For the first there is no journey, he has arrived. For the second the journey is downhill, it will not be arduous.For the third, the journey is going to be uphill. That’s why the master says, “Yes, but I will give you such instructions as you will find very hard to carry out…” To change your actions without changing your being is very hard because actions arise out of your being. That is the problem. It is not your actions that are really the problem, the problem is somewhere in your being.For example, a person goes on lying, and the master says, “Don’t lie.” Now it is going to be difficult. It is more possible that the person will start lying to the master too. Now he will say, “I don’t lie; since you have told me, I have stopped lying.” But it is more possible that he is lying again! Now he is lying to the master himself.When a person lies he is simply saying one thing, that deep in his being he has something wrong. He is a liar there, in his being. He is living a lie deep in his being and that lie goes on coming to the surface.Whatever comes to the surface comes from the roots. If you want to destroy a tree, don’t go on pruning the leaves; that is not going to help. Actions are leaves. That’s what people go on doing: their being is violent and they try to become nonviolent. Then on the surface, just on the surface, they manage a veneer, a facade of nonviolence. Deep down they remain the same violent people because no action can change the being.It is just like you can paint your face, but by painting your face your real face is not changed. But if your real face changes, beauty will certainly arise on its own accord.Remember, there is no way to change the within by changing the without because the circumference cannot change the center. The circumference is impotent against the center, but the center can change the circumference. The circumference is nothing but the reflection of the center, so change the center.The second kind of inquirer changes the center. Then the circumference changes automatically. The first kind of disciple drops the circumference, the center, everything in toto, to the master. He remains unconcerned. He puts everything that he has, good and bad, at the feet of the master, and is free from that very moment. His trust makes him free, his trust becomes his enlightenment. The second tries to change the center, and through the change of the center the first changes.If you become more meditative many changes will happen. For example, a more meditative person will stop smoking. It will not be possible because smoking is nothing but a kind of nervousness – whenever you are nervous you smoke. It keeps you together. But why, what relevance is there? Why does it keep you together when you start smoking? It is a regression. Smoking represents nothing but that you are back at your mother’s breast. Your smoke functions as if you are drinking milk from your mother’s breast. The warmth comes from the hot smoke going in, and the smoke almost gives you the illusion of the milk going in, and the cigarette in your mouth becomes the nipple. Whenever the child was afraid in his childhood he was soothed, calmed. Whenever he was afraid, miserable, angry, sad, the mother would immediately give him her breast. And then he fell asleep; it was very tranquilizing. You are simply repeating that process and nothing else.When the child cannot find the mother he starts sucking his own thumb as a substitute. And that too helps; if the child sucks his own thumb he falls asleep, he feels good, he believes that it is the mother’s breast. “Mother is close by; I need not be afraid, I need not be nervous. There is no fear, nobody can do me any harm.”That’s what smoking is: a psychological regression. Whenever you are nervous – you are facing a crisis, a challenge, you are going for an interview, sitting outside the office waiting for your name to be called, you are trembling within – you immediately take your cigarette out of your pocket and you start smoking. It soothes you.The man who meditates need not stop smoking, it stops on its own accord. It has to stop because now he no longer feels nervous, he is at home. Being meditative, he starts gaining roots into his being, he is no longer trembling, he is not afraid of the world. There is nothing to fear. Even death will not make him afraid because now he has seen something deathless in himself, he has tasted something of the nectar. Smoking will disappear.That’s why I don’t tell you to do this and to do that. My whole approach is: meditate, and things will change on their own accord.The meditator, if he really goes in deep meditation, cannot be violent. Violence erupts from you because you go on repressing so much anger that by and by it becomes very sour, bitter, poisonous. One day it is too much and the steam has to be let out. But the meditator does not repress. He tries to understand rather than repress. His whole approach changes. Because he does not repress, he never carries any wounds in him. He does not carry any steam which can explode at any excuse – and sometimes very irrationally also, with no excuse.So these are the three kinds of seekers. The first, the best, is a devotee. He simply surrenders and things start happening, there is no journey. Instantly he has arrived home. Looking into the eyes of the master, touching his feet, he has arrived. Now he has nowhere to go. But that is a rare phenomenon; very few will be of that intelligence and that fearlessness.The second kind is one who asks about meditation – better than the third because he is asking a more fundamental question.The third asks a very low kind of question, the lowest. His question is more concerned with morality, character building, making a beautiful facade. He is not really interested in transformation. Then the journey is difficult, very difficult. For the first there is no journey, for the second an easy journey, for the third a very arduous journey.“Yes,” said the Pir, “but I will give you such instructions as you will find very hard to carry out, since they will go against your preferences…”And the greatest problem arises when you want to change your actions. The greatest problem is that you have preferred those actions your whole life; you have cultivated them, they have become your second nature. It is not just a question of your mind now thinking and deciding, “I will not smoke anymore.” It is not going to help. Maybe for one or two hours you can try, or for one or two days you can try, but it will come back, and it will come back with great vengeance. And its coming back will destroy whatever little self-confidence you had before. That too will be gone. Now you will know that smoking is far stronger than your will; you are defeated. And if it happens again and again, slowly, slowly you will lose all trust in yourself.That’s what happens to so-called religious people: they take one vow and they cannot follow it; they take another vow and they fail again, and another. And slowly, slowly the recognition arrives, has to arrive, “I am such a low person, so ugly, so weak, such a sinner, that I have no worth at all.” That’s what so-called religious people have been reduced to: worthless, meaningless, impotent people.They started wrongly, they asked a wrong question. Their very first step went wrong. Whenever you want to change your action it is going to be against your preferences, otherwise how have you cultivated that action for so long? You must have liked it, notwithstanding what you say. You may always be saying that smoking is not good; what you say is not the point. The point is that you have been smoking. Why have you been smoking? There must be something you are gaining from it.There is something… It gives you a kind of consolation, it gives you a certain security, it gives you an occupation, it helps you to remain together, it takes you away from your nervousness. It has something psychological for you. You may say that because it brings tuberculosis or cancer, “That’s why I am against it,” but those reasonings won’t help. Tuberculosis may come in thirty years, but the nervousness is now. And there are people who are suffering from tuberculosis and they have never smoked, and there are people who are suffering from cancer and they have never smoked. And there are people who have smoked their whole lives and they are not suffering from cancer. So all those things are there in the mind: “Who knows?”So, for something uncertain, how can you surrender that which is certain – that right now smoking is going to give you a little more confidence? And you are going for an interview. Your boss has called you and you are afraid. Just puffing on your cigarette will give a good puff to your chest. You will be a little warmer, blood will be circulating better. A little more nicotine in your blood and you will be standing straight, and you will be able to look eye to eye with the boss. Without this cigarette you will be limp and loose, and you will not know what to say and how to say it. You may start trembling and you may mismanage the whole thing, you may mess up the whole thing. This is right now, immediate. Who bothers about a tuberculosis that will come after thirty years? Who knows if you are going to live thirty years? Seeing the traffic and the accidents and the airplanes falling and the trains, who knows? And there are wars. Who knows about thirty years? The question is right now, and the cigarette is going to help you right now – unless you know something better.If you can sit silently just for a single minute and watch your breath, that will give you real confidence, not created by nicotine. That will give you real silence, not dependent on any chemical. But meditation will have to be learned.Don’t ask how to change your actions, ask how to change the very roots of your actions. Actions are always going to be against preferences. And sometimes it happens: even if these preferences are for hardship, then too you have lived with them for so long that they have a certain appeal.People are great rationalizers; they go on rationalizing. Even if they are creating misery in their lives, they go on finding beautiful reasons for their misery. They say it is duty, they say it is sacrifice. They find beautiful labels. Remember, man is very cunning and very clever in finding rationalizations. There are millions of people who are unnecessarily suffering, but they think their suffering has great value. The idea that their suffering has great value keeps them in the suffering.Many people unnecessarily travel long journeys where shortcuts are available, but they have become accustomed to the long journey. They won’t choose the shortcut. The shortcut is so new. It may be comfortable, it may be convenient, but it is so new – that is the trouble.The mind always likes the old. It does not like the new because the new creates a little insecurity in you. You don’t know how to tackle it. Who knows, you may fail, you may not succeed. It is better to always go through the old way; you are perfectly acquainted with it.So the Pir is right. He says: “…even if these preferences are sometimes for hardship.”Just the other day I was reading an article against me. The person who has written it says, if I really want to help this country, I should become like Dayananda and Vivekananda; only then can I help this country. Now, this is how the mind functions.Dayanandas and Vivekanandas have existed here by the millions. Have they helped the country? Nobody will ask that question. How have they helped the country? And if they have helped, what is the need for me to help the country? So many Dayanandas and so many Vivekanandas have existed; what have they done?In fact, they are the causes of your misery. But you have become accustomed to them. You have started liking them because you have been acquainted with them for thousands of years. They have a great appeal because they fit with your mind – and your mind is the cause of your misery. They fit with your mind and they are also part of the cause of your misery.The author who has written the article against me says that I teach people to live an earthly life and the real saints have never taught that; they have always taught people to renounce the earthly life.That I know. That’s why you are suffering. That’s why you are poor – because you have forgotten how to live on this earth. Nobody has taught you how to live on this earth, how to love this earth. They have all taught you that this earth is ugly, that it is a punishment that you have been sent here, that you are not supposed to enjoy. If you enjoy, you will be sent again. You are supposed to be very sad, detached. You have to renounce all the joys of the earth so next time you don’t have to be born, and then you will enjoy heavenly pleasures.Because these people have been talking too much about the other world, they have destroyed this world. I teach you this earth. This very earth, the paradise. This very body the buddha.I am not a Dayananda, and I don’t want to be a Dayananda. And if you think Dayananda is a saint, I don’t want to be called a saint either; that very word becomes ugly to me, obscene.These are the people who have destroyed you, poisoned you. But the appeal is because they are old and you are acquainted with them, and they are not alone, they have happened in thousands. And they have been telling it so often, continuously, for centuries. Adolf Hitler has written in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, that if you repeat a lie continuously, it becomes a truth. And that’s what has happened in this country.For thousands of years a few lies have been repeated: that God is against the world. He is not. If he is against the world, why does he go on perpetuating this world? If he is against this world, he is the greatest sinner. Why does he go on giving life to this world? Why do trees grow? Why are children born? Why does life continue? And you call him omnipotent. Can’t he simply say, “Stop!” Just as one day he said, “Let there be light” and there was light, now let him say, “Let there be darkness,” so there will be darkness. “Let there be death.” He can simply finish the whole nonsense in a single stroke if he is against it.If a poet is against his poetry, he will not write it. If a painter is against his painting, he will burn it. If a musician is against his music, he will throw his veena, he will destroy it; what is the point?God must be in utter love with the world. He is.Your Dayanandas and your Vivekanandas are utterly wrong, but because they have been repeating an ancient lie, you go on believing in them. Now, I look wrong to you, naturally, obviously. Centuries of repetition, and suddenly I am here and I am saying that God is in love with the world, and you should also be in love with the world. Don’t renounce it, live it in great joy, celebrate it. Naturally I look like I am against religion. I am not, Dayananda is.Dayananda is not a religious person at all. He is certainly a great scholar, a great logic chopper, a great hairsplitter, but if you look deep down, there are only words and words and nothing else; no spiritual experience of his own. But this country praised him very much because he praised this country! This is how we satisfy each other – a mutual arrangement of ego satisfaction.He said this country is the holiest country in the world. He said Hindus are the Aryans. He changed the name because, he said, “Hindu” is not our real name, it was given by other people – foreigners have given it to us. Just as the whole world calls Germans, Germans, but that is not their name; and the whole world calls Japan, Japan, but that is not its name. Exactly like this, Dayananda said, others have called us Hindus. This is not our name; our name is Aryan. The word arya means “the noble ones, the noblest ones, the chosen few of God.”Adolf Hitler also chose to call his Nordic race the Aryans – the noble people of the world, the people who are born to dominate the world.Now, this satisfied the Hindu ego very much. They praised Dayananda as if he were a reincarnation of God. He was just a mere scholar and all his argumentation was childish, ugly, irreligious because he was fighting against all religions: Christianity was wrong, Buddhism was wrong, Jainism was wrong, Islam was wrong. All religions were wrong except the Aryan religion. I don’t call him religious at all.I call Ramakrishna religious – who said all religions are the same, who said all religions reach the same experience, who said, “I have known not from one window, but from all the windows, and I have seen the same vision again and again.” He tried Hindu methods, he tried Mohammedan methods, he tried Christian methods, he tried Buddhist methods. And again and again he said, “I have come to the same experience from all possible ways. God is one, and the experience of God is one.”Ramakrishna was a religious person. He was a contemporary of Dayananda. Dayananda was not a religious person at all, but the man who has written the article seems to be a follower of Dayananda.And so is the case with Vivekananda. His master, Ramakrishna, was an enlightened person, but not Vivekananda. Vivekananda was just a good missionary, clever, intelligent, articulate, educated, well versed in the ways of philosophy, but that’s all.I am not a Dayananda and I am not a Vivekananda, and I don’t want to be. But people go on saying and asking these things. And they don’t see the point that all these people have been worshipping poverty and if you worship poverty, poverty can never be destroyed. I hate poverty! I call poverty the greatest disease. It has to be destroyed, not worshipped. These people have been saying again and again that poverty is something spiritual. I say poverty is the most unspiritual thing in the world.Richness is spiritual, and outer richness creates possibilities for inner richness.But certainly, my statements will go against their preferences. Although their preferences lead them into hardship, misery, starvation, still they will cling to their old mind. The mind always clings to the old. It has no guts to go with the new; it is always afraid to go into the uncharted ocean. It remains tethered to the known, to the familiar territory.Ibn Halim spent some months with Pir Ardeshir, and found that the teaching was indeed hard for him. Although Pir Ardeshir’s former disciples were now famed throughout the world as enlightened teachers, he could not stand the changes, the uncertainties and the disciplines placed upon him.That is bound to happen. When you move into an inner work, your old certainties will disappear because the old mind will start losing its hold on you and you will become more uncertain.What actually happens when people come to seek truth? They have really come to seek certainty, not truth. They want to be absolutely certain so they can be secure and safe. But when you start searching, your old certainties will go because your old certainties are based on lies. Before new certainties come, the old will have to go, and there will be a transitory period when you will almost be in chaos, when you almost don’t know at all what is going to happen, and what is happening.…he could not stand the changes, the uncertainties and the disciplines placed upon him.At length he applied to the Pir for permission to leave, and traveled to the tekkia of the second teacher, Murshid Amali.He asked the Murshid, “Would you place upon me burdens which I might find next to intolerable?”Now from the very beginning he wants to be certain that no burdens should be placed upon him, no hardships, no uncertainties, no disciplines. People want truth to be very cheap. They want it without paying any cost for it.Amali replied, “I would not place upon you such burdens.”Ibn Halim asked, “Will you then accept me as a disciple?”He must have been utterly happy, exhilarated with the prospect of finding a master who was not going to put any hardships on him.The Murshid answered, “Not until you have asked me why my training would not be so onerous as that of Pir Ardeshir.”Ibn Halim asked, “Why should it not be so onerous?”The Murshid told him, “Because I would not care for you and your real well-being like Ardeshir cared for you. Therefore you must not now ask me to accept you as a disciple.”The moment the disciple asks, “Give me God in a cheap way,” he is not worthy of being accepted as a disciple. The moment the disciple says, “Don’t ask any hardship for me to go through, I don’t want to go through any pain, any agony,” he is not ready to be a disciple.He had asked a wrong question of the Pir, now he was asking an even worse question of the Murshid. Murshid means the master.The master said: “Because I would not care for you…” You are not worth caring for. The master cares only for one who is ready to surrender. “…and your well-being” – I cannot take care of that too – “like Ardeshir cared for you.” That’s why he put so many hardships for you to go through: he loved you.But you have destroyed that possibility. And if you could not get through that beautiful man and his help, it is useless to waste my time. “Therefore you must not ask me to accept you as a disciple.” To be accepted as a disciple needs surrender. One needs to die into the master, only then does one become a disciple.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why am I so much afraid of two groups here, Tantra and Encounter?Man has always been afraid of two things, life and death. He is afraid of life because life brings death, he is afraid of death because death ends life. Hence there have been only two taboos in the world: one is sex – sex represents life – the other is death. All the societies of the world have been repressing two things.If you watch people’s faces, their beings, you will come to know two things: they don’t take any note of death, and death is everywhere. Death is the way life exists on the earth. And death is beautiful; it is only through death that life renews itself, otherwise life would become so rotten. It is death that goes on giving it new garments, new abodes; otherwise life would be in ruins. Death is very creative. You only see the disappearing body, you don’t see the new appearance.And whatever is death on one side is sex on the other side. Death and sex are two aspects of the same coin, and they are always together. If you deny one, you automatically deny the other.This is something very important to be understood because I would like you to live your sex in totality, and your death too in its totality. A man is in truth only when he is capable of living life and death both, without any inhibition. Life exists only between the polarity of sex and death. If both are denied – as they have been denied down the ages – man becomes apathetic. Great apathy arises; man becomes indifferent to things, man becomes boredom.Have you observed the fact? Each time you go deeply into love, each time you attain a sexual orgasm, what happens afterward? A sadness settles, you fall into a deep valley of darkness. That’s why people make love and then they go to sleep, to avoid facing that dark, deep valley. It is inevitable because sex brings you to the highest peak of life, to the greatest peak of radiance, joy, to the climax. You vibrate at your maximum. But that can only be for a moment, and then suddenly all starts disappearing, you start falling back. And the fall is going to be deep and steep.It is not only in man. Animal watchers also say animals look very sad after making love. When you make love, life takes flight, and when life is very much there you become aware, in contrast, of death too. Awareness happens only in contrast. That’s why in the night you can see the stars in the sky, not in the day. In the day there is no contrast; there is so much sunlight in the day that you cannot see the stars. But in the night, when the sun is gone and all is dark, the stars start appearing. What happens? The contrast of darkness is needed for them to appear, just as you write with white chalk on a blackboard.If you move deeply into life, love, sex, suddenly you become aware of death surrounding you from everywhere. That’s why man became afraid of sex, and religions became repressive of sex. It is not just an invention of some theologians, there is a deep psychological reason for it. Man became aware of one thing: whenever you move to the peak of love, suddenly you become aware of the deep, deep, abysmal valley surrounding it. And fear grips you, you start feeling nauseous, shaky; trembling arises in you. How to avoid this trembling? The only way that was found was to avoid the peak, so that you never come across the valley; avoid sex, so you never become aware of death.You will be surprised to know that it is really death that has made people afraid of sex. And all the people who are afraid of sex are cowards, naturally. It has to be so. It is because of the fear of death that they have become inhibitive of sex, hence they are cowards.The second taboo is death. Don’t talk of death, it is thought to be unmannerly. Don’t bring death into a conversation, it is thought to be uneducated, vulgar. Keep death out of life, as if it doesn’t exist. At least believe that it doesn’t exist. That’s why cemeteries are made outside of the town, so that we don’t come across them. Or cemeteries are made in such a beautiful way – gardens, flowers, marble graves – to hide the phenomenon of death. And people believe in the immortality of the soul, not that they know, but only so that they can go on living with this illusion that death is unreal.Just as in the moment of sexual ecstasy you become aware of death, the same happens when you are dying, or you are on the verge of death: you become aware of your whole sexuality, of your whole sexual being. It is a well-known fact that when people are crucified, the last thing that happens to them is ejaculation. When a person is murdered on a cross, the last thing that happens is ejaculation. Why? Death brings the other pole into vision.People who are dying almost always die with sexual fantasies surrounding them, and that is natural because that is the way they will immediately enter another womb. Here they are dying, the body is disappearing, they are losing their roots in this body, and their fantasy is already searching for a new womb, for a new body, for a new sexuality. In the moment of death people become very aware of sexuality. The dying person almost always has an erection; even old people, very old people, have erections when they are dying. What happens? Life is trying to assert itself at the last moment too. Life is trying to overcome death.People try to avoid sex, to repress sex, so that they can forget all about death. And then at the moment of death, priests have invented rituals – they go on repeating mantras and sacred scriptures into the ears of the dying man so he is still kept engaged, so that he does not become aware of his sexuality. But these are just foolish inventions of man which don’t work, which can’t work.You must have heard about William Randolph Hearst, the great newspaper tycoon. He is an example. He tried through power and wealth to build a wall between himself and the human condition. A fairyland world was constructed on his orders, where the mention of death was prohibited, and everything was arranged to create the illusion that life would never end. Hearst, in his later years, showed himself to be a weakling and a fool – naturally – because he avoided life to avoid death. He remained stupid.You will remain stupid if you avoid the real human situation. Whatever it contains, whatever is implied in it, has to be encountered, has to be lived through. That is the only way to go beyond it.Given the human reality, the only alternative to courage is a flight from reality. That’s how escapism arises. Millions of people have been escaping to the monasteries, to the Himalayas, to the caves. Why? – to avoid life so they can avoid death. Millions of people have been searching for immortality, hoping that there must be some way to become immortals.I am not saying that the soul is not immortal. It is, but you don’t know anything about the soul. And your efforts to be immortal simply show that you are not yet aware of your soul. Because the soul need not become immortal: it is! But it is not a question of believing in immortality. It is a question of exploring, and exploration goes through real life situations. And these two are the greatest life situations: sex and death.It is through sex that life arises, it is through death that life disappears. Sex is the door from where life enters, and death is the door from where life disappears. These two doors have to be explored in their totality. And those who have looked into it have found that these two doors are not two, it is one door. From one side it is the entrance, from the other side it is the exit.The so-called monks, the so-called old ideas of sannyas are all escapisms, cowardly, utterly cowardly. Running away, however, is never a solution. It is rather a form of weakness and cowardice. Minor forms of this weakness are called neuroses, and the acute forms of this weakness are called psychoses. Your so-called religions have been teaching you only these two things: neurosis and psychosis. Neurosis is a mild form, a mild dose of cowardliness, of not facing life as it is, and psychosis is the acute. The fully grown neurosis becomes psychosis – then you start escaping to the monastery, then you drop out of life – but this is not the way to go beyond. The way beyond goes through life, and life is utterly beautiful. Sex and death, both are beautiful.You ask me, “Why am I so much afraid of two groups here, Tantra and Encounter?” Tantra is based on life; Tantra is the art of life, of love. Tantra is the method to encounter your sexuality, your sensuousness, your sensate being. And you are afraid of it because you have been taught that there is something wrong in your sensuousness. You are afraid to encounter your sensate being, your physical being. You are afraid to encounter your body and others’ bodies, and you are afraid, deep down, that if sex reaches a climax, you will have to face the ultimate terror of death. It is better to avoid the peaks and walk on level ground – no peaks, no valleys. Live a mediocre life of no peaks and no valleys. Live an unintelligent life, stupid, boring, dull, drab, placid. One thing is good about it, that you will not encounter two things: the ecstasies of the peaks and the agonies of the valleys. But you will not grow either.Growth happens only when one moves from peaks to valleys and valleys to peaks. Growth happens only in that constant pilgrimage between darkness and light and from light to darkness. When one rises on the waves of the ocean and falls back, and again rises and falls back and slowly, slowly attains a certain balance, in that balance one transcends both peaks and valleys, becomes a witness. That witnessing is meditation.So people are afraid; not only you are afraid of Tantra. And Encounter is facing your fears – all fears are based in death – facing your anger, facing your violence, facing the possibility that death is there, that death cannot be denied. So Encounter and Tantra are frightening because they bring you against two taboos which have been cultivated for centuries: sex and death.Just the other day I was talking to you about Geet Govind from Esalen. When he came here, I gave him only two groups, Encounter and Tantra – because that was my first insight into his being, that he was afraid of two things: sex and death. Although he had been a disciple and a colleague of Fritz Perls, he had not learned anything. Although he is the founder of Esalen, he must have been avoiding his own deep problems. I gave him these two groups. If he had passed through these two groups he would have attained a great insight – a satori was possible – but he escaped, he ran away.In the Encounter group, after just twenty-four hours, he wrote a letter to me: “I don’t want to participate in it. There is too much violence. I cannot cope with it.” I gave him a message, “If you cannot cope, drop out of it.”Receiving my message he must have become aware that dropping out of it was cowardice, so just to keep face, he tried to continue in it, but he remained only on the periphery, he didn’t get involved in it. He was there more as a spectator than as a participant. He did not expose his own hidden fears and violence. He did not expose that he is afraid of death. He did not encounter the possibility of his own death.Rather than encountering the possibility of his own death, he started being angry at the Encounter group that is being run here. That is “transference”; it is a well-known phenomenon to psychoanalysts. If the psychoanalyst brings the patient to a certain point that the patient wants to avoid, if the psychoanalyst pushes a button that the patient has been avoiding his whole life, the patient immediately becomes angry at the psychoanalyst. Rather than seeing the truth of his wound, when his wound is touched he thinks he has been offended, he has been hurt. He immediately becomes angry with the therapist – and that’s what happened to Geet Govind.If it had happened to somebody else it would have been understandable. But a man who runs a prestigious institute like Esalen, who is the founder, if he could not understand the simple phenomenon of transference, then who is going to understand? Not only did he fail, but through him he betrayed Fritz Perls too. If living with him for so many years and being his disciple he could not understand the simple phenomenon of transference, what else could he understand? And remember, trees are known by their fruits; the master is known by the disciples. He has, through his cowardice, condemned his own master.He became so angry. Not seeing his fears, not seeing his death-oriented cowardice, he started projecting all his violence and anger on the group. And he escaped before the Tantra group started, without telling anybody. He was to see me before he was going to leave, but for that he would have had to do the Tantra group. He left without seeing me. He didn’t even participate in Tantra. He didn’t participate in Encounter either, but at least he was a spectator there. But in Tantra he was not even courageous enough to be a spectator. Now he is talking against me, without understanding what he has done.Man is made of two things: being and non-being. Man is a strange phenomenon. Something in him is very existential, and something in him is very nonexistential. The existential is sex, and the non-existential is death. Man is a combination of sex and death. And unless you know both without any prejudice, you will not be able to transcend, you will not be able to become a real meditator. You have to face these two facts. These are the ultimate facts of life, and these are the tests. If you face them unafraid, they will hold the keys to eternal life. It is through them that you will be able to enter the kingdom of God.These two groups are very important. All the other groups are, in a way, a preparation for these two. But the fear is there. One has to go into these experiences in spite of the fear.Just see how you are made with being and non-being. Something in you is present: that is your sexuality. That’s why in deep sexual experience the past and future disappear, and you are utterly present to the present moment and it becomes a moment of meditation. So is the case with death: if death is suddenly encountered, the mind stops; all past and future disappear again.If you have been in an accident… When you see that another car is coming and there is no way to avoid it and an accident is going to happen – just a few seconds more and you will be gone – in those few seconds all thoughts disappear. Suddenly there is silence, utter silence. The silence you have been seeking your whole life and were not able to attain, is attained. It comes from nowhere. Death makes you again present to the moment, it brings you to the moment. These are the two most potential experiences. Please don’t be afraid, and don’t avoid them.Geet Govind has written a letter to me too: “I will remain a sannyasin of yours only if you change the structures of the groups that are being run in Pune. Then I will believe you, that you are a bhagwan, an enlightened person. Otherwise you are just Mr. Osho.”Do you see the stupidity? You are making conditions for me. You are trying to bribe me – as if being called “Bhagwan” by Geet Govind is going to give me something, as if I am interested in being called “Bhagwan” by Geet Govind, or as if his sannyas is something immensely valuable for my existence.Reading his letter I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s lines:We are the hollow menWe are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpiece filled with straw. Alas!If you are afraid to face your sexuality, which is the beginning of your life, which is the source of your life, and if you are afraid to face your death and the fear that it creates, which is going to be the end of your life, you are nothing but a “hollow” man, a “stuffed” man, a “headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” You are not a real man yet if you cannot face these two things. These two things have to be faced.In the new commune I am going to introduce another group which will be called Death, which will be a higher and more intense form of Encounter in which you will have to actually move through death. You will have to pass through the experience of death, and if you can pass through it you will come out alive in a totally new sense.I am preparing things. This is just the beginning, Geet Govind. This is just the ABC of the work. As more and more courageous people will be coming to me, and they are coming; as more and more uninhibited people will be coming to me, and they are coming; my methods will start becoming more and more intense. I will sharpen my sword!And remember, if you avoid these two things, apathy is created. That’s why you see so much apathy all around the world – people walking, moving, doing things, but with empty faces, with no joy, no cheerfulness, their eyes dull, non-expressive, their faces almost dead, just pulling, dragging themselves somehow, a great burden. Life is not a benediction for them but a great burden, a misery, a hell.Who has done this? Who has poisoned the sources of human joy and celebration? The people who have taught you inhibitions.If sex and death are repressed, you will become very apathetic, you will become very, very dull. Your life will not have any streaming energy because the energy can be created only by this polarity: sex and death. Between this polarity the beautiful tension is created which keeps your life energies flowing. If you avoid these two things you have avoided all. Then you live in vain. Then your life is nothing but an empty gesture, it means nothing. And you will never be able to enter the temple of God because you are missing the very door, or you have misunderstood.The haggard young man went to his psychiatrist and complained of a recurring bad dream. “Every night,” he said, “I dream of a sign on a door and I push it and push it, but I can’t open it.”The doctor took notes frantically. “And what does the sign say?”“Pull.”You can go on pushing your whole life, but if the sign says pull…? God says live, love, live dangerously, love dangerously, and you remain frozen in fear. How will you enter the temple of God?Be aware of the poison that the priests have poured into your beings. Accept whatever is a fact. But priests go on rejecting facts: they say Jesus was born out of a virgin mother, just to reject the facticity of sex. They cannot conceive of Jesus being conceived through sexuality. These are the poisoners. And they go on doing another thing also: they cannot conceive that Jesus died on the cross, they say he was resurrected.The whole of Christianity depends on two dogmas. One is the virgin birth of Jesus, the other is his resurrection. One is against sex, the other is against death – and these are the only taboos. The whole of Christianity depends on this pathological approach, this neurotic approach. In Jesus’ life they have denied two things, sex and death, and Jesus is the example you have to imitate. You have to become like Jesus.Jesus is born as much out of sex as anybody else. Jesus was not a freak! He was a normal human being, a natural human being – more natural than you are. And Jesus died as everyone dies. There is nothing wrong in death, anything that begins ends.But still there is something which never begins and never ends – that is God. And that is in you too. But to know that which never begins and never ends, you will have to know that which begins and ends. Only in contrast will you be able to know the eternal. You will have to experience time and its process of change to know the eternal and the unchanging and the absolutely abiding truth.The second question:Osho,What is wrong in imitating the great ideals taught down the centuries?It is not a question of great ideals or petty ideals, it is a question of imitating. What you imitate is immaterial; the important thing is that you imitate. If you imitate you become a carbon copy. If you imitate you have betrayed your authentic being. If you imitate you are no longer your being, you are no longer your soul, you are no longer yourself. You have committed suicide, and this suicide is far more suicidal than when you destroy your physical body. This is destroying your very psychology.Imitation means you will not live according to your own spontaneity, you will live according to somebody else as your image, you will follow somebody else’s character, behavior, way of life. You will have to impose. What will you do if you want to follow Christ? If you want to imitate Christ, what will you do? You will act like Christ! What else can you do? It will be a drama, it will not be a real, true life.What will you do if you want to become Buddha? You can take a begging bowl, you can use the same type of clothes he used, you can even walk like him – these are simple things, they can be learned – but you will be just a showpiece, not a Buddha. You will be just doing it on the surface, but you will remain the same deep down, deep behind it. Your reality will not be affected by it; it will be just a painted face, a mask, a personality. It will not touch your essence.I am against all kinds of imitation because I respect the individual. Learn from everywhere. Learn from Jesus, learn from Buddha; they have something great to share with you. Participate in that sharing, but never imitate.You are here with me: never imitate me! Listen to me, understand me, feel me, feel my love for you, drink this presence that is available to you, participate in this silence, but don’t imitate. There is no need for you to wear the same clothes I wear or to eat the same food. There is no need to follow my lifestyle.But the idea has become very deeply planted in you. You have been told again and again and conditioned for it. Nobody has ever told you to be yourself. Everybody was giving you an example: “Be like that. Be like Jesus, be like Buddha, be like Mahavira” – as if your whole purpose here is just to act somebody else’s life and not to live your own; as if God has not given you a firsthand life but only a secondhand life. This is disrespectful to yourself and this is disrespectful to God too.God has given you a life to be lived, and lived spontaneously, with no pattern. Don’t become a slave and don’t become an imitator. Love yourself, respect yourself, and try to live your life the way you feel it. And even if you are a failure you will be contented. Imitating somebody else, even if you succeed, you will remain empty inside, filled with straw and nothing else. Alas!The person who succeeds in imitating Christ will be the person who has completely destroyed his possibility of growing. He has been playing, he has not been living. Howsoever intelligently he tries to imitate, imitation is unintelligent. Intelligence never tries to imitate.A cowboy boasted to the sheriff that he had the best horse in the world.“I was riding him through a lonely stretch of the country when he stumbled over a rock. I fell from the saddle and broke my leg.”“Don’t tell me,” the sheriff said, “that the horse reset your leg!”“Nope. But he grabbed me by the belt, dragged me home, and galloped five miles to fetch the doctor.”“I am glad everything worked out so well,” said the sheriff.“Not really. That dumb horse fetched a horse doctor!”But what more can you expect from a horse? Even this is too much!By imitating somebody, whatever you do will miss the point somewhere or other. At one stage or another stage you will miss the point – because imitation means you have already accepted living a stupid life.A man checked into a hotel and was asked by the manager if he wanted a R.W.B.“What is that?” he asked.“Room with bath,” he was told. “You see, in the hotel business we try to abbreviate everything,” explained the manager. “Would you also like an R.W.V.?”“What is that?”“I told you we try in this hotel business to abbreviate everything – that means room with view.”“I will take an R.W.B. with an R.W.V.” And he proceeded to his room where he took his shower and lay on the bed completely naked.In walked the chambermaid, not knowing the room was occupied. She looked at him on the bed and he looked at her and said, “F.U.C.K.”“What did you say?” she said in shock.He repeated “F.U.C.K.” – whereupon she ran to the manager and told him about the naked man on the bed and what he had said.Up came the manager and ordered the man to leave the hotel immediately.“What did I do? What did I say that was wrong? You tell everybody to talk hotel talk, so when she came in, I said F.U.C.K. – First You Couldn’t Knock?”Imitations won’t do! You will get into trouble. You will have to live your life intelligently on your own. You are so unique that only you can live your life and nobody else. And you are so original that trying to copy somebody else is simply destroying such a tremendous gift of God.Sing your song and dance your dance and love your love.The third question:Osho,Will you please speak about the difference between a healthy love of oneself and egoistical pride?There is a great difference between the two, although they both look very alike. The healthy love of oneself is a great religious value. The person who does not love himself will not be able to love anybody else, ever. The first ripple of love has to rise in your heart. If it has not risen for yourself it cannot rise for anybody else because everybody else is farther away from you.It is like throwing a stone in the silent lake; the first ripples will arise around the stone, and then they will go on spreading to the further shores. The first ripple of love has to be around yourself. One has to love one’s body, one has to love one’s soul, one has to love one’s totality.This is natural, otherwise you would not be able to survive at all. And it is beautiful because it beautifies you. The person who loves himself becomes graceful, elegant. The person who loves himself is bound to become more silent, more meditative, more prayerful than the person who does not love himself.If you don’t love your house you will not clean it; if you don’t love your house you will not paint it; if you don’t love your house, you will not surround it with a beautiful garden with a lotus pond. If you love yourself you will create a garden around yourself. You will try to grow your potential, you will try to bring out all that is in you to be expressed. If you love, you will go on showering yourself, you will go on nourishing yourself.And if you love yourself you will be surprised: others will love you. Nobody loves a person who does not love himself. If you cannot even love yourself, who else is going to take the trouble? And the person who does not love himself cannot remain neutral. Remember, in life there is no neutrality.The man who does not love himself hates, will have to hate: life knows no neutrality. Life is always a choice. If you don’t love, that does not mean you can simply remain in that not loving state. No, you will hate.And the person who hates himself becomes destructive. The person who hates himself will hate everybody else; he will be so angry and violent and continuously in rage. The person who hates himself, how can he hope that others will love him? His whole life will be destroyed. To love oneself is a great religious value.I teach you self-love. But remember, self-love does not mean egotistical pride, not at all. In fact it means just the opposite. The person who loves himself finds there is no self in him. Love always melts the self: that is one of the alchemical secrets to be learned, understood, experienced. Love always melts the self. Whenever you love, the self disappears. You love a woman and at least in the few moments when there is real love for the woman, there is no self in you, no ego.Ego and love cannot exist together. They are like light and darkness: when light comes, darkness disappears. If you love yourself you will be surprised: self-love means the self disappears. In self-love there is no self ever found. That is the paradox: self-love is utterly selfless. It is not selfish because whenever there is light there is no darkness, and whenever there is love there is no self.Love melts the frozen self. The self is like an ice cube, love is like the morning sun. The warmth of love – and the self starts melting. The more you love yourself, the less you will find of the self in you, and then it becomes a great meditation, a great leap into God.And you know it! You may not know it as far as self-love is concerned because you have not loved yourself. But you have loved other people; glimpses of it must have happened to you. There must have been rare moments when for a moment suddenly you were not there and only love was there, only love energy flowing, from no center, from nowhere to nowhere. When two lovers are sitting together, there are two nothingnesses sitting together, two zeros sitting together – and that is the beauty of love. It makes you utterly empty of the self.Remember again, just the other day I was saying, empty yourself in hugs, in kisses, in love, in embraces. Empty yourself. Pour yourself into love so that in your inner world space is created – because God can enter only when there is space in you to contain him.And great space will be needed because you are inviting the greatest guest. You are inviting the whole of existence into you. You will need infinite nothingness in you. Love is the best way to become nothing.So remember, egoistical pride is never love for oneself. Egoistical pride is just the opposite. The person who has not been able to love himself becomes egoistic. Egoistical pride is what psychoanalysts call the narcissistic pattern of life, narcissism. You must have heard the parable of Narcissus: he fell in love with himself. Looking into a silent pool of water, he fell in love with his own reflection.Now see the difference: the man who loves himself does not love his reflection, he simply loves himself. No mirror is needed, he knows himself from inward. Don’t you know yourself, that you are? Do you need proof that you are? Do you need a mirror to prove that you exist? If there were no mirror, would you become suspicious of your existence?Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection, not with himself. That is not true self-love. He fell in love with the reflection; the reflection is the other. He became two, he became divided. Narcissus was split. He was in a kind of schizophrenia. He became two – the lover and the loved. He became his own object of love – and that’s what happens to so many people who think they are in love.When you fall in love with a woman, watch, be alert; it may be nothing but narcissism, and the woman’s face, and her eyes, and her words, may be simply functioning as a silent lake in which you are seeing your reflection.My own observation is this: out of a hundred loves, ninety-nine are narcissistic. People don’t love the woman that is there. They love the appreciation of the woman that she is giving to them, the attention of the woman that she is giving to them, the flattery of the woman that she is showering on the man.Two lovers were sitting on the sea beach, and it was a full-moon night, and great waves were arising in the sea; it was high tide. The lover said loudly to the sea, “Now, roll into great waves! Roll, rise into great waves!” And great waves started rising, and the great waves started rolling toward the beach.The woman came closer to the lover, hugged him, kissed him and said, “I knew it before, that you are a miracle! Even the ocean follows your orders.”This is what goes on happening. The woman flatters the man, the man flatters the woman; it is a mutual flattery. The woman says, “There is nobody as beautiful as you are. You are a miracle! You are the greatest that God has ever made. Even Alexander the Great was nothing compared to you.” And you are puffed up, your chest becomes doubled, and your head starts swelling – although there is nothing but straw, but it starts swelling. And you say to the woman, “You are the greatest creation of God. Even Cleopatra was nothing compared to you. I can’t believe that God will ever be able to improve upon you. There will never again be another woman so beautiful.”This is what you call love. This is narcissism. The man becomes the silent pool and reflects the woman, and the woman becomes the silent pool and reflects the man – in fact not only reflects the truth, but decorates it, in a thousand and one ways makes it look more and more beautiful. This is what people call love. It is not; it is mutual ego-satisfaction.Real love knows nothing of the ego. Real love starts first as self-love.Naturally, you have this body, this being, you are rooted in it; enjoy it, cherish it, celebrate it. There is no question of pride or ego because you are not comparing yourself with anybody. Ego comes only with comparison. Self-love knows no comparison; you are you, that’s all. You are not saying that somebody else is inferior to you, you are not comparing at all. Whenever comparison comes, know well it is not love; it is a trick somewhere, a subtle strategy of the ego.The ego lives through comparison. When you say to a woman, “I love you,” it is one thing. When you say, “Cleopatra was nothing compared to you,” it is another, totally another, just the opposite. Why bring Cleopatra in? Can’t you love this woman without bringing Cleopatra in? Cleopatra is brought in to puff the ego. Love this man; why bring in Alexander the Great?Love knows no comparison, love simply loves without comparing.So whenever there is comparison, remember, it is egoistical pride. It is narcissism. And whenever there is no comparison, remember, it is love, whether of oneself or the other. In real love there is no division. The lovers melt into each other. In egoistical love there is great division, the division of the lover and the loved.In real love there is no relationship. Let me repeat it: in real love there is no relationship because there are not two persons to be related. In real love there is only love, a flowering, a fragrance, a melting, a merging. Only in egoistic love are there two persons, the lover and the loved. And whenever there is the lover and the loved, love disappears. Whenever there is love, both the lover and the beloved disappear into love.Love is such a great phenomenon, you cannot survive in it.Real love is always in the present. Egoistical love is always either in the past or in the future. In real love there is a passionate coolness. It will look paradoxical, but all greater realities of life are paradoxical, hence I call it passionate coolness. There is warmth, but there is no heat in it. Warmth certainly is there, but there is also coolness in it, a very collected, calm, cool state. Love makes one less feverish. But if it is not real love but egoistical love, then there is great heat. Then passion is there like fever, there is no coolness at all.If you can remember these things you will have the criterion for judging. But you have to start with yourself, there is no other way. You have to start from where you are.Love yourself, love immensely, and in that very love your pride, your ego and all that nonsense will disappear. When it has disappeared your love will start reaching other people. And it will not be a relationship but a sharing. It will not be an object-subject relationship but a melting, a togetherness. It will not be feverish, it will be a cool passion. It will be warm and cool together. It will give you the first taste of the paradoxicalness of life.The fourth question:Osho,Would you please tell us more about what the Sufis call adab? Is it a tariqa: a method that extends beyond the physical presence of the master, becoming part of the innermost being of the disciple and reflecting in every action of his daily life?Yes, adab is a tariqa, a method. It is the beginning of something very immense, of something utterly incomprehensible to the intellect. It is the first step of a great eternal pilgrimage. To be with the master is simply a lesson in how to be with God. That’s why down the ages the master has been called God. It is very symbolic, it is a metaphor.The word metaphor is beautiful. Meta means beyond, phor means going: that which takes you beyond. The master is a metaphor; he takes you beyond himself. He is just a beginning, a jumping board. To be with the master is nothing but a discipline in how to be with God. God is not visible, the master is visible; it is easier to learn from the visible and then to move to the invisible.Have you looked into children’s books? We have to make big pictures, very colorful pictures for them. Words are few. If you have to teach the child M, you have to make a big mango, very juicy, colorful. The child is not interested in M. Something abstract – what does it mean to a child? But he is certainly interested in the mango. Juices start flowing in his mouth the moment he sees the mango, so colorful, so full of juice. Now there is a way we can teach him about M through the mango. The mango becomes a metaphor. Slowly, slowly the picture will become smaller and smaller and smaller, and one day it will disappear. Then M will work on its own. There will be no need again and again to bring in the mango to remind the child about the M.Exactly like that, the master is something visible, God is invisible. You cannot learn adab with the invisible, you will have to learn adab with the visible. You fall in love with a master, it is very difficult to fall in love with God. Where is he in the first place? Who is he? Whether he is or not? But one can fall in love with a master, and in that very love grace arises in you. Love always creates grace. That grace is adab.When you love the master you behave in a certain way. Love knows how to behave. It is not a question of an imposed discipline. It is not that it is enforced on you; if it is enforced, you are not in the presence of a master. It arises out of you, it is part of your love, it is part of your feeling heart. You feel so much for the master that when he is around, you immediately fall into silence, into grace. A great elegance arises in you, a great joy. Suddenly you forget all your worries, you forget all your past and future programs. For a few moments you are transported into another world.This is the beginning. Slowly, slowly this will become so deep-rooted in you that there will be no need for the master to be present. Whenever and wherever you remember the master, immediately you will fall into the same space again. Then by and by there will be no need to remember the master. The remembrance will become like your breathing, it will be always there in a subtle form. Then your whole life will become graceful. Then it will not only be a question of behaving gracefully with the master. You will behave gracefully with whomsoever you are relating – in the marketplace, in the office, in the factory, wherever you are, wherever and with whomsoever. Now the master has become your innermost core, you are always in the presence of the master. Slowly, slowly it will spread to trees, to mountains, to the sky, to the stars. Then you are entering God. By and by, step by step, one day suddenly the master is no longer there, the disciple is no longer there – only godliness is.Adab is a discipline, but it brings you to a state of total spontaneity. It is a tariqa, a method – and a great method. It can be known only by those who love. It can be known only by those who have become devotees, disciples. It is available only to the eyes of love. It is such a subtle experience that if you come to the master full of your knowledge and intellect you will miss it. It is such an exquisite feeling that unless your heart is open for it, you will not have any taste of it.That’s why each master finally decides to live only with his own disciples. Because that is the only way to help people toward God. I am not interested in mobs. I am not interested in people coming here out of curiosity. I am interested only in those people who are ready to die in my presence, who are ready to disappear into my love.You are living adab. This silence is adab. Your hearts beating with me, you are breathing in rhythm with me: this is adab.The fifth question:Osho,Clothes of a particular color and the wearing of the mala is prescribed for sannyasins so that they are continuously aware of the final aim of life: bliss. Is it possible to be aware of this aim without wearing a particular dress? The utility is understood but the inevitability is not. Please elucidate on the use and the limitations. For bliss, I will wear them. If you convince me of its inevitability, I will wear it happily.You are missing the whole point. You are not getting what I am saying to you. You are listening through your prejudices, through your already arrived conclusions. You are not listening to me, not at all. You have not understood a single word uttered here.You say, “Clothes of a particular color and the wearing of the mala is prescribed for sannyasins so that they are continuously aware of the final aim of life: bliss.” There is no final aim of life. That’s what I am teaching. Life has no aim, no purpose. It is not going anywhere, life is already there. The ultimate is the immediate, the immediate is the ultimate – that’s what I am teaching. I am not saying that tomorrow you will attain bliss. Bliss is already here. If you are available it will explode in your being, if you are not available it will not explode for lives and lives.Tomorrow has nothing to do with it. Bliss is a quality of the present moment. It is the essence of now, of here. It is the radiance of this moment.But you are thinking in terms of desires, longings, succeeding somewhere in the future. The clothes and the mala, the orange color, are not given to my sannyasins to be reminded of the ultimate goal of life, bliss; no, not at all. And they are not prescribed by me as a doctor prescribes a medicine. In fact, they are not purposive at all. It is just that I am crazy. It is my eccentricity, that’s all. There is no reason behind it.It is not meant for people who are rationalistic. It is just a gesture from the disciple’s side that he loves me so much that even if I tell him to do something crazy, he is ready.It is not something utilitarian, as you say. You say, “Is it not possible to be aware of this aim” – there is none, no aim – “without wearing a particular dress? The utility is understood but the inevitability is not.” There is no utility, there is only inevitability. What is that inevitability? Being with a crazy man, you have to become crazy! It is just a gesture of surrender from your side.That gesture is needed because I will be telling you so many absurd things. And if you cannot accept a simple phenomenon like wearing orange and the mala, when we will be moving into more dangerous spaces – when your reason will not support you at all, when your reason will in fact try to prevent you from going more into it, and I will be calling you forth, “Come on!” and you will see that ahead there is death, and the road ends in an abyss, and I am calling you, “Come along!” – it will be very difficult. So this is just a gesture from the side of the disciple that he is ready to go with me.When Ibrahim, a great Sufi master, first went to his own master – Ibrahim was a king, King of Balkh and Bukhara – when he went to the master, the master told him, “Undress immediately!” The master’s disciples were puzzled because he had never asked anybody to undress, why should he ask Ibrahim to undress? But Ibrahim immediately undressed. Then the master gave one of his shoes to him and told him to go into the marketplace and go on beating on his head with the shoe, and laugh as loudly as he could.The disciples were even more puzzled and confused: “What is going on? Has he gone completely mad?” They had always suspected that he was a little crazy, but now this was too much!But Ibrahim went – in his own capital town where he had always moved in a golden chariot, where he was respected like God – naked, beating on his head with a shoe and laughing. You can just imagine the scene. It created a circus. The whole capital gathered, people were laughing, people were throwing banana peels and rotten onions and tomatoes, and they were enjoying, they were having fun: “What has gone by?” Their king! “And what is he doing?” And the more they were throwing banana peels and tomatoes, the more he was laughing.When he came back, the master hugged him and he said, “You are accepted as a disciple.”His other disciples asked, “What is the matter? What is the secret behind it?”The master said, “You need not worry, this much was needed. He has been a great king, with all his ego. This much of a gesture was needed from his side so that I could be convinced that he was ready to go into the suprarational, where there would be no possibility of convincing him. If he can do such an absurd act, then I am convinced.”You are saying, “Osho, if you can convince me of its inevitability, I will wear it happily.” I am not going to convince you. You will have to convince me that you are ready to go crazy with me. It is not a question of me convincing you, it is a question of you convincing me.And remember again, this is just the beginning. Soon Ibrahims will be coming! Please be in a hurry because my demands will go on growing more and more. As the work goes deeper, more and more demands will be made. It is not a prescription, it is a demand!And I am not here to convince you about its rationality because if I convince you about its rationality – and I can convince you… In fact, anything can be made to look rational. Any absurd thing can be made to look rational, that is such an easy game. I can convince you of the utility, of the inevitability and everything, but that will all be just bullshit.The real truth, the simple fact, is that you have to show a simple gesture from your side that you will not ask for reasons. You have to convince me, not I convince you. It is your problem that you are missing bliss, it is not my problem. Why should I bother to convince you? I am not suffering from any problems, I am bliss. You are suffering.You have to give me a few indications that you are ready to take the jump. By wearing orange and the mala you give me a little proof that you will not be demanding reasons for each and everything – because that will not be possible.As the journey deepens, reasons and rational explanations become absolutely futile, meaningless. And as you start soaring higher you go beyond rationality completely. This is a journey into super-reason, or irreason. This is a journey beyond mind.And you are asking me, “For bliss, I will wear them. If you convince me of its inevitability, I will wear it happily.” I am not going to convince you. If I convince you, the whole point will be lost. If I convince you and then you wear it, you have not shown the gesture. It is out of your own conviction, out of your own reason that you wear it. You have not dropped your reason, your mind. It is your conclusion. It is utterly meaningless. And then, again and again you will be asking me – and there are things which are going to happen to sannyasins about which nothing can be said, they can only be experienced. Then I will be in trouble. I don’t want to start that kind of process at all.You say, “For bliss, I will wear them.” Your whole motivation is very ordinary. Your mind is full of desires. You may be thinking that you are having spiritual desires – for bliss, for God, for truth – but all desires are worldly. Yes, even the desire for God and bliss and truth is worldly. If you want to become a sannyasin you have to become a sannyasin for no reason at all, for no desire, for no motivation. At least do one thing in your life without any motivation, for the sheer joy of it. And from there starts bliss.If you can do a single thing, even a single thing, for the sheer joy of doing it you will be surprised: bliss simply starts pouring on you. Not to live through motivation is the way of bliss.But there are people who are continuously thinking of gaining this, of gaining that, whose whole idea of life is through motivation. The motivation may be worldly, they may be otherworldly; in my observation there is no difference between them. Live through motivation and you are living in the world of misery, live without motivation and you are a sannyasin.A rabbi was giving a very serious sermon in the temple when he came to the name Moses – and from the congregation came a loud voice, “He was a stupid jerk.” The rabbi could not believe his ears and thought he was hearing things, so he continued until again he mentioned Moses, and again the loud voice cried, “He was a stupid jerk!”With that the rabbi stopped and dared the man to identify himself and prove his remark.“Certainly I can, and will,” replied the apparently rebellious Jew. “You remember when God told Moses to lead our people out of the land of Egypt and Moses led our people to the Red Sea? So what happened? God parted this Red Sea so Moses could lead our people across. So what happens? – the stupid jerk at the top of the procession leads our people, and when he gets to the other side he makes a right hand turn into the desert. If he had made a left-hand turn, we would have been up to our asses in oil wells!”Please don’t be a Jew! And out of a hundred people, ninety-nine point nine percent are Jews – continuously greedy, continuously thinking of gaining this and that. Can’t you allow a few moments without desire? And to be without desire is to be in bliss.Bliss cannot be desired. It is impossible to desire bliss because desire creates misery. Bliss happens only when you have understood the process of desire, when you have seen through and through that all desire ends in misery. When you have seen it, desiring disappears. And in that very moment, instantly, immediately, all is bliss.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There was once a woman who had heard of the fruit of heaven. She coveted it. She asked a certain dervish, whom we shall call Sabar, “How can I find this fruit, so that I may attain immediate knowledge?”“You would be best advised to study with me,” said the dervish. “But if you will not do so, you will have to travel resolutely and at times restlessly throughout the world.”She left him and sought another, Arif the Wise One, and then she found Hakim the Sage, and Mojud the Mad, then Alim the Scientist, and many more.She passed thirty years in her search. Finally she came to a garden. There stood the tree of heaven, and from its branches hung the bright fruit of heaven.Standing beside the tree was Sabar, the first dervish.“Why did you not tell me when we first met that you were the custodian of the fruit of heaven?” she asked him.“Because you would not then have believed me. Besides, the tree produces fruit only once in thirty years and thirty days.”Once upon a time there lived a very poor man in a village in Italy. He desperately wanted to know the answer to the mystery of existence, so he decided to work very hard and travel to the Himalayas and find a guru. He worked long arduous hours and at the end of twenty years he had saved his fare.He had been on a ship for about two weeks when a tremendous storm blew up and he was shipwrecked, and found himself on a desert island. He spent the next twenty years on the island when one day he managed to finally attract the attention of a tanker. They picked him up and took him to Mumbai where he caught a plane. He had managed to salvage some of his money when shipwrecked.However, during the flight he was hijacked. But the hijackers decided to set him free in the desert. He walked to a village and waited for the bus to take him to the Himalayas.Within a few months the bus came and he caught it to the foothills of the Himalayas. He then spent a long time on foot but finally managed to arrive at the guru’s cave. He then asked the guru his question about the mystery of life.The guru replied, “Life is a river.”The man went crazy, threw his arms up and shouted at the guru, “For fifty years I have been trying to get to you. I had to work very hard for the fare. I was shipwrecked and then hijacked – and bloody hell, now you tell me life is a river?!”And the guru said, “Isn’t it?”Life is not a problem or a puzzle to be solved. Life is a mystery to be loved and to be lived. And the mystery is not something far away, the mystery is something that is very obvious, herenow. The mystery is the thisness of existence. Hence the answer of the guru: “Life is a river.”He must have been sitting on the bank of the river watching the river go by. In that moment his consciousness was full of the river, there was nothing else but the river.Another master was asked, “What is truth?” and he said, “The cypress tree in the courtyard.”He must have been looking at the beautiful cypress in the courtyard, that was all in that moment. That moment was full of the cypress tree, that moment was nothing but the cypress tree.And another master when asked, “What is life?” was drinking tea. He said, “A cup of tea.”Thisness, idam, or suchness, tathata: that’s what life is.Another, still another master, was weighing flax and he was asked, “What is Buddha?” and he said, “Three pounds of flax.”These answers are tremendously important. They don’t appear important on the surface. It certainly can drive a person crazy who has been working for fifty years to reach the master, who has wasted his whole life to reach the master, to know the mystery of life – and the master says, “Life is a river,” or, “A cup of tea,” or, “The cypress tree in the courtyard,” or, “Three pounds of flax.” It will drive anybody crazy. But the answers are tremendously beautiful.This moment is the answer, whatever it is. There is no other answer. The facticity of this moment is the answer. Truth is herenow, but the ego is never satisfied with the truth that is herenow. The ego wants something difficult, it thrives on difficulties. The ego lives through great challenges. If life is only a cup of tea, where will your ego find the ground to stand on? If life is only the cypress tree in the courtyard, how will you become a great saint, a mahatma? There is no possibility left – the ego will have to disappear. If truth is so simple and obvious, then the ego cannot be nourished. There is nothing left to be nourished on.When the master said, “Life is a river,” he simply took away the very earth underneath the man. He must have wanted something of tremendous import, a revelation, God descending from heaven, great light, infinite light happening, a vision, something utterly extraordinary.“Life is a river” – such an ordinary statement? But if you meditate over it you will find that God descending from heaven, great light, infinite light coming to your vision, psychedelic, colorful, spiritual experiences are all just childish, are all toys for the ego to play with.The real religion consists of the obvious. The obvious, the ordinary, is the mysterious. The obvious, that which is always with you, has been always with you, will be always with you, is God. Between you and God there is no distance at all. Not even a single step is needed to be taken. If you understand it, you have understood all the religions, all the scriptures.But the ego will create trouble. The ego is never interested in simple things because on simple things it cannot soar high. The more difficult something is, the better for the ego. That’s why religions became interested in unnecessary difficulties. They are called austerities, asceticism; they are nothing but food for the ego. They have not helped anybody to know the truth. In fact they have been the greatest barriers.Religion became a pathology, religion went neurotic because of the demands of the ego. The ego wants something utterly difficult so that it becomes a special privilege if you attain it; only you have attained it, nobody else. It wants truth to be something like the peak of Everest or walking on the moon, something so special that you can claim. Through it, you become special.Because of this, religion slowly, slowly became sadomasochistic. “Torture yourself” – the more you torture, the more religious you are. When a person tortures himself and he, out of necessity, teaches others also to torture themselves, he becomes doubly pathological. He tortures himself, so he is a masochist, and because he teaches others to torture themselves he becomes a sadist.In the name of religion, sadomasochism has existed on the earth. That’s why only neurotic people become interested in religion. The healthy person avoids it.The religion I am teaching you is for the healthy person. It is for those who are not in search of fulfilling their egos. It is for those who are ready to be ordinary, utterly ordinary. It is for those who are ready to dissolve in the obvious. It is for those who are ready to make their home in this moment, this beautiful now, and who are not hankering for any paradise, who are not hankering at all; who have no desires for the other world and no desires for some God sitting on a golden throne somewhere. It is for those whose God is spread all over existence, in the calls of the birds and in the green leaves of the trees and in the dewdrops and in the sun rays and in you and in me – all over – whose God is not something separate from life and existence; whose God can be in a cup of tea; whose God can be the river flowing by; whose God can be the cypress tree in the courtyard; and whose god can be three pounds of flax. It is not sacrilegious. It is not that God is reduced, Buddha is reduced, to three pounds of flax; on the contrary, three pounds of flax is transformed into divinity, into buddhahood, into God. It is not sacrilegious, it is one of the most sacred statements ever made.This is one of the basic truths to be understood. Then it will be very easy to go into this beautiful parable.There was once a woman who had heard of the fruit of heaven. She coveted it.Meditate over each word: There was once a woman who had heard… Many of the people who become religious, become religious only through information. That’s where they miss the whole point, their first step has fallen on the wrong track.If your life makes you religious, it is totally different. If your very experience of life creates inquiry in you about truth, that has beauty in it. But just because you have heard – people are talking about God and paradise and nirvana and enlightenment, and because of their talk and constant propaganda down the centuries, and millions of books and scriptures, and churches and temples and gurudwaras and mosques, and everywhere it is being taught, from the very childhood you are being conditioned that there is a God, that there is a paradise, that you have to search for it… If you become interested in the search because of those conditionings, your search is doomed from the very beginning. You have already moved in a wrong direction. It is not your search, it is borrowed. It is not an authentic desire in your heart, it is just in your head. It is accidental, it is because you have been told. If you were not told, you would not have bothered at all. And you can see it.When a Jaina comes to me, he never asks how to find God – because in his scriptures there is no belief about God. He asks how to attain moksha, ultimate freedom, liberation. God is not meaningful to him at all because he has not been taught about God. Not that he knows there is no God, but because his mind has been conditioned in a certain way, he was given another word with totally different connotations. He has been taught that your soul is in bondage in the world, and you have to drop the bondage and attain ultimate freedom. Until you attain ultimate freedom – when all bondages of attachment, possessiveness, domination, have disappeared, when there is no greed, no anger, no sex, when there is nobody left and you are a pure soul… Then you have arrived. This is the goal, moksha. He asks about moksha.But no Christian ever asks me about moksha, freedom. He has not been told. He asks how, by what means, one can enter the kingdom of God. He never asks how to become God because he has not been told. On the contrary, he has been told nobody can become God. God is God and you are you, God is the creator and you are the creature – and how can the creature be the creator? So even the idea of becoming God will look sacrilegious, a sin, a great sin. He will never ask how to become a God, how to realize God. No! All that he wants is how to enter the kingdom of God, that’s all.But when a Vedantin comes to me, his inquiry is totally different. He asks, “How to become God? How to become absolute truth?” He does not ask about the kingdom of God. He has been told, “Tattvamasi, that art thou. You are God in your very essence, so attain your godhood.” Aham brahmasmi – I am God – has been poured into him with the mother’s milk. He has become saturated with the idea. He asks, how to become God? From where are these different inquiries coming?When a Buddhist comes he never asks how to become God because there is no God in his theology. His theology is without any concept of God. In fact, to call it theology is not right because there is no theos, no God. He does not believe in a soul, so he will never ask how to realize one’s own being: there is none. Self-realization is utter nonsense for him. Because he does not believe in the soul there is no question of attaining liberation; there is nobody to be liberated. Then what is his inquiry? He asks about nirvana. Nirvana means how to extinguish this illusory flame of life. His inquiry is very negative, he simply asks how not to be. There is no question of being a soul, no question of being a God, no question of God’s kingdom. His inquiry is very negative. He asks how not to be, how to be extinguished utterly, how to become utter emptiness, how to disappear into emptiness so nothing is left.The Jaina asks how to make one’s own self free, and the Buddhist asks how to be free of one’s own self. But these different inquiries are all accidental, borrowed. Even your questions are borrowed, your queries are borrowed. Even your inquiry is not yours. It is not true, and when you begin with an untrue inquiry you will never come to a true conclusion.That is one of the greatest problems every seeker has to face. Don’t start with what you have heard, start with what you have felt. Can’t you feel the beauty of existence and the mystery of existence? Can’t you feel this utter poetry of existence? Do you have to go into the Vedas to feel the poetry of existence? Do you have to go into the Bible? Do you have to ask Buddha, Christ, Krishna? Can’t you, yourself see? Don’t you have eyes to see and ears to hear and a heart to feel? Then what are you doing here? What are you? Are you alive or not?An alive person is one who will look at life, who will witness life – who will not only witness life, but will witness the witness itself. And then there arises a great inquiry: “What is all this?” It is not borrowed, it is not heard from somebody else. It arises from the deepest core of his being just like a sprout arising out of a seed. Then the inquiry is not plastic, it is a real rose. And only a real rose can have a real fragrance.There was once a woman who had heard of the fruit of heaven. She had just heard, and when you hear you are bound to misunderstand. Now, the “fruit of heaven” is just a metaphor. It is just a way of saying, a poetic way of saying. The ultimate truth cannot be expressed in words. No word is adequate to express it. Hence metaphors have to be used, similes have to be used, just to give you a little indication, a little taste. It is difficult to show you the truth directly, so some indirect ways and means have to be devised. Parables have to be told, stories – because stories don’t say anything directly, they only give you subtle hints, delicate hints.The “fruit of heaven” – what does it mean? If you have heard it from somebody it simply means the fruit of heaven. Then you start thinking of a fruit. It is not a fruit, it is fruitfulness. The fruit only represents a state of fruitfulness. The fruit represents three F’s: one is fruitfulness, another is flowering, another is fragrance. And when all these three F’s exist together – the fruit, the flower, and the fragrance – the fourth F comes into existence. That is fulfillment. That is the real goal.Now if you try to decipher, to decode the symbol of the fruit of heaven, how are you going to work, how will you decode it? The Christian will think it means the Kingdom of God, and the Brahmin will think it means God-realization, and the Jaina will think it means freedom of the self, and the Buddhist will think it means freedom from the self. Again you have fallen into the trap of the herd.Be a little more intelligent. Be a little more trusting of your own being. Decode these beautiful metaphors on your own, meditate on them.That’s why I am speaking on these stories. Nobody has ever spoken on them. Why am I speaking on these small stories? – just to give you a few clues on how to meditate. These are not commentaries on these stories; I am not a commentator. I am simply helping you to meditate. I don’t want to give you a very fixed meaning, I simply want to give you a very liquid, vague, cloudy glimpse. Then you have to search and seek and find. The conclusion has to be yours. I can give you a few clues on how to meditate. That’s all that I am doing here – just clues on how to meditate, not conclusions. Don’t lean upon me. I am not going to give you a single conclusion because once a conclusion is given by somebody else it loses all truth, it becomes a falsehood. It may be true for me, but the moment I give it to you it becomes false. In the very transfer it loses all truth. To me it was a real rose, by the time it reaches you it is a plastic flower.This is the problem of language, the great problem that has always been faced by all the mystics of all the ages of all the lands. Language is good enough to convey mundane reality, it is utterly impotent in conveying the sacred reality.But some ways have to be found because it has to be conveyed. A parable, a story, is a subtle way, a delicate way, an indirect way. The story does not hit, it simply triggers a process in you. It is not like a stone that hits you hard. It is like the fragrance of a flower that comes and surrounds you and caresses you.There was once a woman who had heard of the fruit of heaven. She coveted it. The moment you believe in somebody else’s truth, you start coveting it. And truth cannot be coveted. The person who covets truth will never attain it.Truth is not a commodity to be coveted. Truth is not a thing to be desired and longed for. Truth is not there outside you to be possessed. Truth is something that flowers in you, you don’t take it from anybody. And if you attain truth, it is not like money that somebody else has lost because you have it. It is not a quantity in the world, it is a quality of being.When Buddha becomes enlightened it is not that somebody else is suffering: Buddha has usurped enlightenment, now somebody must be poor and will not be able to attain enlightenment. If somebody becomes rich, naturally somebody else somewhere will become poor. That’s not the case with truth. It is not a quantity, remember, it is a quality.If I see the beauty of the moon, it does not mean that I have taken some beauty of the moon and nobody else will be able to see the beauty now because I have possessed it. It is a quality. Millions of people can see the beauty. There is no question of competition, there is no quarrel. On the contrary, the more people see the beauty of the moon, the more beautiful it becomes.In fact, this has been one of the greatest observations of poets, painters, and the people who move in the dimension of aesthetics: when a poet writes a poem about the moon he reveals some beauty of the moon which was not available before. And many more people will be able to see it now, their sensitivity will be aroused.You have seen the sun rising, but if you have seen the paintings of Vincent van Gogh of the sun rising, the sun in the middle of the day, the sun setting, you will be surprised: he has a totally different way of looking at the sun. He was as madly in love with the sun as nobody has ever been. For one year continuously he was painting the sun and the sun and the sun; he was standing continuously under the sun for one year. It was so hot, but he wanted to catch the sun in all its moods. He caught the sun in all its moods, in all its whims, in all its expressions, but he himself went mad. One year of just standing under the sun, looking at the sun – the heat was too much, he could not bear it. His love for the sun was such that he went mad for it.If you see van Gogh’s paintings of the sun you will become, for the first time, aware of the beauty of the sun. When you look at the sun, something of van Gogh’s vision will have penetrated your soul.Nature is more beautiful because there have been nature poets. Nature is more beautiful because there have been nature painters. Nature is more beautiful because many, many people have seen beauty in it and that has become a heritage that has penetrated our beings.Truth is not like money, truth is like beauty. The more people see it, the more clear it is. The more people have it, the more people can have it. There is no question of coveting.But the woman had only heard, the woman had only gathered rumors about the fruit of heaven. Now, she must have felt very miserable, in despair: “Others have attained and I have not attained. I have to show to the world, I have to prove myself.”This is an ego trip, this is not a true search; this is the same ego trip… Some people try to collect more and more money so they can stand on the pile of money and declare to the world, “Nobody has more than I have.” Somebody else moves into the world of power politics so he can become the president of a country and declare, “Look! I have arrived.” Then there are others who think that when they have attained the fruit of heaven they will show the world: “Now do you know who I am? I am a realized person. I have attained and you are all ignorant, you are all sinners and you are all still crawling in the mud of the world. I have gone beyond it.” Then they can have that look which is known as holier-than-thou. This woman coveted it. If you hear about truth, God, enlightenment, there arises a great desire: “Others have something which I do not have. I must have it.”It is just like somebody else having a beautiful house, and you covet it; somebody else has a beautiful wife, and you covet. Is truth a beautiful house? Is truth a beautiful woman?Truth is not a thing, truth is a no-thing. Truth is not a commodity there outside you, it is an experience, it is in your interiority. It is felt, lived at the very core of your being. It cannot be possessed, it cannot be coveted – but that’s how it goes on.Just the other day somebody said if I can convince him, he will become a sannyasin. If I can convince him that by wearing orange and the mala he will attain bliss. Now, this is greed, and a greedy person cannot be a sannyasin. It is not a question of my convincing you, you will have to convince me that you are worth being initiated into sannyas. You will have to convince me that you have not come to inquire just because others are talking about God, but that a great inner desire has arisen in you, a longing, a thirst – that you are aflame, that a passion has arisen in you: “Life is useless if I don’t know who I am, if I don’t know from where I come and if I don’t know to where I am going. I have to know it because without knowing it, whatever I am doing is foolish, is going to be stupid. Without knowing who I am, whatever I do is meaningless. Meaning can arise only when I know my nature and start moving according to my nature. When there is harmony between me and the existence that surrounds me, only then can there be joy and bliss.”Bliss is not something to be desired, bliss is not something to be coveted. But the person who asked must have come here hearing others say that if you become a sannyasin you will attain God, bliss. Now he wants me to convince him.I am not a salesman! I am not selling God to you. Why should I convince you? If you are thirsty you will come to the river. The river does not bother, the river is not in any need of convincing you: “I am water and I can quench your thirst.” If you are thirsty you will try. You will have to try, there is no other way.But the problem always arises because we hear others, we don’t feel any passion arising in our own being. Our passion is borrowed, superficial. And a man who has no passion of his own for truth is not yet man. He is still part of the animal world, he is still living unconsciously. At least something… Even just a small thirst will do, but you will have to bring a thirst of your own.I have heard…A tramp knocked at a cottage door, and when it was opened he said to the housewife, “Beg pardon mum, but I wonder if you would not sew a button on a coat for me.”“Why yes, my man,” said the woman, a kindly soul. “Come in.”The tramp entered and handed the woman a button.“Very well,” she said, “now where is the coat?”“Ah, I ain’t got nothing but the button, mum. I was thinking maybe you would sew the coat on.”But people who start searching for God don’t even have the button. I am ready to supply the coat, but at least bring the button! At least a little thirst of your own, your own heart beating a little faster, a readiness to risk, a readiness to devote something, to dedicate, a readiness to sacrifice something… A readiness to risk…She asked a certain dervish, whom we shall call Sabar, “How can I find this fruit, so that I may attain immediate knowledge?”Sabr or Sabar is a significant word: it means patience. She asked a certain dervish, whom we shall call Sabar, “How can I find this fruit, so that I may attain immediate knowledge?” These parables are pieces of objective art. Each word has significance, and each word has to be meditated upon. Why should we call this dervish Sabar? That is not his name, certainly. That’s why the story says, “We shall call him Sabar.”Sabar comes from sabr: it means infinite patience. Those who are in search will need infinite patience. Patience is the greatest religious quality; if you have patience nothing else is needed. Patience is enough, enough unto itself. Patience means hope, trust, and without any hurry, without any impatience. Impatience simply shows that you are not trustful. Impatience simply shows that you want to impose yourself upon the will of God, that you want it right now. You don’t want him to work on his own. Impatience means, “My will is greater than your will.” Patience means, “I surrender my will to your will. Let you be my will, so whenever I am ripe, whenever – if it takes an eternity it is okay – I will trust, I will hope. I will not lose my heart, I will not be disheartened.”Just think of patience – it will bring meditation on its own. The man of patience becomes meditative because he becomes contented. He says, “God is looking after me so why should I worry?”The more God has disappeared from the world, the more worries have entered the world. You can watch it, there is a certain relationship. When people are in trust, in faith, when people know that God is, that we are taken care of, that we are not strangers on this earth, that we belong, that there is some invisible hand that is always ready to take us in the right direction, that we can live without worry, contentment arises, peace, silence, tranquility, serenity.All is lost now because trust in God is lost. The moment man loses God, he loses all because then he has to depend only on himself, and he is tiny, and existence is vast. Man is just an atom and the atom is trying to struggle with this infinite existence. There is bound to be tension, anguish, despair, frustration, worry, suicide, madness.The religious person is one who is relaxed with existence, who does not push the river – on the contrary, who dissolves into the river and says to the river, “Take me wherever you are going because wherever you are going is the goal.” The religious person, the person who is patient, is one who says, “I will not seek and search a goal of my own, I don’t have a private goal to seek and search. Wherever this infinite universe is going I am also going.” So whatever is the destiny of the whole is the destiny of the part. This is patience, this is sabr.She asked a certain dervish, whom we shall call Sabar, “How can I find this fruit…?” Now, she is asking a wrong question. She asks: “How can I find this fruit…?”Remember Lao Tzu’s famous statement: “Seek and you will never find, do not seek and it is already found.” In seeking you go astray because seeking means “my will.” Non-seeking means let-go, disappearance of the ego. And whenever you are not, God is. Lao Tzu is right: seek and you will miss, do not seek and find.Non-seeking is the way to find. It will look very strange, illogical, but this is how it is. This existence is illogical, that’s why we call it a mystery. If it were logical there would be no mystery. If existence were logical there would be no need for religion, science would have been enough. Science would have discovered everything if the existence were logical. But it is not; fortunately, it is not. Logic only goes to a certain extent and then it flops. And when logic flops the real existence begins.Existence is a mystery. The way to it is not logic but love. The way to it is not prose but poetry. The way to it is not the head but the heart.Now, this woman asks: “How can I find this fruit…?” The question of “how” is a question of the head, and the idea of finding this fruit is egoistic: “I must possess.” It is the desire to possess and conquer and be: “…so that I may attain immediate knowledge?” Now, the whole desire is how to attain the fruit so immediate knowledge is possible. People are in a hurry, they want instant God, just like instant coffee. They cannot wait.And when you cannot wait you simply say that you don’t care much. If you care you can wait; the more you care, the more you can wait. If you really care you can wait for eternity. If you don’t care, you are in a hurry. You say, “If it is possible right now, instantly, okay. Otherwise I am not going to waste time, it is not worth wasting time.”God is not a seasonal flower, it is a cedar of Lebanon; it takes time to grow. To reach the clouds, it takes time. In fact time is not enough, it takes eternity. Time falls short.I am not saying that God is not available now. Another paradox to be understood: eternity is always now. Now is the door to eternity. But that door is available only to the patient one – because the very hurry of those who are in a hurry and say, “I want this instantly,” creates such clouds and clamor in their minds that they cannot see the now. To see the now one needs an unclouded consciousness. And consciousness is unclouded only when there is no desire, no hurry, no impatience, no longing. Consciousness is unclouded only when one is not going anywhere. Just “sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” That is patience.“You would be best advised to study with me,” said the dervish. “but if you will not do so, you will have to travel resolutely and at times restlessly throughout the world.”That’s what anybody who knows would say: “You would be best advised to study with me…” What does he mean? The word study has not the quality that Sabar must have used.In India we have a word, swasthya. It can be translated as study, but that misses the whole point. In fact, swasthya means self-study, studying the self. It is not a question of reading scriptures, it is not a question of going more and more into information. Rather it is a question of going more and more inward, into transformation.When Sufis say, “Study with us,” they simply mean “Be with us.” Being with a master is the study; just being with the master, adab, just being in the presence of the one who knows, drinking his presence, savoring his being, tasting him, digesting his energy. You will be surprised: if you come to a Sufi study circle, it has nothing to do with the study circles that exist in the West. In a Western study circle you read a book, then questions are raised and questions answered, and discussion follows.In a Sufi study group no question is raised, no book is read. People sit silently for hours, and maybe somebody starts swaying. But the one thing to be remembered is: nobody has to do anything. If it happens it is good. Somebody sometimes starts saying something, but the rule has to be followed: nobody should try to say anything. If it happens on its own, if one finds that something needs to be said on its own – is ready to be said, is just on the tongue, wants to come out “in spite of me” – then it’s okay.It is just like the Quaker prayer meeting. Quakers learned it from the Sufis. In the Middle Ages, Sufis penetrated deep into European countries. Quakers learned how to sit silently from the Sufis. The Quakers sit silently for hours; then somebody may stand up and may start saying something, but those statements are very inspired. They are not from the person himself. As if God has taken possession of him, he has become just a hollow bamboo, a flute, and some unknown energy has started singing through him.The rule has to be followed. But in a Quaker group it is very difficult to follow the rule because the basic thing is missing, the master is missing.In a Sufi group the master is a must. The Sufi group arises only when the center is there. The Quaker group is just a traditional thing. They learned it from the Sufis but they missed one thing. They learned the outward, adab, the etiquette, how to sit in silence – and it is good even if without a master; sitting in silence is good – but the mind is very cunning.Your mind may play tricks, your mind may like to say something, your mind may enjoy the idea: “Now I am a vehicle of God.” And it is not that you are trying to deceive others; your mind can deceive you and you may stand up – and you will feel as if you are not doing anything. But there is no check in a Quaker group.When you are with a Sufi master there is a check. He will immediately stop you, he will know when it is from your mind. Maybe it is from your unconscious mind but it is still from your mind. You may not be aware of from where it is coming, that does not mean that it is coming from God. It may be coming from your own deep unconscious of which you are not aware, so it looks as if it is coming from God. A master is needed, one who can see through and through, who is a mirror not only of your conscious mind but of your unconscious too, before whom you are utterly naked, before whom you cannot hide a thing. His very presence prevents all strategies of the mind.That is the meaning of being with a master, adab. That’s what Sabar means when he says, “You would be best advised to study with me…” “Be with me, learn to be here. Just watch what is happening here.”But the woman was in a hurry. Study? She had not come to study. She wanted to know immediately where the tree was, where that garden was, and where the fruit of heaven was. She was not there to waste her time in studying some nonsense. She wanted immediate results, she was in a hurry. Sabar must have immediately felt it. So first he said, “You would be best advised to study with me, but if you will not do so…” He must have seen the mind of the woman, that she was not going to do it. She was too much in a hurry; she could not be in the presence of a master.“…you will have to travel resolutely and at times restlessly throughout the world.” Then you can go, but one thing I must remind you of. Remember, you will have to go: “…throughout the world, resolutely and at times very restlessly.” The journey will be long. If you want it in such a hurry, then the journey will be very long. If you are ready to wait, the journey can be very short. If you can wait infinitely it can happen right now too, but if you cannot wait, it may take years or even lives. It is up to you.The woman missed. The people who are in a hurry always go on missing the masters because the basic requirement to be with a master is patience, and they are impatient. She must have thought, “It is better to go to somebody else who can show me a shortcut.”She left him and sought another, Arif the Wise One…Now, arif means the knowledgeable. If you go to a real master, a perfect master, he will demand many things from you. He will demand utter surrender, just as Krishna says to his disciple Arjuna: “Sarva dharma parityajya mamekam sharnam braja – leave all your religions etcetera, and come to my feet, surrender.”The real master will demand, and the greater the disciple, the greater the demand is going to be. The more the potential, the more the demand is going to be. The real master is not there just to inform you, he is there to transform you. But who wants to be transformed? People want something without paying for it.That’s why the woman went to Arif. Arif means the knowledgeable one. He is not a master, he is a teacher. Teachers are many, masters very rare and very few. That’s why Sabar said, “You will have to go around the whole earth, you will have to travel the whole world. Then too, if you can find the master again, it will be a rare fortune.”You will meet many teachers, they exist everywhere. And they have great appeal too because they never demand. On the contrary, they supply, they give you information, they make you more knowledgeable. Arif means one who is very knowledgeable, a learned man who knows the scriptures, knows doctrines, dogmas, can explain difficult problems of theology, can go into subtleties, into very deep, logical complexities of systems. But information can never satisfy. It is as futile as informing a hungry person about bread: it is about and about, the bread is never supplied. Great talk about the bread, but how can bread, just by being talked about, be satisfying? Talk about the lamp will not create light.So the woman must have soon become frustrated. She must have gathered great knowledge, but she must have become frustrated. She moved.That’s how people go on moving from one teacher to another teacher. Even if they come across a master, there is every possibility of missing the master because they come with expectations. And no master ever fulfills anybody’s expectations; that is an absolute criterion. If somebody fulfills your expectations he is a teacher. In fact he is a follower of yours, he is fulfilling your expectations. The real master never fulfills your expectations. On the contrary, he goes on destroying your expectations. Whatever you expect, he will never do, he will do just the contrary. Why? – because if he fulfills your expectations he will never be able to change you.You have to be changed, utterly changed. You have to be burned in toto. Your expectations come from your mind, your mind has to be destroyed. Only then – and only then – is God possible. So how can a real master fulfill your expectations?People go on changing, from one teacher to another. They are on a honeymoon with one teacher for a few days, then as every honeymoon, it fades away, and after a few days they are finished. When they first come across a teacher they are very enchanted; it seems as if the time has come for the fulfillment of their desire. But soon knowledge is supplied, and knowledge cannot quench their thirst.The woman must have felt frustrated, so she went to another:…Hakim the Sage…Hakim means the man who has character, Arif means the man who has knowledge. Now she is finished with knowledge. She has seen a learned scholar but what does that have to do with it? Now she wants a man who is not only knowledgeable, but who has practiced, who has something in his character to say that he knows.So she must have gone to another: …Hakim the Sage…. Now, the man of character has more appeal than the man of knowledge because the man of knowledge lives in an intellectual world which very few can understand, and the man of character is very earthly, you can understand him. He eats only once a day, he lives in poverty – it is so visible – he is a celibate. Any stupid person can see. No intelligence is needed, no intelligence at all is required, so foolish people become very much attracted to character. And the people who create character around themselves are also mediocre because by creating a character nothing is changed, never. Only their surface is painted in a better way, their inner reality remains the same.But it has great influence on people. They can see, “Yes, this man is not only a learned man, this is a man of God. Look how he lives, with what simplicity, with what humbleness, how egoless he is.” It is so plain on the surface anybody can see.So she went to the teacher, Hakim, the man of character. But sooner or later you will see the hypocrisy. If you live long enough with the man of character you will see the duality, that there are moments when his real being surfaces, there are moments when he cannot manage his so-called character. If you live long enough and if you watch the man of character, you will be able to see the contradictions of his life, the hypocrisy. He is not one, he is many – or at least two. One is his real essence which comes once in a while at certain moments, through certain provocations. He may be a man of very great compassion if everything goes according to him. If something goes against him, anger may surface. For that anger you will have to be with such a man for a long time – because once in a while he will flare up. He may have repressed his sex, may have become celibate, but once in a while the repressed desire may come to the conscious mind, he may behave in contradiction to his character. Because the duality has not been dissolved, it is bound to assert… So she must have been tired, seeing the hypocrisy.She went to:…Mojud the Mad…Mojud means the mad. In a way she was coming closer. First she went to the man of knowledge, Arif, which is very superficial. Then she went to the man of character, which is a little bit more practical, not just heady. He had tried to do something with his life, even if he was wrong; his sincerity could not be suspected. He may have been full of errors but he was sincere. He had tried to do – in a stupid way of course – but he had tried to do.Now she went to a madman, Mojud. Mojud means one who is utterly drowned in God, lost, has attained the state of fana, is no more. She had come to the best man.But there is a problem with a mojud: he cannot be a master. He is so mad, he cannot help. He is utterly lost, he is not in any way capable of helping. In fact, he himself needs the help of an enlightened person so that some sanity can be brought back to him.That kind of work has rarely been done in the world, but one of the greatest masters of this age, Meher Baba, did it. He was also here in Pune, and the Pune people were as much against him as they are against me, for the same reasons – because he would not fulfill their expectations. He was a man of God. He did something so tremendously valuable that it is rarely done, but no history books will ever mention it because histories are written by fools about other fools. Histories are written by people who don’t know anything about the deeper phenomenon that goes on happening. Histories and so many books are written about the politicians, stupid politicians: Adolf Hitler…If you want to see all the books about Adolf Hitler, you can go to Samarpan’s room. He has them all, so many books, he is the expert. And people go on writing as if there is something important. Can’t you forget those stupid, neurotic people? Is there any need to keep their memory alive forever? It would be very good to drop them out of history. They are wounds! But flowers are not talked about, only wounds.Meher Baba is not part of history. Nobody has tried to see the great experiment that he did. He traveled all over the country to catch hold of all kinds of majzubs, madmen, because they are just very close to God. Only one thing is needed: somebody is needed who can shake them back to their sanity. Then they can become great masters. Just a little sanity will be needed, then their madness will have a method in it. Right now they are only mad without any method, they cannot help. And to follow them may be dangerous, hazardous. To follow them, you will be only following yourself because they will never give you any clue. Whatever they will say, if you follow it, can lead you astray. It can throw you into deep pitfalls because they are not in their consciousness; they have drowned themselves in God so much that they are drunk, they are drunkards. They have known God but they have no way to relate it to you. They cannot be masters.Each master becomes a mojud before he becomes a master – he goes through great madness – but all majzubs are not masters. If a mojud dies as a mojud, he will attain God but without helping anybody at all.Now she had come to a right person, but the person was not a master and could not be a master. He could not supply any method.So she started moving again to somebody who could supply a method. So she went to the fourth, Alim. Alim means the scientist, the methodologist, one who can give you the methods. She had again moved far away – it is not necessary that the person who can give you the method knows what he is doing because methods can be gathered from scriptures. You can read Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and you can start giving methods to others; that is not going to help.A mojud cannot give methods. And the person who gives methods, if he has not been a mojud, is of no use. The mojud cannot be followed – it is dangerous because you will be following a madman – and you cannot follow Alim the scientist because he himself does not know anything. He has gathered methods, he is interested, he is a collector of methods.There are many people who go on writing commentaries on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and they have never meditated, they have never known what meditation is. But they know all about meditation. Many times they have come to me; they have written beautiful commentaries, they are very knowledgeable, learned, scholarly. You cannot find any fault with their language, with their exposition, but there is no experience to support what they are saying. There is not much difference between them and the ignorant people.…and many more.She went to many more.She passed thirty years in her search. Finally she came to a garden.The garden is again a symbol. The story of the world starts with the garden, the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and life was eternally beautiful and blissful. The garden is the beginning of existence. And then Adam and Eve were thrown out, or threw themselves out, by eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.The moment you become knowledgeable you lose innocence. And innocence is the garden. In innocence, flowers bloom. In innocence, fragrance is released. In innocence, all is bliss. The garden is a symbol for innocence. And since Adam and Eve left the garden, man has been searching for the garden again and again.The teqir, or the school of the master, is called the garden of the master – because with a master you start vomiting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. The master is nothing but a process of taking out all the poison of knowledge from your system so that you can become innocent again. And when Adam is innocent, Adam becomes Christ. He enters the garden again – paradise lost, paradise regained.Do you know what the word paradise means? It comes from a Sufi word firdaus. Firdaus means a walled garden. That is from where the word paradise comes. Paradise is the garden. We have lost the garden somewhere in the past, we have to regain it. We have to be again as innocent as children and immediately we are back in the garden. In fact we have always been in the garden, but our eyes are so full of knowledge that we cannot see the garden. When the eyes are cleaned of knowledge and the dust of knowledge disappears from the mirror of consciousness, suddenly the whole garden explodes.She passed thirty years in her search. Finally she came to a garden. There stood the tree of heaven, and from its branches hung the bright fruit of heaven.Standing beside the tree was Sabar…You can imagine the shock the woman must have gone through. Sabar? He was the first one she had come across. Standing beside the tree was Sabar…That too is a beautiful metaphor: if you want to attain the fruit of heaven, you will have to pass through the custodian, Sabar: patience. Patience is the door back to the garden. The first dervish was standing by the side of the tree.“Why did you not tell me when we first met that you were the custodian of the fruit of heaven?” she asked him.“Because you would not then have believed me.”A truth can be told only when you are ready for it. A truth can be given to you only when you are worthy of it. A truth can be transferred only when you have become a receptacle, not before it, not a single moment before it. When you are ripe, mature, ready, then not even a single moment passes by. Immediately: here you are ripe and there you are given the truth.The master cannot load you with something that is unnecessary. The unnecessary load will be heavy on you. It will be destructive, it may turn into poison, it will not nourish you. It may give you weight, but it will not give you vitality.“Because you would not then have believed me. Besides, the tree produces fruit only once in thirty years and thirty days.”Even if you had believed, you would have had to wait. Even if you had believed, this time had to be passed in infinite patience; for that also you were not ready. So the best course was this: that I should allow you to go from one teacher to another, from one school to another school, and come back again when the time was ripe. You are ripe now because you have seen through all the falsities.You have been to Arif, the man of knowledge, and it was not enough. How can knowledge ever be enough? Knowledge is knowledge. To know about water is not going to quench your thirst.You went to Hakim, the man of character, but the real man has no character. The real man lives moment to moment. The real man has consciousness but no conscience. The religious man knows nothing of morality; although he lives in morality he knows nothing of it. The real man has no character; he is characterless, although only he has character.What do I mean by this contradiction? He has no programmed character, he does not live in a ready-made way, he is not predictable. Each moment he responds in a fresh way. He is true, he is one, he is integrated, but these things are not imposed on him. He has not practiced them. He has worked for only one thing: he has tried to become more and more conscious. Now, out of his consciousness, each moment characters arise and disappear. But he does not carry the load of a structure around himself. He has no armor of character. He is continuously free, he is freedom.You went to Hakim, and then you knew that all character, imposed character, carries hypocrisy in it. Then you went to Mojud and he was a real man, but he was so mad that he could not teach you anything. Seeing that he could not teach you any method, you went to Alim, the methodologist, who knows everything about methods. But he had never done anything, it was not based on his own experience.All this was needed, everything was good, and you have come back right in time because this: “…tree produces fruit only once in thirty years and thirty days.” Even if you had believed – which was impossible – you could not have understood. Even if I had said, “I am the custodian,” you may have thought, “This man is very egoistic, claiming himself to be the custodian.” That may have put you off. You could not have understood it because you had come with the expectation that the man of knowing is humble.The man of real understanding is neither arrogant nor humble. He simply is not, he only states the fact. It can hurt you, but that is your responsibility, that is your problem. He does not want to hurt you, he has no desire to hurt anybody, but his statements can hurt. And when they hurt, you think they are being made in arrogance, in anger. They are not made in any anger or arrogance, he is simply stating a fact as it is.Sabar said: “Because you would not then have believed me.” – “And it was better not to say anything that you could not believe. It was better for me to wait for you. And I have also been waiting. I am Sabar, I can wait; that’s why I am the custodian. And you have come right in time. Now don’t feel worried and don’t think those thirty years have been a wastage. Nothing is a wastage. All those experiences – even going through false teachers, even going through unnecessary paths – have helped you. They have ripened you, they have made you mature. Now you are ready, I can deliver the fruit to you.”And that’s what is happening here; many come, only a few stay. Many come, but I cannot tell them that now there is no need to go anywhere, you have arrived home. I can tell that only to a few people, only to those who are ready to understand, ripe to understand. Otherwise I have to tell people to go, to search, to seek. Hopefully, after thirty years and thirty days, if I am here and you come back, you may be able to understand, and I may be able to give to you what I can give to you right now – but you would not take it.The greatest thing in life is to be ready to take, to receive, to be feminine, to be a womb. And the real disciple is one who becomes feminine, who becomes a womb. When he is with the master he is just receptive, passive. He drops all seeking, all searching, all hankering. He forgets all about truth, all about God and paradise and all that. He simply goes on allowing the master to enter him, he becomes the host for the master.And when you disappear completely and the master has filled you completely, the master also disappears. In the disappearance of the disciple and the master is paradise, the garden. You have come back home.Enough for today.

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The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Is there a difference between the real self and no-self?The no-self is the real self, there is no difference at all. It is just a different way of expressing the same thing. The “real self” is a positive way of expressing it, and “no-self” the negative way.But always remember: the negative is far better than the positive. The greatest masters of the world have always expressed in the negative way for a certain reason: the positive can deceive you, can easily deceive you. If it is said that you have a real self, what are you going to understand by it? You will think of whatever you understand about yourself, that the real self will be a purified state of the same thing, higher, holier, more dignified, deathless, divine – but you will conceive of it according to the idea of the self that you already have. Your real self will become only a modified idea, a decorated idea of the false self. That is the danger.The real self is utterly different; not only utterly different from your false self, it is diametrically opposite to it. You cannot have any idea of the real self through the unreal self. The unreal has to cease for the real to be. The unreal has to go absolutely.What idea can you have of light if you know only darkness? Whatever you think of light will remain a form of darkness. You know darkness.That’s why Buddha has chosen a negative way. He does not talk about the real self, atma, the soul, atta. He talks about anatta, no-self, anatma, absence of self. He negates the whole idea of the self because the idea of the self will carry – will remain continuous with – your false idea of the self.You have to disappear as you are, then the real arises. You don’t have any idea, not even in your dreams, of what the real is. You are unreal and you live in unreality. You live in dreams, you are fast asleep. You cannot conceive of what awakening is going to be.Only one thing can be said: whatever you know will not be there. This is the negative way of saying it.Sufis have also chosen in the same way. They say fana – first dissolve, dissolve in toto. Nothing of you has to remain, and only then that great transformation. When you are absent, God becomes a presence in you, but only then. That condition has to be fulfilled.The danger with the positive expression is this: any positive expression is bound to be limited. The positive means the defined. Only the negative can be undefined, only the negative can be unbounded. The positive immediately becomes a thing, and you are not a thing. You are a no-thing; that’s why Buddha says you are a nothing. Remember always, nothing does not mean nothing; it simply means no thing.But we live in the world of things, we are surrounded by things. And it is very easy to think of our own self as another thing – luminous, divine, but still a thing. It is not a thing, it is a no-thing. It is not even a person, it is only a presence. It is not even a flower, but only a fragrance.In our “thingified” culture, personal existence has lost all significance. We are continuously surrounded by things, man-made things. Things distract the human person from the fact that he is a no-thing. Maybe that’s why we are so interested in things. “Have as many things as you can, go on accumulating things. The more things you have, the more you are” – this is our logic.When you have a great bank balance you feel you are. The moment the bank balance disappears, you start disappearing. People commit suicide when they go bankrupt, as if their soul was in the bank. Their bank balance was their soul. How can they live now without a soul?Just watch how attached you become to things. Your house, your many scientific gadgets that are nothing but toys – how deeply you become obsessed with them. And slowly, slowly you forget completely that you are a no-thing. Not only that you forget that you are a no-thing, you forget that your wife is not a thing, that your child is not a thing. Surrounded by things and things, living in a thingified culture… That is the real name for a materialist culture. One tends to forget all that is spiritual, and one tends to reduce everything into a thing. Even persons are reduced.When you meet a woman and you fall in love, she is a person. Sooner or later you reduce her into a thing, she becomes a wife. A wife is a thing, a woman is a person. If you really love a woman you will not reduce her to a wife. A wife is a function. If you really love a man you will not reduce him to a husband. A husband? It is a legal contract, a formality. To be in love with a man, undefined, indefinable, has beauty; to reduce him to a contract, to reduce him to a function, to reduce him to a husband, means you have reduced him into a thing.But whatever you do, a person remains a person, and he cannot be reduced into a thing. And that creates trouble. The wife remains a woman, whatever you think. She remains a woman. You can believe that she is a wife, but still she is a woman – vast, unpredictable. That creates trouble. You would like her to be as predictable as a thing, as your car, as your tape recorder, as your TV – predictable, manipulatable, controllable, always obedient. And she tries, but still there is something inside her which is not a thing at all, a no-thing, a freedom. That asserts. And whenever that freedom asserts, there is trouble. You also have that freedom, and whenever your freedom asserts there is trouble.We love people, but our love is not real love because we go on reducing them into things. Real love will raise them higher, higher than the person. Real love will make them presences. Watch. When you meet a man or a woman, the other is a person. If your love is not real, the person will disappear and there will be a thing, a wife, a husband, et cetera. If your love is real, if you respect the nothingness of the other person, the innermost unbounded infinity and eternity of the person, you will raise him or her into a presence. The person will disappear; there will be a presence, a very, very vital presence. But the presence cannot be predictable, and the presence cannot be manipulated. The presence means freedom. It is as free as the fragrance of a flower.Because no person can really be reduced totally and finally into a thing, people stop loving people. They start loving things. It is safer that way. Watch yourself. Do you love things? That means you have forgotten completely who you are, and you have forgotten completely that God exists as a presence in existence. And you will never be able to have any communion with God.Millions of people only go on gathering things, go on possessing things. Finally what happens? They are possessed by things. If you try to possess things, you will be possessed by things. And this is the ugliest state a man can fall into.Things seem solid, certainly they are solid. There is no need to believe in things, there is no need to trust. They are so solid, they are there, tangible. Their existence needs no proof. Things seem solid, they are solid. And the no-thing seems to be in danger today – because that no-thing that you are is not solid. It is not tangible, it is not visible. You cannot touch it, you cannot see it, you cannot hear it. Unless you have a heart to feel it, your senses are incapable of knowing anything about it. It is not an experience of your senses, it is something transcendental to the senses.Deep concern, care, respect, love, responsibility, the giving of self to another, these are not thing-like activities; when you start believing too much in things these activities start disappearing.That’s why I say this country thinks it is religious. It is not! It believes in things. There are two kinds of people in this country, but both believe in things. One kind is called the worldly, that kind goes on accumulating things. The other kind is called the otherworldly, spiritual, religious: that kind goes on renouncing things. But both are focused on things, both concentrate on things – one to possess, one to dispossess. But their eyes remain focused on things.I call this country one of the most materialistic countries in the world. It is living in a great illusion, and the illusion is created because the people who renounce things appear to be religious. It is not a question of possessing things or renouncing things.A religious person is one who has started living in the world of no-things, who knows how to love, how to pray, how to meditate – because meditation is not a solid thing. You cannot show it to anybody. Neither is love a commodity. You cannot sell it in the marketplace, you cannot profit from it. The religious person is one who starts entering the world of no-things. And the beginning has to be with the acceptance – with the celebration of – your own no-thinghood, of your own nothingness. It is far better to use the negative expression so that you don’t start thinking about yourself as a thing.Symbols are significant because a symbol creates its own center in you, and starts creating a reality around it. For example, if you believe that you are a soul, your whole life is going to be different. It will be settled by that symbol of the soul. If you believe that you are a no-self, anatta, a silent nothingness, an utter emptiness, a nobody, that will transform your whole life. It is going to be different.The person who thinks, “I am a soul,” will live differently from the person who thinks, “There is nobody inside me.” What will be the difference? The person who thinks, “I am a soul” will be alienated. He will think himself separate from existence. That’s what alienation is. The word alienation comes from a Latin root, alienare, which means “to make strange or to separate what once was united.” The person who thinks, “I am” will certainly have to draw lines around himself to make it clear who he is: “I am not the tree, I am not the rock, I am not the woman I love, I am not the child I have given birth to, I am not this earth, I am not the sun.” He will have to go on defining himself: “What I am not.” He will have to eliminate millions of things; then a tiny space will be left, of which he will think, “I am.” This is alienation.The positive language used down the ages by the religious people has created great alienation. Man has become a stranger in a world which is his home. He feels homeless, uprooted, an outsider. And the reason is a wrong symbol. Change the symbol and you will see how your life starts changing. Small changes sometimes bring great revolutions. Just a slight change. Symbols are significant, they create their own world. Each symbol creates a world. A symbol is a seed.Just think that you are a no-self. Now there is no need to draw any boundary around you. How can you draw one? You are not. You cannot draw a boundary when you are not. You need not think, “I am not the tree, and I am not the rock, and I am not the earth, and I am not the people who are here.” You will have to think in a totally different way. You will have to say, “Because I am not, that means I am all. Because I am not, that means I am not a wave in the ocean but the ocean itself. ‘I am not’ means God is.” Suddenly you belong to the world and the world belongs to you, and it is your home. And that brings great peace and great joy; you are not alienated.Alienation is bound to create some kind of neurosis, schizophrenia, some kind of great paranoia – because if you are, you are against this whole world. And you are so small, and the world is so vast, there is no possibility of your ever being the conqueror. Now the whole stupid idea of conquering nature arises. Once you accept that you are a self, now you have to conquer, you have to prove. You have to conquer other selves; you have to conquer nature. You have to prove yourself.The greatest teachers have always been negative. They don’t say that you are, they say you are not – and the beauty of that negativity is immense, incalculable, immeasurable.Remember the significance of the symbol. The symbol is just a center around which you become integrated. The opposite of symbolic is diabolic. The symbol draws people together and generates action. The diabolic is what pulls apart and enervates. Without a symbol creating unity and involvement, people slip into diabolic apathy. Apathy creates sleep and an illusion as if the problems have been solved. But they are not solved.A symbol is a seed, a creative seed. Choose a symbol very intelligently. Much will depend on it, your whole life may be decided by the symbol you choose. If you choose a wrong symbol, you will be moving in a wrong direction. The function of the master is to give you the right seeds, right symbols. Sannyas is a symbol, nothing else, a symbol around which you can create a new vision, a new perspective.There are people who have forgotten the significance of symbols. They start falling apart, they start falling to pieces. There is nothing to keep them together. The symbol keeps you together, it is like glue. It gives you direction, it gives you meaning, it gives you a possible future, it makes you aware of your potentiality.If you don’t choose a right symbol, your life will become diabolic, it will become disintegrated, fragmentary. And when a person becomes disintegrated and fragmentary, his life takes on the color of apathy, indifference. He drags, he is bored, he somehow manages to live. He simply waits for death to come and deliver him. His life can’t have any poetry, his life can’t have any splendor, his life can’t have any dance. There is nothing to dance for.Man is a symbolic animal; that is my definition of man. Man cannot live without symbols. It is because of this great need that religions have always existed. They have existed because man needs symbols.This century is the first in the whole of human history which is living without symbols, and suffering much, unnecessarily. When you don’t have symbols you start disintegrating. Modern man lives in apathy, boredom. He is continuously tired and weary of existence. There is nothing to hold him together, he is always falling apart. He has no center, he is only a circumference. He can’t have any richness of being. So choose a right symbol. And no-self is far better than the self.You ask, “Is there a difference between the real self and no-self?” There is no difference in reality. When you arrive, the no-self is the real self. But there is a difference before you have arrived. When you are on the journey there is a difference.And my suggestion is, choose the negative; there is far more possibility of your reaching the positive by choosing the negative. If you choose the positive you will be lost. Then your self will be nothing but a sanctified idea of your ego.The second question:Osho,Is poetry the voice of wonder, or an avoidance of moving closer to the source, a sensuous lingering?It all depends on the poet. Poetry is simply a flowering, an outpouring of the heart of the poet. On a rosebush there will be a roseflower, it depends on the rosebush. No other flower will happen to the rosebush, only the rose. It depends on the poet.In Sanskrit, in the ancient language of India, we have two words for poet. I think there is no other language in the world which has two words for poet. One is rishi and the other is kavi. The English word poet only translates the second, kavi. For that first word, rishi, in English there is no equivalent. It has been translated as the seer, but that is only approximately right.These two words will be good to understand. The rishi means one who has seen, one who has arrived, one who has entered the source and now a poetry arises out of him. He is not a poet in the ordinary sense, he does not compose poetry. Poetry simply flows out of him. Even if he talks in prose, there is poetry in it. And even if he sits silently underneath a tree, there is poetry in his silence. If he walks, his walk has a grace of its own, a poetry. If he looks at you, you will find poetry pouring through his eyes. If he touches you, you will feel poetry flowing into your body through his touch. One who has arrived becomes poetry. A rishi is a poet who has become poetry itself.The poet only has glimpses. The poet comes to know what reality is only once in a while, and that is only for a moment, like lightning. One moment the window opens and then it is closed again. But that glimpse stirs his heart. Now he tries to express it, to find the right words, right rhythm. If he is a poet he will compose poetry, if he is a painter he will paint, if he is a musician he will try to bring that glimpse back again in his songs or in his music, or if he is a sculptor he will try to transform a marble rock into his vision. But there is great effort. The vision is gone, only the memory lingers. The taste is still on the tongue, but only a lingering taste, and great effort is needed to express it.The poet tries to express. The rishi can’t help expressing it. There is no effort involved because the experience is not just a glimpse. The experience has become his very soul: he is it.You ask me, “Is poetry the voice of wonder…?” Yes, the rishi’s poetry is the voice of wonder, it is the voice of God himself. That’s why in the East we say the Vedas are not written by man but by God himself. It simply means that God has spoken through man and the people he has used were only mediums, vehicles. The words are not their own, the words have come from God. So is the case with the Upanishads and the Gita, and so is the case with the Koran and the Bible and the Tao Te Ching.The Koran is a descendance from the beyond. Mohammed is only on the receiving end; he has not composed it, he has not written it. It has been written through him, he was only a medium. He has been used by God just as you write with a pen – the pen is not the writer. The pen is only used, it is an instrument of writing, but the writing comes from beyond, it comes from you. You use your hand to hold the pen, but the hand is not the writer either. That again is an instrument.When God speaks, there is no effort involved, there is no deliberate composition of poetry or painting. One is in a kind of drunkenness, one is a drunkard. One is drowned in God and something flows. Then certainly the poetry is the voice of wonder and it has great mystery in it. It has the taste of eternity. It is nectar.And blessed are those who can move and can be moved by such poetry, who can move into this poetry, this kind of poetry, and can be moved by this kind of poetry. Yes, blessed are they.But the other kind of poetry, which is not the voice of God, is also there. It is just man’s creation. It is mundane. Howsoever beautiful, it carries man’s signature on it, it carries all the limitations of man. The other kind of poetry may be an avoidance of the real kind. It may be an escape.You ask, “Is poetry the voice of wonder, or an avoidance of moving closer to the source, a sensuous lingering?” The other kind of poetry can be an avoidance. You may be afraid to take the jump, you may be afraid to lose yourself totally, so you allow only a few glimpses here and there, and then you drown yourself: what you call creativity. You paint, you make poetry, you create music, and you get lost in “doings.” That may be an avoidance. Maybe you are afraid: that lightning was too much.You are afraid that if you don’t get drowned in your so-called creativity, the window may open again. And who knows? You may not be capable of resisting the temptation of jumping out of it. It is so alluring, it is so magnetic, it simply pulls you into the unknown. It is like a vortex and it is so powerful that nothing can hold you.It is possible. The other kind of poetry, the other kind of painting and creativity, may be just an avoidance of the creator.Gurdjieff used to divide art into two divisions: one he used to call objective art and the other subjective art. The objective art is the art that flows out of a man who has arrived, and the subjective art is illusory, dreamlike. It is out of the man who himself is fast asleep, only dreaming that he is awake – only dreaming that he is awake. And certainly when you dream that you are awake, that dream becomes a hindrance to awakening – because you are already thinking that you are awake, so what is the point of thinking of another awakening? You are awake in your mind, so you go on sleeping.It is very right to have two words for poet. Because Mohammed’s words are poetry, pure poetry, but they are different from Milton. Omar Khayyam’s words are pure poetry, but they are different from Shakespeare. Buddha’s words are pure poetry, but they are different from Kalidas.Where is the difference? The difference is that Buddha is no more, only God is. Buddha has become a hollow bamboo, a flute. The song is descending from the beyond, Buddha is a flute on the lips of the beyond. He is not a doer; he is not at all. His nothingness is the source of his poetry. But Kalidas is very much, Shakespeare is very much, Milton is very much. All the poets of the world are very much. You can just watch it. You will be surprised, poets are very egoistic people, sometimes more egoistic than people who have much money and much power. Poets are very quarrelsome and are continuously fighting with each other, condemning each other, taunting each other, or very ironical about each other. They create poetry, but their poetry is ordinary, subjective, dreamlike. Their poetry reflects only their faces. They are not rishis, they are only kavis.When the poetry starts reflecting the face of God, you are a rishi, a seer, a real poet.Kelly comes to Cohen’s office to sell him a dictaphone, and after listening to the sales pitch, Cohen, who has a very strong Jewish accent asks, “Tell me, what for I need a dictaphone? I have a secretary, an office boy, a junior vice president. What for I need a dictaphone?”Kelly, being a super-salesman, says, “Tell you what, Mr. Cohen, take the dictaphone one month free of charge and just try it.”“Well,” said Cohen, “if it shouldn’t cost a penny, what the hell; I have nothing to lose.”After one month, Kelly returned and asked Cohen how he enjoyed it. “Well,” Cohen said, “it is pretty okay, but there seems to be one thing wrong with it.”“What is that?” replied the salesman.“The damn thing talks too much like a Jew!”The poetry is going to be your reflection. If you are there too much, your ego will be reflected in your poetry; then it will be nothing but an ornament for the ego. But if you are not there, God will be reflected. Then poetry is sacred. That is the beauty of a Zen haiku, it is sacred. That is the beauty of the Upanishads, they are sacred.Remember, for real poetry to be born, you have to die. You and real poetry cannot exist together. Real poetry is religion. Religion is the highest form of art, and art is the lowest form of religion. Religion is pure aesthetics.The third question:Osho,Why do politicians go on misunderstanding you?It can’t be helped. They are utterly incapable of understanding something which is nonpolitical. They can understand only politics, they are experts in understanding politics. And even when there is nothing of politics, they suspect. They are constantly suspicious, and they go on finding politics even when nothing of it exists.Now, this place is absolutely a nonpolitical place. We are not interested in any kind of politics, but whenever they see that so many people are gathering, they become suspicious.Now the central Indian government wants to know how many sannyasins we have in the whole world, how many centers we have in India and abroad, how many government officials are sannyasins, and so many queries. Just because the orange people are growing and spreading, they are becoming afraid – something is on the way.I am not interested in politics at all, but their paranoia, their fear, is that if so many people are here, sooner or later there may be trouble for them. And out of their fear they can go on interpreting things. It will be their interpretations, and they can create so much mess in their own minds, and they can start believing in their own fears. Politicians are, deep down, paranoid.It is out of fear that a person wants power. It is to hide one’s fear that a person becomes interested in power trips. He wants great power so that he can feel that there is no fear, “at least not for me.” Even the greatest politicians are constantly trembling inside. To hide that trembling, they need great power around themselves; only then can their fear subside, can they console themselves. They constantly live in fear, fear is their problem.And because all politicians live in fear, they are creating a world of paranoia, a fear-oriented world. Now the Americans are afraid of the Russians, and the Russians are afraid of the Americans. This is so foolish. Because the Americans are afraid of the Russians, seventy, eighty percent of their energy goes into preparing for war, and because the Russians are afraid of the Americans – because the Americans are preparing for war – eighty percent of their energy goes into preparation for war.Now, this same energy could make this earth a paradise. There is no need at all for anybody to be poor in the world now. And if people are poor, it is because of these foolish politicians, these fear-oriented politicians.Now the Russians cannot stop preparing for more war because they say the Americans are doing it: “Unless America stops, we cannot stop.” And America makes it a condition: “Unless you stop, we cannot stop.” Then who is going to stop first?And this is not only the case with America and Russia, this is the case with every country. India is afraid – Pakistan is preparing, China is preparing – so we have to prepare. Pakistan is afraid that India is preparing for war, so Pakistan has to prepare for war.It happened…A procession was coming, a marriage procession, and Mulla Nasruddin was standing by the side of a cemetery wall. Night was descending, things were becoming dark. He was reading a book, a detective novel or something like that, and he was full of fear. He was still dreaming about, thinking about the things he had been reading, and suddenly he saw this procession coming toward him. He thought, “These must be my enemies. Why are they coming toward me? And somebody is sitting on a horse with a sword! And bands and people! Must be enemies.”He frightened himself so much, he jumped inside the cemetery, searched for some place to hide. There was a freshly dug grave, so he went in, lay there with closed eyes so that the danger would pass.Now, these people, the marriage procession people, had seen somebody standing by the side of the wall. In the dark it was not clear who he was, and suddenly he jumped inside the cemetery. They panicked: “Somebody is trying to do something. Maybe he is going to throw a bomb.” So they stopped by the wall and a few brave ones went in, ready to fight. They looked around, there was nobody. Then they came across that freshly dug grave, and Mulla Nasruddin was there. He stopped breathing because he became very much afraid: “These people have come, so whatever I was afraid of is going to happen now. This is the last time. I am finished.”They all leaned over the grave and looked at him, what this man was doing – and he looked alive! And how long can you stop your breathing? Finally, he had to breathe, so they asked, “What are you doing here?”And Mulla Nasruddin opened his eyes and he asked, “What are you doing here? Why are you here?”And those people were also angry. They said, “First you tell us why you are here!”Then the whole thing was clear to Nasruddin. He laughed. He said, “Now, this is a very, very difficult philosophical problem. You are here because of me, I am here because of you. Now, it cannot be solved. There is no beginning and no end, it is a vicious circle.”And this goes on and on, the whole world preparing for war, and the whole world wants to live in peace. It is because of these stupid politicians. Because their orientation is fear, they make the whole country afraid. They spread fear. They live in fear. They are constantly suspicious.Because I talk about laissez-faire, because I say that real political freedom can exist only when there is economic freedom… Economic freedom has to be the fundamental freedom. Once you destroy economic freedom, political freedom disappears, and when political freedom disappears, religious freedom disappears. They are all connected.If freedom is to exist in the world, it has to exist in its multi-dimensions – religious, political, economic. It cannot exist only as political, it cannot exist only as economic. Freedom is one phenomenon. It has multidimensions to it, but they are all interlinked.Just think of a country which allows no economic freedom. How can it be politically free? That’s why communism cannot create freedom. It creates “equality.” Equality means people’s freedom to be unequal has been taken away. Equality means people who can earn more, who have the talents to earn more, will not be allowed to earn more. And there are people who have talents.It is not only that poets have talents different from non-poets, it is not only that philosophers have talents different from non-philosophers; so is the case with the rich and the poor too. Andrew Carnegie or Rockefeller have certain talents which nobody else has. Andrew Carnegie was born poor, but died the richest man in the world; he had some genius. In a communist structure, this genius cannot be allowed. Nobody can become an Andrew Carnegie in Russia. But this is destroying people’s freedom; that means it is unfair, unfair to Andrew Carnegie.And the problem is the people who cannot become rich cannot create wealth, cannot create capital, cannot create richness. It is people like Andrew Carnegie who create richness.It is only people like Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, G. E. Moore who create philosophy. If you stop them from creating philosophy, there will be no philosophy. It is people like Rockefeller and Morgan and Carnegie who create wealth. If you don’t allow them to create wealth, there will be no wealth.Just stop a few poets from creating poetry. Do you think everybody else will become poets because you have stopped a few people and you have “distributed poetry equally”? Now everybody should be equally a poet? No.People are different, people are unequal. The most fundamental error that Karl Marx committed was that he was not at all aware of the psychological inequality of human beings. Communism lacks something very fundamental, the perspective that people are unequal psychologically. And a fair and free world has to give people full freedom to be unequal, to move into their own talents, to be themselves.Because I said that capitalism is the natural evolution of human society, immediately the politicians became afraid. They thought I must be working for America or the CIA or something. Just a few days ago, a well-known communist, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, wrote an article against me, declaring that I am working for the CIA. Now, this is surprising because others say that Khwaja Ahmed Abbas is a Russian agent. In America, if you talk about communism you are a Russian agent.If you talk about communism you are a Russian agent, if you talk about capitalism you are an American agent. That means you cannot talk at all. Otherwise you will have to be either a Russian agent or an American agent. That means there is no possibility to think, to contemplate, to meditate, to talk the way you feel. If I talk about communism and for communism, I am a Russian agent; if I talk about capitalism, I am an American agent. Then where is the possibility for me not to be anybody’s agent and just to talk the way I want to talk? There seems to be no possibility. This is the world your politicians have created – continuously afraid, continuously afraid.And it is not only that the Indian government is afraid of me. It is so absurd that other governments of other countries are becoming afraid. Now here are German agents from the German government, watching what is happening. Now the Indian government is afraid of why the German spies are here! Now Indian spies are following the German spies; there must be something, otherwise why should Germany be interested in me? And soon other spies will be coming!And this is a place where nothing is happening for anybody. They’re all fools! German, Indian, etcetera, they’re all fools. They are unnecessarily wasting their time. But I am not saying don’t send your spies. Go on sending. A few of them are bound to become sannyasins! A few of them have already become.Just the other day, I received a letter from a very well-known professor in Germany just to inform me that the Protestant Church of Germany has sent spies here. Now they are becoming afraid because Christians are becoming sannyasins. That is dangerous.You will soon see all kinds of spies here. Be very loving to them, and help them to know as much as they can know about me. A few of them are bound to become sannyasins, and that will shock their governments and their churches very much.From a very reliable source in New Delhi, I have just received information that Eva Renzi was here as a German government spy. Now, this is what the Indian spies have discovered! You see the paranoia? You ask me, “Why do politicians go on misunderstanding you?” To understand me, a little intelligence is also needed.A very smug and complacent politician disclosed airily to a New Delhi reporter that he had attended both Oxford and Cambridge.“Why did you leave Oxford?” asked the reporter.“Pneumonia, dear boy,” explained the politician.“Because you caught it?” persisted the reporter.“No,” admitted the politician. “Because I could not spell it.”A little intelligence is certainly needed.The politician was campaigning to be elected to parliament. He was trying to make conversation with an old farmer.He said, “Say, mister, your corn looks kind of yellow.”Farmer, “Yep, that is the kind we planted.”The politician, “Looks as though you will only have half a crop.”Farmer, “Don’t expect any more. The landlord gets the other half.”The politician, “Have you been living here all your life?”Farmer, “Nope, just part of it up to now.”The politician, “Say, there is not much difference between you and a fool, is there?”Farmer, “Nope, just the fence.”The fourth question:Osho,Please say something about madness. I have seen that psychiatrists know nothing about it in spite of all their efforts.There seem to be two types of madness. You spoke of madness as a step toward enlightenment, and you also called psychosis a severe form of cowardice in facing the reality of life. Not every madman who claims to be Jesus Christ seems to have had an experience of God.Madness is of two kinds and modern psychiatry is aware of only one kind. And because it is not aware of the other kind, its understanding about madness is very lopsided, erroneous, faulty, and harmful too.The first kind of madness that psychiatrists are aware of is falling below the rational mind. When you cannot cope with realities, when they are too much, when they become unbearable, madness is a way of escaping into your own subjective world so that you can forget the realities. You create your own subjective world, you start living in a kind of imaginary world, you start dreaming even with open eyes, so that you can avoid the realities that have become too much and are unbearable. This is an escape; you fall below the rational mind. This is going back to the animal mind. This is falling into the unconscious.There are other people who manage the same thing in other ways. The alcoholic manages it through alcohol. He drinks too much; he becomes completely unconscious. He forgets the whole world and all its problems and anxieties – the wife, the children, the market, the people. He moves into his unconscious through the help of alcohol. This is a temporary kind of madness which will be gone after a few hours.And whenever there are difficult times in the world, drugs become very important. After the Second World War, drugs became of immense importance all over the world, particularly in the countries which had seen the Second World War, in the countries which became aware that we are sitting on a volcano that can erupt at any moment. We have seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki being burned within seconds – one hundred thousand people burned within five seconds. Now, the reality is too much to bear. Hence the new generation, the younger generation, became interested in drugs.Drugs and their impact all around the world, and their influence on the new generation, are rooted in the experience of the Second World War. It is the Second World War that created hippies, that created drug people, because life is so dangerous and death can happen any moment, how to avoid it, how to forget all about it?In times of stress and strain, people start taking drugs. This has always been so. It is a way of creating a temporary madness. And by madness I mean falling below the rational mind – because it is only the rational mind which can be aware of problems. It knows no solutions, it knows only problems. So if the problems are manageable and you can coexist with the problems, you remain sane. When you see it is too much, you go insane. Insanity is a built-in process of avoiding problems, realities, anxieties, stress situations.People avoid in many ways. Somebody will become an alcoholic, somebody will take LSD, somebody marijuana. And there are other people who are not so courageous; they will fall ill. They will have cancers, tuberculosis, paralysis, so they can say to the world, “What can I do? I am paralyzed. If I cannot face realities, it is not my responsibility. Now I am paralyzed.” “If my business is going to the dogs, what can I do? I have cancer.”These are the ways that people protect their egos – poor ways, pitiable ways, but still they are ways to protect their egos. Rather than dropping the ego, people go on protecting it. Wherever life becomes too much of a tension, all these things will happen. People will have strange illnesses, incurable illnesses, incurable because there is great support for the illness from the inside of the person, and without his cooperation with the medicine and with the doctor there is no possibility of curing him.Nobody can cure you against yourself: remember it as a fundamental truth. If there is a deep investment in your cancer, if you want it to be there because it protects you – it gives you a feeling that it is because of the cancer that you are not able to fight in the marketplace, that you are not able to compete: it is because of the cancer. If this investment is there, it gives you satisfaction. Nobody can cure you because you will go on creating it. It is a psychological disease, it is rooted in your psychology.And everybody knows it. Students start feeling ill when the examination comes close. Some students go mad just when the examination is there. And after the examination they are okay again. Each time there is an examination they fall ill – fever, pneumonia, hepatitis, this and that. If you watch you will be surprised: why do so many students become ill at examinations times? And suddenly after the examinations everything is okay. That is a trick, a strategy. They can say to their parents, “What can I do? I was ill. That’s why I could not pass,” or, “I was ill. That’s why I have come third class. Otherwise the gold medal was certainly mine.” It is a strategy.If your illness is a strategy, there is no way to cure it. If your alcoholism is a strategy, there is no way to cure it because you want it to be there. You are a creator, you are creating it on your own – maybe not consciously.And so is madness: that is the last resort. When everything fails, even cancer fails, alcohol fails, marijuana fails, paralysis fails, when everything fails, the last resort is to go mad.That’s why madness happens more in the Western countries than in the Eastern because life is still not so stressful. People are poor, but life is not so stressful. People are so poor, they cannot afford so much stress. People are so poor, they cannot afford psychiatry, psychoanalysis. Madness is a luxury. Only rich countries can afford it.This is one kind of madness that psychologists are aware of: falling below the rational mind, moving into the unconscious, dropping the small conscious that you had. It was not very much in the first place: only one-tenth part of your mind is conscious. You are just like an iceberg, one-tenth above the surface, nine-tenths below the surface. Nine-tenths of your mind is unconscious. Madness means dropping that one-tenth that was conscious so the whole iceberg goes underneath the surface.But there is another kind of madness – that too has to be called madness because of a certain similarity – that is going beyond the rational mind. One is falling below the rational mind, the other is falling above the rational mind, falling upward. In both cases the rational mind is lost: in one you become unconscious, in the other you become superconscious. In both cases the ordinary mind is lost.In one you become totally unconscious; a certain integrity arises in you. And you can watch: in mad people there is a certain integrity, a certain consistency – they are one. You can rely on a madman. He is not two, he is utterly one. He is very consistent because he has only one mind, that is the unconscious. The duality has disappeared. Also, you will find a certain innocence in a madman. He is like a child. He is not cunning, he cannot be. In fact, he had to become mad because he could not be cunning. He could not cope in the cunning world. You will find a certain simplicity, purity, in a madman.If you have watched mad people you will fall in love with them. They have a kind of togetherness. They are not divided, they are not split, they are one. Of course, they are one against reality, they are one in their dream world, they are one in their illusions, but they are one.I have heard about a man who worked for many years in a drama company and his role was always Abraham Lincoln. After many years working as Abraham Lincoln, talking as Abraham Lincoln, wearing the clothes of Abraham Lincoln, slowly, slowly the man went mad. He started thinking he was Abraham Lincoln. At first his family and friends thought he was joking, kidding, but slowly, slowly it became clear to them that he was not joking. He had fallen into that trap. He believed it because not only in the drama… Outside the drama he would wear the same clothes. He would have the same walking stick, he would walk the way Abraham Lincoln used to walk. He would stutter the way Abraham Lincoln used to stutter. He remained Abraham Lincoln twenty-four hours a day.Friends persuaded him, tried to convince him, “What are you doing?”But he was so convinced, he said, “What are you saying? I am Abraham Lincoln!”Finally, seeing there was no way, they took him to a psychiatrist. He tried all that he knew, but the man was utterly convinced.Mad people are very together. You cannot create doubt in them, doubt is part of the rational mind. Whatever they believe, they believe fanatically. So all mad people are fanatics, and all fanatics are mad people. Remember that.A fanatic is one who believes, “Only I am right, and everybody else is wrong.” A fanatic is one who believes, “Whosoever believes in what I say is right, and whosoever thinks that I am wrong is wrong.” There is no possibility of any communication with a fanatic, you cannot communicate. He thinks only in two ways: either you are a friend or an enemy. Whosoever believes the way he believes is a friend, and whosoever does not believe the way he believes is an enemy.That’s why I call Morarji Desai a fanatic. He thinks the whole country has to believe the way he believes – that I have to believe in his ideology, only then can I be allowed to exist in this country. The fanatic can never be a democrat, the fanatic is always a fascist. The fanatic is mad.All efforts failed. And the man was so convinced about his being Abraham Lincoln that slowly, slowly, day in, day out as the psychiatrist was trying, even the psychiatrist started being doubtful: Maybe he was? He also looked like Abraham Lincoln. For years he had been acting, and when you act something for years, you become it. A lie repeated again and again becomes a truth.When the psychiatrist also started becoming suspicious: “Who knows, he may be right. We may all be wrong, that is also a possibility,” he tried something. There is now a machine in America, it is called a lie detector. It is used in the courts.He brought a lie detector; it detects whether people are lying or not.It is a simple device. The person is not aware that he is standing or sitting on the lie detector, it is hidden underneath. It is something like a cardiogram, it goes on making a graph of his heartbeats. When he is speaking the truth there is a harmony in the graph, and whenever he tells a lie the harmony is broken. So first a few questions have to be asked about which he cannot lie, about which there is no possibility of lying, so one knows the graph is going harmoniously.The man was asked, “Look at the clock. What does the clock say?”And he said, “Fifteen to ten.”A letter was given to him and he was told, “Read this letter,” and he read the letter. Now the graph was going on harmoniously.And a few more questions to be absolutely certain: “How many people are present in the room?”He said, “Seven.”“What color is the curtain?”He said, “Green.”Things like that, about which he could not lie, there was no possibility.And then he was asked, “Are you Abraham Lincoln?”He was getting tired. Every day for years people had been persuading him that he was not. So just to get rid of the whole thing, he said, “No, I am not.”But the lie detector said he was lying! The conviction had gone so deep that he was only lying just to convince people, to get rid of those foolish people.He said, “No, I am not,” but he knew he was.Madness has a consistency, a togetherness. There is no doubt in it, it is utter belief.And the same is the case with the other madness. A man goes above reason, beyond reason, becomes utterly conscious, superconscious. In the first madness, the one part that was conscious becomes dissolved into the nine parts that were not conscious. In this madness, the nine parts that were unconscious start moving upward and all come to the light, above the surface. The whole mind becomes conscious.That is the meaning of the word buddha, becoming absolutely conscious. Now, this man will also look mad because he will be consistent, utterly consistent. He will be together, more together than any madman can ever be. He will be absolutely integrated. He will be an individual, literally an individual – it means indivisible. He will not have any split at all.So they look alike: the madman believes and the buddha trusts. And trust and belief look alike. The madman is one, utterly unconscious; the buddha is also one, utterly conscious. And oneness looks alike. The madman has dropped reason, reasoning, mind. A buddha has also dropped reasoning, rationality, mind. That is similar, and yet they are poles apart. One has fallen below humanity, and the other has risen above humanity.Modern psychology will remain incomplete unless it starts studying buddhas. It will remain incomplete, its vision will remain incomplete, partial, and a partial vision is very dangerous. A partial truth is very dangerous, more dangerous than a lie because it gives one the feeling that he is right.Modern psychology has to take a quantum leap. It has to become the psychology of the buddhas. It will have to go deep into Sufism, into Hasidism, into Zen, into Tantra, into Yoga, into Tao. Only then will it really be psychology. The word psychology means the science of the soul. It is not yet psychology, it is not yet the science of the soul.These are the two possibilities. You can go below yourself, you can go above yourself.Become mad like Buddha, Bahauddin, Mohammed, Christ. Become mad like me. And that madness has immense beauty – because all that is beautiful is born out of that madness, and all that is poetic flows out of that madness. The greatest experiences of life, the greatest ecstasies of life, are born out of that madness.Initiating you into sannyas, I am really initiating you into that kind of madness. This place belongs to mad people.The last question:Osho,Who is a masochist and who is a sadist?I have heard this definition of a masochist and a sadist…A masochist says, “Beat me, whip me, put me in chains.”A sadist says, “No, I won’t.”Enough for today.

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

The Secret 01-21Category: SUFISM

The Secret 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Ayaz was the boon companion and slave of the great conqueror Mahmud, the Idol Breaker, Monarch of Ghazna. He had first come to the court as a beggarly slave, and Mahmud had made him his adviser and friend.The other courtiers were jealous of Ayaz and observed his every movement, intending to denounce him for some shortcoming, thus encompassing his downfall.One day these jealous ones went to Mahmud and said, “Shadow of Allah upon Earth! Know that, indefatigable as always in your service, we have been keeping your slave Ayaz under close scrutiny. We now have to report that every day as soon as he leaves the court, Ayaz goes into a small room where no one else is ever allowed. He spends some time there, and then goes to his own quarters. We fear that this habit of his may be connected with some guilty secret: perhaps he consorts with plotters, even, who have designs upon your Majesty’s life.”For a long time Mahmud refused to hear anything against Ayaz. But the mystery of the locked room preyed upon his mind until he felt that he had to question Ayaz.One day, when Ayaz was coming out of his private chamber, Mahmud, surrounded by courtiers, appeared and demanded to be shown into the room.“No,” said Ayaz.“If you do not allow me to enter the room, all my confidence in you as trustworthy and loyal will have evaporated, and we can never thenceforward be on the same terms. Take your choice,” said the fierce conqueror.Ayaz wept, and then he threw open the door of the room and allowed Mahmud and his staff to enter. The room was empty of all furniture. All that it contained was a hook in the wall. On the hook hung a tattered and patched cloak, a staff, and a begging bowl.The king and his court were unable to understand the significance of this discovery.When Mahmud demanded an explanation, Ayaz said, “Mahmud, for years I have been your slave, your friend and counselor. I have tried never to forget my origins, and for this reason I have come here every day to remind myself of what I was. I belong to you, and all that belongs to me are my rags, my stick, my bowl, and my wandering over the face of the earth.”La ilaha il’Allah: there is no God but God. There is no goal but the goal. And the goal is not separate from the source, the source and the goal are the same phenomenon. This is one of the most fundamental things to be understood: to reach the goal one has to reach the source. The alpha is the omega.If you go on trying to reach the goal you will remain in an eternal wandering, and you will never come home. If you start searching for the source you will not only find the source, but you will have also found the goal. When the source is found the circle is complete.God is not where we are going, God is from where we are coming. And our eyes are fixed on distant stars. We go on looking ahead. We are oriented toward the distant and faraway, and all those goals that we create are our own mind projections. The real goal is from where we are coming. It is in our very nature, it is in our very being, it is the very ground of our existence.Hui Hai once went to visit the great master, Ma Tzu. The master asked him, “Why do you come here?”Hui Hai replied, “I come seeking enlightenment.”The master said, “Why should you leave your home to wander about and neglect your own precious treasure? There is nothing I can give you. Why do you seek enlightenment from me?”The visitor pressed him for the truth: “But what is my treasure?”The master answered, “It is he who has just asked the question. It contains everything and lacks nothing. There is no need to seek it outside yourself.”Seeking presupposes that it is far away. Seeking has taken it for granted that it is not now-here, that it is not in you, that it is not you. Seeking has already supposed that it is different, separate from you and somewhere else, and it has to be sought to be found.This presupposition creates misery for the seeker. The seeker lives in misery and frustration because he has started on a wrong journey. The seeker is never going to find God because God is not the sought but the seeker himself.The only religious question worth asking is, “Who am I?” That means diving deep within your own consciousness, coming closer and closer to your center. And when you have reached, penetrated the center like an arrow, you will be surprised that nothing was ever lacking, nothing was ever missed. You had not left your home – you were already there – but your eyes were wandering far away. Only your eyes were wandering far away, you were rooted in your home. But your mind, your dreams, your eyes, your ideas had left you, and they were roaming all over the world.Ma Tzu is right. He asks, “Why do you come here? What is the point of coming here?” He asks, “Why did you leave your home?” These statements are not ordinary statements, they are very symbolic. “Home” does not mean just the ordinary home. It means God. Ma Tzu is saying, “Why have you left your source? Why this unnecessary wandering? All that you need is already provided for. You have the treasure within you. Why do you come here?”Hui Hai replied, “I come seeking enlightenment.” Now, that is the fundamental error of all seekers. Enlightenment cannot be sought, and if you seek it you will never find it. Enlightenment is when there is no seeking. Enlightenment is when there is no desiring, not even the desire for enlightenment. Enlightenment is when you are still, calm, quiet, and there is no mind, no desire, nowhere to go, when you are suddenly here and now. That very moment is enlightenment: light explodes in you, you become light.Hui Hai said, “I come seeking enlightenment.” Everybody is seeking, in different names. You may call it bliss, you may call it God, you may call it enlightenment, you may call it truth, love, beauty; it doesn’t matter what you call it. But everybody is seeking something. All are seekers in the world, the world is full of seekers.Remember: the man who is seeking money and power is not different from the seeker who is running after God. It is the same seeking. The object of the seeking makes no difference in the nature of seeking, the quality of the seeking is the same. What is that quality? It is a tension between that which you are and that which you would like to be. A wants to be B – this is seeking. The poor wants to be rich; the unenlightened wants to be enlightened; the ugly person wants to become beautiful; the unknown person wants to become famous. It is the same seeking. Seeking means discontentment with that which you are.Then what is non-seeking? Non-seeking is: A is perfectly happy in being A and has no desire to be B. Contentment is the beginning of enlightenment. Contentment is the seed which becomes enlightenment. The seeker is discontented, tense, worried. He is continuously going to face frustration because whatever he is going to do is doomed to fail.Remember this because there are religions, priests, pedagogues who go on teaching people, “Don’t seek worldly things, seek otherworldly things.” They only change the object of seeking. They say, “Don’t seek money, seek meditation.” And it appears on the surface as if they are transforming your being. They are not. They are only giving you a new toy to play with. But the old seeking will continue. You will remain the same old person with the same old rotten mind, with the same old wandering, tensions, frustrations, worries. Nothing is going to change by that. That is not conversion.Then what is conversion? Conversion is when you understand the nature of seeking – when you see the point that it is seeking that is debarring you from getting; that it is seeking that is the wall; that it is seeking that keeps you separate from the sought; that it is seeking itself that has to be dropped and nothing else. Seeking is worldly, non-seeking is otherworldly. When the seeker becomes a non-seeker he becomes religious.But how to become a non-seeker? One can become a non-seeker only if this understanding arises: rather than going for a goal, the first and most necessary thing to know is, “Who am I? From where do I come? What is my source?” If the wave looks for its source, it will find the ocean. And if man looks for his source, he will find God.We are waves in the ocean of God. If a leaf of a tree starts looking for its source, it will find the roots of the tree. It will find the earth, it will find its very source. We are leaves of the tree of God, waves of the ocean of God.But if the leaf starts looking outward… There is the beautiful moon hanging so close by; it looks so enchanting, and the leaf becomes troubled, starts to dream. And the wave certainly dreams of the moon. When the moon is full, the waves start rising high, higher and higher; a great longing arises to reach the moon.You will be surprised to know that scientists have found that it is not only the waves that rise when the full moon is in the sky. Even the earth… Even the earth starts rising six inches, almost six inches, whenever the moon is full. It also tries hard to reach the moon. When the full moon is there, the earth forgets all its solidity, becomes a little liquid, behaves as if it is made of rubber, tries to reach the moon. And man is made of eighty percent water and twenty percent earth. That’s why the full moon has so much hypnotic power on man – eighty percent ocean in him, twenty percent earth in him, and both start rising toward the moon.The fact has been known down the ages that the moon drives people crazy. Hence the word lunatic; it means struck by the moon. Lunatic comes from the word luna, the moon. The moon is so close by, it attracts.And there are many “moons” in life; you are surrounded by many attractive goals. There is power, there is money, there is prestige, respectability, fame. There are a thousand and one things. You are constantly pulled in this direction and that. Life provides you with many goals, and there is only one goal: that goal is God.But to call God the goal is very paradoxical because he is also the origin. Only the origin, the source, can be the goal because ultimately, when you have reached back home and the circle of your life is complete and perfect, there is fulfillment.Ma Tzu is right. He says, “Why should you leave your home to wander about and neglect your own precious treasure? There is nothing I can give you.” No master can give you anything. Truth has never been given. It is not a thing to be given or taken. And you don’t need it in the first place from anywhere else because you already have it there within you. You are it. The master only makes you alert that the treasure is within you, the kingdom of God is within you. He provokes you, he shakes you and shocks you, so that you can become aware of who you are. The master cannot give it to you. It is not a thing in the first place, and in the second place you don’t need it. The given truth will be borrowed, and the given can be taken away. The truth has to arise in you, only then can it not be taken away.Ma Tzu is really a great master. He says, “There is nothing I can give you. Why do you seek enlightenment from me?”The visitor pressed him for the truth: “But what is my treasure?”The master answered, “It is he who has just asked the question.”Meditate over it. A tremendously significant statement: “It is he who has just asked the question.” It is your consciousness that is your treasure. Diving deep into your consciousness you will touch the source, the rock-bottom of your being.It is there where God is found, and enlightenment, and freedom, and love, and beauty, and bliss, and all that you have always wanted and was never happening. All suddenly happens simultaneously. The experience of the source is a multidimensional experience. Ma Tzu says, “It contains everything and lacks nothing” – your consciousness – “There is no need to seek it outside yourself.”Hui Hai became a master in his own right later on, and a great master too. This was the beginning, this was the seduction from Ma Tzu. Listening to this – when Ma Tzu said, “It is the one who has just asked the question” – a great trembling arose in Hui Hai, a great energy started moving. The frozenness disappeared, he melted. He bowed down to Ma Tzu, and in that very moment he had his first satori.This is what I am trying here, provoking you, seducing you into that which you already are. But you have forgotten about it; I am only reminding you of it.Sufis say there are two things the whole of religion consists of. One is faqr: nobodiness, nothingness, egolessness, humbleness. In faqr, all these things are implied. The basic point is that you are not separate from existence. To think yourself separate from existence causes the phenomenon of the ego. The ego gives you the idea that “I am somebody,” and then, “somebody special.” Then you have to prove, then you have to compete, then you have to be ambitious and succeed. Then you have to leave your footprints on the sands of time, you have to leave your name in history. And then all kinds of desires start arising in you.But the root of all desires is in the acceptance of a false idea – that “I am.” When a person drops that idea, he is a fakir, he has attained faqr. This is the real meaning of fakir. It does not mean just a beggar, it does not mean just poverty. Real poverty consists of egolessness. That’s what Jesus means when he says, “Unless you are poor in spirit, you will not attain the Kingdom of God.”Poor in spirit… It is very easy to renounce one’s wealth and become poor outwardly, it is very easy. But rather than helping one to become inwardly poor it may hinder – because the person who renounces becomes very egoistic. He starts thinking, “Look, I have renounced so much. I am no ordinary mortal. I am a great sage, a saint, a mahatma; I have renounced all.”And deep down in him he starts comparing himself with those who have not renounced. He becomes holier-than-thou. He starts pretending that he is on a high pedestal, that everybody else is condemned, that everybody else is going to hell except him – because he has renounced the world, the joys of the world, the things of the world. Rather than becoming inwardly poor, he has become inwardly very rich. The ego is strengthened. The ego has become stronger, it is more solid than before. It is almost a rock.That’s why I don’t say to my sannyasins to renounce the world. I say renounce the ego! Let the world be as it is. Who are you to renounce it? In the very idea of renouncing, you accept one thing, that it belongs to you. How can you renounce something which does not belong to you? See the simple point: nothing belongs to you.You come into this world without a thing, and you go from this world without a thing. You come empty-handed and you go empty-handed. Nothing belongs to you, so how can you renounce? Renunciation is possible only if possession is possible. Possession is just an illusion, you don’t possess anything. How can you possess anything? Death will come and will separate you from all your possessions, and you will not be able to take a single thing with you.The first illusion is of possession, and the second illusion is of renunciation. Both are based in the same ego. First the ego tries to possess as much as it can – the more it possesses, the more it is. Then comes a point when one has possessed so much that the ego loses all interest; it becomes boring.That’s why rich people look so bored; you will not find poor people so bored. Rich people are always bored, utterly bored. The richer they get, the more bored they are. From where does their boredom come? Their boredom is coming from their possessions. They have everything they ever hoped for, dreamed of; now what else is there to do? All their hopes are fulfilled, and nothing is fulfilled in their being. A great boredom starts settling. They have enjoyed all that the world can give, and all those joys have proved superficial, momentary. They have done those things so many times, they have repeated all those things so many times, that now there seems to be nothing new. They are constantly hankering for some new amusement, some new entertainment. They are utterly bored.The poor person is not so bored. He still has many things to hope for. Tomorrow he is going to have a better house, the day after tomorrow a better car, and so on, so forth. He can hope, his eyes are full of hope. There are surprises still waiting for him in the future. For the rich man there is no future; for the poor man the whole future is there, he is excited.For the rich man all is past, there is no future. In the future there is only death and nothing else; nothing else is going to happen to him. He has the biggest house, the most beautiful woman or man, all kinds of gadgets that technology can supply. What else is there? The future seems bleak – only death somewhere, nothing else. In the dark night of the future only death is lurking.The rich man becomes bored; he is bored to death. He’s afraid, he is in a panic. He cannot hope, and to be in a hopeless state is the most miserable state to be in. Then he starts renouncing. That brings excitement again, the future becomes hopeful again. Now he thinks, “I will renounce all that I have. I will become the humblest person in the world, the poorest. I will become a great sage, and the world will know how much I have renounced – nobody has done that much before. I will be the greatest saint in the world.” Again there is hope. The ego has taken another life, another incarnation; now he starts renouncing, he goes on renouncing.Just as there is no end to possessions, there seems to be no end to renunciation. He goes on renouncing: clothes, food, house, everything – companionship, friendship, relationship, people. He escapes to a Himalayan cave or goes deep into the forest, or escapes into a monastery. He goes on renouncing, but one day the end comes again. He has renounced all and nothing is gained. He is bored again.Go into the monasteries and you will see the same boredom on the monks’ faces as you see on rich people’s faces. There is no difference. I don’t tell my sannyasins to renounce the world. Through renunciation the ego survives again, and survives in a more subtle way – becomes more poisonous because now it can pretend to be holy.To be poor in spirit means to see the point that “I am not.” “God is, I am not. The whole is, the part is not. The ocean is, the wave is not.” This is inner poverty, this is faqr. Then you can be in the monastery or in the marketplace, it makes no difference. You know you are not, so whatever is, is God’s will. If he wants you to be in the monastery you are in the monastery, if he wants you to be in the marketplace you are in the marketplace. “Thy will be done”: that is faqr. “I have no will of my own, your will is all. I have no destination of my own; wherever you are going, I am simply coming with you. I will be your shadow, I will not be a separate entity in my own right.”And the second thing Sufis say the fundamental of religion is, is zikr, remembrance of God. God has not to be achieved, God has not to be discovered, God has not to be invented either. God has only to be remembered. We have only forgotten him. All that is needed is an awakening. That is called zikr.These two small words, faqr and zikr, are the very soul of Sufism. And this beautiful story is the story of these two words. These two words are two aspects of the same coin. If you remember God, you disappear; if you disappear, remembrance of God starts happening. Faqr brings zikr: inner poverty, egolessness, brings remembrance of God. And zikr brings faqr: remembrance of God makes you aware that you are not, only he is.Ayaz was the boon companion and slave of the great conqueror Mahmud, the Idol Breaker, Monarch of Ghazna.Meditate on each important word used in this parable. Islam does not believe in idols, but that has been misunderstood by the Mohammedans. It is one thing not to believe in idols, it is another thing to start destroying other people’s idols. In fact, to destroy somebody’s idol is a negative belief in the idol; otherwise why should one be concerned? It is none of his business.Mahmud was a fanatic Mohammedan. He destroyed many temples of this country. His whole life’s work was to destroy temples and idols, and he thought he was doing a great service to God. That’s how one can misunderstand great truths.Mohammed is right when he says that there is no possibility of making an idol of God. Moses also says the same thing. There is no possibility of making any idol of God because God is vast, immense. How can you make a representation of him? If you want to worship him, worship him as he is, in the mountains, in the trees, in the stars, in the clouds. He is all over. Only he is – la ilaha il’Allah – there is nobody except him.There is no need to make a stone idol or a wooden image. It is pointless. This is something of immense value, but Mohammedans missed the whole point. They started breaking other people’s idols. If God is everywhere, he must be in the idols too. Now, look at it from another standpoint: if God is everywhere, how can he not be in an idol? Then he is in a stone idol too. If he is in an ordinary rock, why is he not in a carved rock? There is no need to destroy anybody’s idol or anybody’s temple.And you still go on making temples. What is a mosque? A temple without an idol of God. But then the mosque itself becomes the idol! When people pass by the side of the mosque, they become very respectful. They bow down, it is no ordinary house. What is the difference between an ordinary house and a mosque? From where does the extraordinariness of the mosque come?It has become an idol. It has already become the house of God, it is already a temple. The mosque is just without an idol, but deep down it itself has become the idol. Mahmud converted many temples into mosques. It is simple: destroy the idol, and the temple becomes a mosque. And he thought he was serving God.Many times, great truths become dangerous in the hands of foolish people. It is like a sword in the hands of a child. That has been happening again and again. Great truths have fallen into the hands of stupid people, then those great truths have become the sources of much misery in the world.What is the Kaaba, where Mohammedans go to from all over the world? It is a stone. In fact, no other stone has been worshipped so much as the stone of Kaaba. No other stone has been kissed so much as the stone of Kaaba. Millions and millions of people every year go on pouring into Kaaba, kissing the stone. If kissing makes something dirty, that stone must have become the dirtiest. Millions of people must have transferred many kinds of infections through their kisses – because in a single kiss at least one hundred thousand germs pass. Beware!And what is all this nonsense of kissing a stone? It is the same old trip. You have broken idols; now you are worshipping a stone.Man is so foolish that he goes on remaining the same although he goes on changing his labels. A Hindu becomes a Mohammedan, a Mohammedan becomes a Christian, a Christian becomes a Jew, a Jew becomes a Jaina; but no difference ever, just the label.Understanding is not just a change of the label. It is a change of the heart, it is a change of vision and perspective.Ayaz was the boon companion and slave of the great conqueror Mahmud, the Idol Breaker, Monarch of Ghazna. He had first come to the court as a beggarly slave, and Mahmud made him his adviser and friend.This is the story of every person. When you enter the world you enter as a beggarly slave. Why? Because a child comes into the world utterly helpless. The child cannot survive if he is not supported by others, if the parents and the family don’t support the child. He comes as a beggar. He is continuously begging for food, for warmth, for care. And he is so helpless that he is a slave.Because of this situation, the parents, the society, the state, the church have exploited children down the ages. They give him food, they give him nourishment and support, but with conditions. They make many conditions on the child, and he has to accept those conditions because he is helpless. It is a question of survival. The child cannot say no. He will not be able to survive at all by saying no, he has to say yes. That is his slavery.We have not yet become so human, not yet so capable that we can avoid exploiting small children. Children are the most exploited people of the world. Just as there is now a great movement arising in the world, women’s lib, someday children’s lib will be needed.Children have suffered tremendously, nobody else has suffered like that. And it is almost impossible to take them out of this structure because they are dependent, they are helpless.The parents think they love, but love is not love if it is conditional. The parents try to transform the child into a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu. This is a game of politics you are playing on your poor child. You condition his mind. You tell him what is right and what is wrong – you yourself don’t know. You condition his mind about whether God exists or not and you yourself have not inquired. You go on pouring all kinds of your rubbish knowledge into the child’s head. Before he becomes aware, all these things will have taken root in him. They will create confusion in him, neurosis in him. He will suffer his whole life because of your so-called love. It was not love in the first place. The child was helpless, and you enjoyed helping him because when you help somebody you feel great. The helpless person gives you the idea that you are comparatively strong.That’s why people love sympathizing. People love it very much. If you are in trouble, people love to sympathize with you very much because then they are higher and you are lower, then they are fortunate and you are unfortunate. They never come to participate in your joy. If you make a beautiful house, nobody comes to participate in your joy, to celebrate. But if your house is on fire, acquaintances and non-acquaintances all come to sympathize with you. Deep down they are enjoying it, you are in trouble and they are not in trouble. God has been good to them. Deep down they know why you have suffered – because of your sins, because of all the wrong things you have done. This is exactly what should have happened to you, you deserved it. But on the surface they are sympathizing with you. And they had never participated in your joy, they were jealous.When you are happy, people are jealous. And if people are jealous when you are happy, how can they be sympathizers when you are unhappy? That is very illogical, it makes no sense. The person who is jealous when you are happy will be happy when you are unhappy. That is logical. But he will show sympathy. Deep down he will feel very happy that now you are cut down to size, now you have been forced to be in your place, now you know who you are. But on the surface they will sympathize.People enjoy children very much because they are helpless, and they give you an idea that you are strong, powerful. And you do all kinds of power trips with your children. You try to make them your imitators. You try to force your ideals on them. You try to make them replicas of you, and you know perfectly well that you are unhappy, miserable; still you go on making replicas of yourself.Hence the world remains in misery because the parents create the children. They were miserable; they create miserable people again. Each father wants his son to be like him, and each mother wants her daughter to be like her. This is how the pattern of misery continues. This is how there seems to be no possibility of making human beings happy.Somewhere the continuity has to be broken. If the parents really love the child, one thing is certain: they will not help the child to be like themselves. They know perfectly well they have lived in misery, they have suffered enough. At least they will try in every way so that the child is not like them, so that he never suffers, or at least he tries some other way of being. Who knows, he may not suffer. But one thing is certain: he should not be like them. That must be the basic understanding of a really loving parent.He will give his love, but he will not give his knowledge. He will give all his care and caressing to the child, but he will not impose his ideology on him. He will not make him a Christian, a Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Mohammedan, communist, etcetera. He will lead the child to be himself. He will share his experiences, but he will not enforce them. He will be friendly to the child. He will not play the game of power on the child. But that’s what is being done. That’s why I say every child comes into the world as a beggarly slave.Ayaz …had come first to the court as a beggarly slave, and Mahmud made him his adviser and friend. We come into the world as an empty canvas, and then something is painted on us. We come utterly empty and blank, then something is written on us. We become something in the world, we come as nothings. We come as nobodies, then we become somebody.That somebodiness is accidental. That somebodiness is not your essence, it is not your original face. That is only your personality, it is not your individuality. And personality is very deceptive, it deceives you. You start thinking that it is your individuality.Remember the difference between the personality and the individuality. Personality is that which is conferred upon you by the society, by the people who bring you up. Individuality is that which you bring into the world with yourself. Individuality means your original face. Personality means the mask, the painted face.Nobody comes as a Christian or a Hindu, hence the Christianity and Hinduism that are imposed upon you are part of your personality. They are not part of your essence, your essential core. Nobody comes into the world with adjectives, all adjectives are added to you.People come into the world as beautiful empty zeros, and then everything is added. All that is added is not you, and you become too identified with it.Remember again and again who you are, and don’t be identified with that which has been added to you. Don’t be identified with the persona, with the mask, with the idea implanted in you about yourself. This is the religious revolution: not to be identified with the personality and continuously reminding yourself, “Who am I?”The other courtiers were jealous of Ayaz…Naturally. That’s how this world is. This whole world is political and everybody is jealous of everybody else. And the more you succeed, the more enemies you will have in the world. The more famous you are, the more people will be against you. This is an obvious thing: they also want to be famous, and they have failed and you have attained. They will take revenge. They are angry at you.They will rationalize their anger. They will find fault with you. If they cannot find, they will invent – because just to be in a rage against you without any reason will make their jealousy very apparent. They have to hide their jealousy. They have to give it a beautiful camouflage, at least a beautiful form on the outside.The other courtiers were jealous of Ayaz… And it was the court of Mahmud. He himself was a very violent, stupid person, and there must have been many stupid people, violent, ambitious, in his court. His court must have reflected him.The politicians are the most jealous people because their whole life depends on being successful, famous, powerful. Their whole longing is to be more and more powerful. They are constantly at each other’s throats. You can go into any capital – you can go to New Delhi – and you can see how politicians are constantly at each other’s throats. Politicians cannot be friends, they can only be enemies because their goal is such that they are all competitors against each other. One person is going to become the prime minister of India – and there are millions of politicians in India, and they all want to become prime minister. Naturally, it is going to be a cutthroat competition, utterly violent. And these politicians talk of nonviolence and peace. It is impossible.Unless politics becomes less and less powerful, war cannot be avoided. It is a natural outcome of the political game. Unless politics loses importance… It can lose it. The only way out of the political trap is make people more and more free – economically, politically, spiritually. Decentralize power.But the whole trend is going in just the opposite direction. States are becoming more and more powerful, and they are hiding their power greed, their lust for power, behind beautiful names. They call it “nationalization.” Then it looks very good; nationalization is a good thing. But all that it means is more power to the state. Nationalize the banks, nationalize the industries, nationalize agriculture, so more and more power goes to the state. The state becomes the only owner, and when the whole economy is controlled by the state, there is no freedom left. Naturally, the politician becomes more and more powerful as the state becomes more powerful. The prime minister, the president become powerful.The only way to take away the power of the politicians is to denationalize things. Give more and more things to people to do on their own. All nationalization should disappear. Even railways, the post office, and things like that should be run by the people themselves; the government need not come in. Slowly, slowly power has to be withdrawn from politics. Then the politician will automatically be neglected, he will lose importance.America seems to be the only country where politicians are not as powerful as they are in other countries, and the reason is that now there are so many corporations which have become almost as powerful as the state itself – multimillionaire corporations – and their power is great. They have international power, intercontinental power.Spread the power to people, more and more. Slowly, slowly all the work has to be withdrawn from politics. Only leave the essentials, and the essentials are not very many. There is only one hope for the world: if politics becomes less powerful. Then the world can live at peace, otherwise it is impossible. The whole foundation of politics is jealousy, greed, lust.I have heard…The old retired politician from New Delhi was assigned the topic for an after dinner speech, “Honesty in Politics.”When he was called upon he arose, bowed and said, “Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: Honesty in Politics – there ain’t any.” And he sat down.Politics cannot be honest. Greed, lust, how can they be honest? Politics cannot be peaceful. Ambitious people, how can they remain peaceful? If they remain peaceful they lose time. They have to fight. They have to fight in every possible way. They can’t lose any opportunity to fight. Any excuse to fight has to be used, and molehills have to be made into mountains because it is through fighting that somebody becomes powerful.The politician was homeward bound one night when he was waylaid by three thieves. He defended himself with great courage and obstinacy, and the struggle that followed was long and bloody. At length, however, he was overpowered. The thugs, anticipating a rich booty after the extraordinary resistance they had experienced, began to go through his pockets. They were baffled to find that the whole treasure which the politician had been defending at the hazard of his life was a bent sixpence.“Only a sixpence!” exclaimed one of the disgusted rogues, nursing his bruises.“Well, we are lucky at that,” said another. “If he had had eighteen pence he would have killed all of us.”Politics is a violent struggle and naturally the courtiers must have been very jealous. Suddenly, Ayaz became the most important person in the court.And the reason why Ayaz became the most important person in the court was his simplicity, his nonpoliticalness, his nobodiness, his faqr. And somewhere deep down was zikr. He was a Sufi. He had a subtle radiance, almost invisible, but it still affected people – more so because it was invisible, so one cannot defend oneself.Ayaz was a Sufi. He had wandered all over the earth as a poor man, “poor in spirit,” constantly remembering his source. That’s how he suddenly became so important in Mahmud’s court. And he was a very cheerful person, always happy. He was like a roseflower. Just to be with him, just to be in his presence, would have made anybody cheerful. He had a vibe.The other courtiers were jealous of Ayaz and observed his every movement, intending to denounce him for some shortcoming, thus encompassing his downfall.That is the whole desire of the politicians: how to create downfalls for others so they can replace them.One day these jealous ones went to Mahmud and said, “Shadow of Allah upon Earth!”The politician is always jealous of those who are in power – and always a flatterer too. He has no self-respect; he cannot have. A man who has any self-respect and self-love will not go into politics. It is utterly degrading, it is humiliating.Now, to call Mahmud “Shadow of Allah upon Earth” is ridiculous. Mahmud was one of the most murderous people who have lived on the earth. He belonged to the same category as Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah. He was one of the most murderous, violent persons.India knew him very well. He attacked India about eighteen times in his life. He butchered, murdered, looted, raped. He left many wounds in India. To call such a man “Shadow of Allah upon Earth” is ridiculous, but that’s how politicians move upward. Politicians are flatterers. They are always ready to bow down wherever they see power. Power simply hypnotizes them.“Know that, indefatigable as always in your service, we have been keeping your slave Ayaz under close scrutiny. We have now to report that every day as soon as he leaves the court, Ayaz goes into a small room where nobody else is ever allowed.”Now, Sufis say that whenever you want to pray, pray alone, in utter privacy. Prayer should not be done loudly; you should not shout it. It is not a performance, there is no need to exhibit it to others. It should be done in utter silence, stillness, privacy, so nobody ever comes to know about it. Sufis say, “Even your wife should not know when you pray.” They say, “In the middle of the night, when your wife has fallen asleep, sit silently in your bed and pray.” Only God should know. You should not brag about it, you should keep it a secret.And there is something more to it, the idea of keeping prayer secret. If you can keep something secret, it deepens in you. The tendency of the mind is to tell everything. That is a way of throwing it out. That is a way of getting rid of it. It is a subtle vomiting. If you know something in which people will be interested or people may be curious about, you immediately start talking about it. It is very difficult for people to keep a secret, and if they are told to keep it a secret, it becomes even more difficult. It starts coming up again and again; it becomes a turmoil within them.Sufis say if you can keep something a secret it goes deeper in you. Everything moves. Either it moves outward or it moves inward. If you don’t allow it to move outward, it will automatically move inward. This is a fundamental rule. Nothing is static, everything is in movement, so be very mindful of it. If you want something to go deep in you, please don’t talk about it. If some spiritual experience happens to you, don’t start talking about it. If it is very difficult for you, go to your master and relate it to him and then forget all about it – but don’t talk about it.If you talk, the ego enjoys talking about it. You start feeling as if you are becoming special. You had seen lights, kundalini rising, chakras opening, and all that jazz. And then you are rushing, trying to find people, whoever is wishing to be a victim. You catch hold of people and you start pouring your knowledge – you don’t even bother whether they want to listen to it or not – but you are destroying something beautiful.Things have to go deeper in you, and the only way to let them move deeper is not to let them move outward. They have to move. If you don’t give them an outlet for the outside, they will choose to move inward. Just as a seed has to go deep into the earth to die there, in utter darkness and privacy, so your prayer, the seed of prayer, has to go deep into your heart and die there.The courtiers reported to Mahmud:“Ayaz goes into a small room where nobody else is ever allowed. He spends some time there, and then goes to his own quarters. We fear that this habit of his may be connected with a guilty secret…”People who live a guilty life always think and project their guilt on others. Remember: when you say something about somebody else, the first thing to be thought and pondered over is that it may be a truth about yourself and not about the other. The person who is really interested in self-knowledge will always ponder over the fact: “What I am saying about the other, is it truly about the other, or is it just a projection of mine and shows something about me, not about the other?” And you will be surprised: out of a hundred cases, ninety-nine you will find to be your own mind.But the mind is very cunning; it projects. It always uses a kind of transference. For example, if you are sexually repressed and you see a couple hugging, caressing each other, you immediately jump upon them and you start talking of morality, culture, society, and all that. You start saying, “This is not right.” But watch. Have a little insight in your own being as to what is really happening. You have a repressed sexuality. Seeing them in a deep, loving embrace, your sexuality that is repressed starts surfacing. It becomes stirred and you become afraid of it.Rather than accepting the fear of it, rather than looking into and watching it, rather than doing something about it, you become angry. Fear becomes anger when transferred, fear takes the form of anger. You become angry at the couple, and they are not doing anything to you.There is a beautiful story. Indians need to be reminded of it. It happened…Buddha was meditating underneath a tree. It was a full-moon night, and a few young people from the city close by had come to the forest to have a night of delights. They had brought much wine and a beautiful prostitute with them. Just very close to where Buddha was meditating, they started drinking and eating and dancing, and they stripped the woman naked. And they must have been doing nasty things to the woman because they were all drunk. Seeing them all drunk, the woman escaped.Only in the middle of the night, when it started becoming a little cooler, they came to their senses a little bit and became aware that the woman was not there, so they started searching for her. She must have been frightened by them because she had not even taken her clothes; she had simply escaped, naked.They searched. They could not find the woman, but they found Buddha. He was meditating under a tree. They asked him, “Have you seen a naked woman, a very beautiful woman? You must have seen her,” they said, “because this is the only way for her to go to the city; there is no other way.”Buddha said, “Somebody did pass, but it is very difficult for me to say to you whether the person who passed was a man or a woman. It has been long, long ago that I have dropped being interested in bodies, man or woman. That desire has disappeared in me, so it is difficult.“If you had told me before, I would have been more alert. I am sorry. Somebody has passed, but it is difficult for me to tell whether the person was young, old, beautiful, ugly, because these are no longer my concerns. This too is difficult for me to tell – whether the person was naked or clothed – because that too is no longer my concern.”What was Buddha saying? Buddha was saying that now nothing was repressed in him, all repressions were dissolved. Buddha was saying he no longer thought in terms of man and woman, beautiful and ugly, he no longer thought in terms of nakedness or clothes. Those words had become irrelevant. He was again a small child, innocent.Indians have to be reminded of this story, particularly those Indians who think it is their duty to “save Indian culture.” They don’t know anything about Indian culture. This is Indian culture, this: Buddha’s statement and state is Indian culture.But it always happens that you go on projecting and transferring your own ideas on others. Now, these courtiers think there must be some guilty secret, otherwise why should he hide it? Why does he never allow anybody to enter the room? You always think the way you are. You cannot understand beyond yourself; anything that is beyond yourself becomes incomprehensible to you.Ayaz must have been incomprehensible because he was not a politician, he was a Sufi. He was not allowing anybody in the room because it was a private phenomenon, it was his meditation.“…perhaps…”said the courtiers,“…he consorts with plotters, even, who have designs upon your Majesty’s life.”Now, these must have been their ideas that they were projecting on poor Ayaz.For a long time Mahmud refused to hear anything against Ayaz.This is rare. This does not show anything about Mahmud, this simply shows something about Ayaz. His presence must have been of tremendous power. Otherwise, a man like Mahmud, a murderer, must have immediately become afraid when he was told, “There may be some plot, even against your life.” People who are murderers are always afraid of being murdered.Adolf Hitler was very afraid, Nadir Shah was very afraid, Genghis Khan was very afraid, and Mahmud must have been very afraid. When you kill so many people, naturally the fear arises – any day you can be killed. Kings always remain in fear of being killed.So this does not show anything about Mahmud. It simply shows that even a man like Mahmud could not become suspicious; the trust that Ayaz’s presence created must have been really powerful.Otherwise people become very interested in such things. And when there is something like a secret, a guarded secret, it creates curiosity. If you tell a man there are three hundred billion stars in the universe, he will believe you. But if you tell him a bench has just been painted, he has to touch it to be sure.People are foolish like that. They may believe big things because they are so big, and to inquire into them would be a great effort. Three hundred billion stars… People say, “Maybe – who cares? Three hundred or four hundred or six hundred, let them be.” But if someone finds a notice that a bench has been freshly painted, great curiosity arises. He would like to touch it and see.Now, the secret chamber was in the king’s palace. Ayaz was going there every day. It would have been perfectly logical, simple, understandable, if Mahmud had gone the first day he was told about the secret. But Sufis have their own magnetism, as all people who meditate have. He must have been under Ayaz’s great influence.For a long time Mahmud refused to hear anything against Ayaz. But the mystery of the locked room preyed upon his mind until he felt that he had to question Ayaz.One day, when Ayaz was coming out of his private chamber, Mahmud, surrounded by his courtiers, appeared and demanded to be shown into the room.“No,” said Ayaz.Now, this no has to be understood; it is of tremendous value. It is not negative. Ayaz is saying it in tremendous trust. He has loved Mahmud, he has served Mahmud, he has given all that he can give to Mahmud; he has the right to say no.And he is not a politician, otherwise he would have said yes. Politicians are yea-sayers. Whenever there is somebody powerful like Mahmud, they will always say, “Yes, sir.” It is only a man like Ayaz who can say no to Mahmud, knowing perfectly well that the man is dangerous. But he relied on the love that he had been showering on him.And he wanted to understand whether his no could be accepted or not. He had always been open, trusting, available to Mahmud. He had never said no at any time before this time. Now his whole life’s intimacy… Could not one “no” be understood by love, by friendship? If it could not be understood, then that friendship was not of any worth, it was meaningless.Yes is impotent if no cannot be said. Yes is potent only when you leave open the option that no can also be said. If you love somebody, you don’t expect that yes should always be said. If you love somebody, you give freedom to say yes or no. You respect, you don’t expect. Whatever comes from the other side is respected, even a no is respected. If Mahmud had loved the man, he would have simply dropped the idea. Love can trust even a no. Hate cannot even trust a yes.“No,” said Ayaz. His no was sincere, authentic. Yes would have been just a hypocrisy, a pretension. He really wanted his prayer to be a secret, he wanted his zikr to be a secret. He did not want to declare to the world that he was a Sufi. He wanted that to be something only between him and his God. And Mahmud was not more important than that.“If you do not allow me to enter the room, all my confidence in you as trustworthy and loyal will have evaporated, and we can never thenceforward be on the same terms. Take your choice,” said the fierce conqueror.People like Mahmud don’t know what love is or what friendship is. Their love is conditional, and a conditional love is not love at all. Their love is full of ifs and buts.Mahmud said: “If you do not allow me to enter the room…” then all is finished. Whenever you make a condition you destroy love. Remember, never make conditions on love. Let your love be unconditional, and never force the other to fulfill your expectations. Let your love be a sharing of freedom, in freedom.Real lovers, real friends, make each other free. The more they love, the more freedom arises. Unreal lovers, pretenders, have a thousand and one ifs and buts surrounding their love. Their conditions have to be fulfilled, only then can they be loving. But this is not love at all. Love knows no conditions.Ayaz wept…Why did Ayaz weep? He wept because he had loved. He wept because he had really showered all his friendship. He wept because he saw that from the other side the response had not come. He wept because Mahmud had missed one friend, one real friend. Mahmud had lost a lover. He wept because he saw that Mahmud had no heart.Ayaz wept… seeing the murder of love.…and then he threw open the door of the room and allowed Mahmud and his staff to enter. The room was empty of all furniture. All that it contained was a hook in the wall. On the hook hung a tattered and patched cloak, a staff, and a begging bowl.These are the symbols of a Sufi. When he had come to Mahmud, all that he had were these symbols. He had kept them in this secret place. Twenty-three hours a day he was in the court, a worldly man, surrounded by all kinds of foolish politicians; for one hour he used to disappear into his world. For one hour he used to forget all the court and the palace and the nonsense of it. For one hour he was again a Sufi wanderer, in faqr, in inner poverty, in zikr, in inner remembrance.That was his temple, and that was his way of reminding himself of who he was.The king and his court were unable to understand the significance of this discovery.When Mahmud demanded an explanation, Ayaz said, “Mahmud, for years I have been your slave, your friend, and counselor. I have tried never to forget my origins, and for this reason I have come here every day to remind myself of what I was. I belong to you, and all that belongs to me is my rags, my stick, my bowl, and my wandering over the face of the earth.”This is a parable, the parable of remembering your origin, the parable of remembering your original face, the parable of remembering your essence and not the personality. This is a beautiful story, but you have to decode it.The conclusion of the story is that when you come into the world, you come as a clean slate, as a pure virgin emptiness. Then things are added to you and you become lost in those things that are added. You become identified with the knowledge that you accumulate, the wealth that you gather, the respect that you command, the fame that spreads. You become more and more identified with all that happens after birth, and you completely forget who you were before the birth.The Zen people say, “Remember who you were when your parents were not born” – not even you, but your parents were not born… Remember who you were: that is your original face. To see it is to be free from all dreaming and all desiring. To see it is the goal of all religion. And to see it is to see God – because God is not the goal, but the source.La ilaha il’Allah: there is no God but God. There is no goal but the goal. And the paradox is that the goal is in the source. You have it already within you. It is there, vibrating, pulsating in your being. Don’t go anywhere. Move into privacy, into secrecy, into your own innermost chamber. Don’t talk about it. Let it be a secret. If it becomes unbearable, talk to your master, otherwise keep it a secret. Let the secret go deeper and deeper into the soil of your heart. Let it reach the very core. Only when it reaches to the core does one become aflame.Then only God is: la ilaha il’Allah.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Uwais was asked, “How do you feel?”He said, “Like one who has arisen in the morning and does not know whether he will be dead in the evening.”The other man said, “But this is the situation of all men.”Uwais said, “Yes, but how many of them feel it?”Once a learned Mohammedan came to me and asked, “You are not a Mohammedan, so why do you speak on Sufism?”I told him, “I am not a Mohammedan obviously, but I am a Sufi all the same.”A Sufi need not be a Mohammedan. A Sufi can exist anywhere, in any form – because Sufism is the essential core of all religions. It has nothing to do with Islam in particular. Sufism can exist without Islam; Islam cannot exist without Sufism. Without Sufism, Islam is a corpse. Only with Sufism does it become alive.Whenever a religion is alive it is because of Sufism. Sufism simply means a love affair with God, with the ultimate; a love affair with the whole. It means that one is ready to dissolve into the whole, that one is ready to invite the whole to come into one’s heart. It knows no formality. It is not confined by any dogma, doctrine, creed or church. Christ is a Sufi, so is Mohammed. Krishna is a Sufi, so is Buddha. This is the first thing I would like you to remember: that Sufism is the innermost core – as Zen is, as Hasidism is. These are only different names of the same ultimate relationship with God.The relationship is dangerous. It is dangerous because the closer you come to God, the more and more you evaporate. And when you have come really close, you are no more. It is dangerous because it is suicidal, but the suicide is beautiful. To die into God is the only way to really live. Until you die, until you die voluntarily into love, you live an existence that is simply mediocre; you vegetate, you don’t have any meaning. No poetry arises in your heart, no dance, no celebration; you simply grope in the darkness. You live at the minimum, you don’t overflow with ecstasy.That overflow happens only when you are not. You are the hindrance. Sufism is the art of removing the hindrance between you and you, between the self and the self – between the part and the whole.A few things about this word sufi. An ancient Persian dictionary has this for the entry “Sufi” – the definition given by this dictionary goes in rhyme: Sufi Chist – Sufi, Sufist. Who is a Sufi? A Sufi is a Sufi. This is a beautiful definition. The phenomenon is indefinable: a Sufi is a Sufi. It says nothing and yet it says so much. It says that the Sufi cannot be defined; there is no other word to define it, there is no other synonym, there is no possibility of defining it linguistically, it is an indefinable phenomenon. You can live it and you can know it, but it is not possible through the mind or through the intellect. You can become a Sufi – that is the only way to know what it is. You can taste the reality yourself, it is available. You need not go into a dictionary, you can go into existence.I have heard…A small boy was playing in the garden. He was a very small boy and was very frightened of the large bulldog that occupied the yard next to his home.One day, feeling rather adventurous, the little boy climbed the fence and the huge bulldog rushed up to him and licked his face. The boy began to scream and his mother arrived on the scene almost immediately.“Did he bite you, darling?”“No,” whimpered the little boy, “but he tasted me.”If you are not ready to take a bite into Sufism you can at least taste it, and that’s what I will be making available to you – a little taste. Once you have tasted even a drop of the nectar called Sufism you will become thirsty for more. For the first time you will start feeling a great appetite for God.These talks cannot explain to you what Sufism is, because I am not a philosopher. I am not a theologian either. And I am not really talking on Sufism, I will be talking Sufism. If you are ready, if you are ready to go into this adventure, then you will attain a taste of it. It is something that will start happening in your heart. It is something like a bud opening. You will start feeling a certain sensation in the heart – as if something is becoming alert, awake there; as if the heart has been asleep for long and now…the first glimmer of the morning – and there you will have the taste.Sufism is a special kind of magic, a rare kind of magic. It can be transferred only from person to person, not from a book. It cannot be transferred by scriptures. It is also just like Zen – a transmission beyond words. The Sufis have a special word for it – they call it silsila. What Hindus call parampara, they call silsila. Silsila means a transfer from one heart to another heart, from one person to another person. It is a very, very personal religion.You cannot have it without being related to an enlightened master – there is no other way. You can read all the literature that exists on Sufism and you will be lost in a jungle of words. Unless you find a guide, unless you fall in love with a guide, you will not have the taste.I am ready to take you on this faraway journey if you are also courageous, adventurous. I hope you are, because only courageous people become attracted toward me. This place is not for cowards; this place is not for those so-called religious people; this place is not for so-called God-fearing people. This place is for those whom I call God-loving people. And they have a totally different quality. A God-fearing person never moves into the deeper realms of religion, he cannot because of his fear.The word God-fearing is so absurd. If you are afraid of God then where are you going to be loving? Whom are you going to love? If you cannot even love God, then love will not be possible for you at all. If you are related through fear even with God, then this can’t be a relationship.But we have been taught to be afraid of God. In fact, we have only been taught to be afraid of everything. Our whole life is a trembling, a fear, a cowardice – fear of hell, fear of God, fear of punishment. We are good, virtuous, because we are afraid. What kind of virtue is it that is based on fear? And how can you love God if your basic approach is through fear? Out of fear love never arises – that is an impossibility. And out of love fear never arises.When you love a person all fear disappears. And when you are afraid all love disappears. You can hate the person if you are afraid of him, but you cannot love him. Down the centuries man has been taught to be afraid of God and the ultimate result is that Nietzsche had to declare that God is dead. That is the ultimate result of the fear-oriented mind. How long can you tolerate this God? How long can you remain afraid? One day or other you will have to kill him. That’s what Nietzsche did. When he said, “God is dead,” he also said, “Now man is free.” God is dead and now man is free. Otherwise how can you be free with God if he is only a source of fear? Fear cannot give you freedom.People who come to me are God-loving people. When I say God-loving, I mean they are in search, they want to know. And they want to know authentically, they don’t want to have borrowed knowledge about it. They want to have a taste. They want to encounter, they want to face God, they want to look into his eyes. But before you can become capable of looking into the eyes of God you will have to become capable of looking into the eyes of a master. From there you take off. The journey begins.I will make myself available to you. Sufism is just an excuse. I will not be talking about Sufism, I will be talking Sufism itself. The word Sufism is also beautiful. It has many orientations and all are beautiful. And I would not like to emphasize any one orientation, as it has been done again and again. A few people choose one orientation, a few people choose another, but my understanding is that all those orientations are beautiful and have something special to say. I accept them all.One old Sufi master, Abul Hasam, has said, “Sufism was once a reality without a name and now Sufism is a name without reality.” For many centuries Sufism existed without a name. It existed as reality. That’s why I say Jesus was a Sufi, so was Mohammed, so was Mahavira and so was Krishna. Anyone who has come to know God is a Sufi. Why do I say so? Try to understand the word sufi and it will become clear to you.The word sufi is a new coinage – a German coinage, out of German scholarship – not more than one hundred and fifty years old. In Arabic the word is tasawwuf. But both come from a root suf, which means wool.It seems very strange. Why should wool become the symbol of Sufism? The scholars go on saying that it is because Sufis used to wear woolen robes. That’s true. But why? Nobody has answered it. Why should they be wearing woolen robes? Mohammed says in the Koran that even Moses was wearing a woolen robe when he encountered God. When God spoke to him he was entirely in a woolen robe. But why?There is a deep symbolism in it. The symbolism is that wool is the garb of the animals and a Sufi has to become as innocent as an animal. The Sufi has to attain a primal innocence. He has to drop all kinds of civilization, he has to drop all kinds of cultures, he has to drop all conditionings, he has to become again an animal. Then the symbol becomes tremendously significant.When man becomes animal he does not fall back, he goes higher. When man becomes animal, he is not just an animal. That is not possible. You cannot fall back. When a man becomes an animal he becomes a saint. He remains conscious, but his consciousness is no longer burdened by any conditioning. He is no longer a Hindu and no longer a Mohammedan and no longer a Christian. He is in tune with existence as deeply as any animal. He has dropped all kinds of philosophies, he carries no conceptualizations in his mind, his mind is without any content. He is, but he is no longer in the mind. To be without the mind – that is the meaning of the woolen robe. To be like innocent animals, not to know what is good and what is bad – and then the highest good arises, the summum bonum.When you know this is good and that is bad, and you choose good against bad, you remain divided. When you choose, there is repression. When you say, “I will do this. This has to be done. This should be done,” this becomes an “ought.” Then naturally you have to repress – you have to repress that which you have condemned as bad and the repressed part remains inside you and goes on poisoning your system. Sooner or later it will assert, sooner or later it will take revenge. When it explodes, you will go mad.Hence all civilized people are always on the verge of madness. This earth is a big madhouse. A few have already become mad, a few are potentially ready. The difference between you and the mad people is not of quality, it is only of quantity, only of degree. Maybe they have gone beyond a hundred degrees and you are just lingering somewhere – at ninety-eight, ninety-nine – but any moment any situation can push you beyond the boundary. Don’t you see it? Can’t you observe your mind? Can’t you see the madness that goes on and on inside? It is continuously there. You avoid it; you get occupied in a thousand and one things just to avoid it. You don’t look at it, you want to forget about it. It is too scary, too frightening. But it is there – and whether you avoid it or not it is growing. It is continuously accumulating momentum. It can come to a peak at any time, any small thing can trigger it. When you choose, you have to repress.The animal does not choose. Whatever is, is. The animal simply accepts it; its acceptance is total. It knows no choice.So does a Sufi. A Sufi knows no choice. He is choicelessly aware. Whatever happens he accepts it as a gift, as a God-given thing. Who is he to choose. He does not trust in his mind, he trusts in the universal mind. That’s why when you come across a Sufi you will see such animal innocence in his eyes, in his being; such freedom, such joy as only animals know – or trees or rocks or stars.Idries Shah has condemned the definition of sufi from suf – wool – on exactly the same grounds as I am approving of it. He says that Sufis are so alert about symbols how can they choose wool as a symbol? The wool represents the animal, and Idries Shah says Sufis cannot choose the animal as a symbol. They are the people of God – why should they choose the animal? He seems very logical, and he may appeal to many people.But on exactly the same grounds I approve the definition. To me, to be an animal means to be innocent – not to know morality, not to know immorality. To be an animal is not a condemnation. A saint is more like the animals than like you, than like the so-called human beings.The human beings are not natural beings, they are very unnatural, artificial, plastic. Their whole life is a life of deception. If you touch somebody’s face you will never touch his face, you touch only his mask. And remember, your hand is also not true. It has a glove on it. Even lovers don’t touch each other; even in love you are not innocent; even in love you are not without masks. But when you want to love God you have to be without masks. You have to drop all deceptions. You have to be authentically whatever you are, to be choicelessly whatever you are. In that primal innocence God descends.So the reasons Idries Shah finds to condemn the definition that sufi cannot come from suf are exactly the reasons I approve it.I have heard…The Catholic priest was trying to get a Jew converted to his faith.He said, “All you have to do is say three times, ‘I was a Jew, now I’m a Catholic. I was a Jew, now I’m a Catholic. I was a Jew, now I’m a Catholic.’”He said it, but the priest thought he had better check up on his convert one Friday at his home.The Jew was frying chicken. “Now, you know you can’t eat that chicken on Friday.”“Oh, yes, I can,” he replied. “I dipped it in a pan three times and said, ‘Once I was a chicken, now I am a fish.’”That’s how we go on living. All of our religions are just like that – all just verbal. They do not penetrate your being. And you know that whatever you say, you do exactly the opposite. You think one thing, you say another, and you do something else. You are a trinity, you are not one. And all those three people are going in three different directions. You are a crowd – hence the misery.The animal is one – hence the blissfulness of the animal. The animal has nothing whatever to be happy about. He does not have a big palace to live in and he does not have a TV and radio and all of that. He has nothing, and yet in him you will find great peace, silence, joy, celebration. Why? One thing is there: the animal is not a chooser.The Sufi is not a chooser. Choose and you deceive; choose and you start becoming false; choose and you become plastic.A man was going to attend a Halloween party dressed in the costume of the Devil. On his way it began to rain so he darted into a church where a revival meeting was in progress. At the sight of his devil’s costume, people began to scatter through the doors and windows.One lady got her coat sleeve caught on the arm of one of the seats and as the man came closer she pleaded, “Satan, I’ve been a member of this church for twenty years, but I’ve really been on your side all the time.”But that’s the situation of all ladies and of all gentlemen – they pay lip service to God, but basically they are surrendered to the Devil. The Devil is deeper because the Devil has been repressed. Whenever something is repressed it goes deeper in your being; you become just a hypocrite.By asserting the symbol of the animal Sufis declare, “We are simple people. We don’t know what is good and what is bad. We know only God, and whatever happens is his gift. We accept it. We are not doers on our own accord.” This is the first meaning of the word sufi.There is another possibility: the word sufi can be derived from sufa – purity, cleanliness, purification. That too is good. When you live a life of choicelessness a natural purity comes. But remember, this purity has nothing of morality in it. It does not mean pure in the sense of being good; it means pure in the sense of being divine, not in the sense of being good. Pure simply means pure of all ideas, both good and bad. Purity means transcendence. One has no idea at all, no prejudices. One trusts life so utterly that one need not have any ideas, one can live without ideas. When ideas are there in the mind they create impurity, they create wounds. When you are too full of ideas, you are too full of dirt. All ideas are dirty. Yes, even the idea of God is a dirty idea because ideas are dirty.For a Sufi, God is not an idea, it is his lived reality. It is not sitting somewhere on a throne high in the heavens, no – it is herenow, it is all over the place, it is everywhere. God is just a name for the totality of existence.Purity means a contentless mind – so please don’t be misguided by the word purity. It does not mean a man who has a good character. It does not mean a man who behaves according to the Ten Commandments. It does not mean a man who is respected by the society as a good man.A Sufi has never been respected by the society. A Sufi lives such a rebellious life that the society has almost always been murdering Sufis, crucifying them – because the Sufi makes you aware of your falsity. He becomes a constant sermon against your artificiality, against your ugliness, against your inhumanity to human beings, against your masks, against all that you are and represent. A Sufi becomes a constant pain in the neck to the so-called society and to the so-called respectable people.I have heard…It happened that Abu Yasid, a Sufi mystic, was praying – these are parables, remember, they are not historical facts – and God spoke to Abu Yasid and said, “Yasid, now you have become one of my chosen people. Should I declare it to the world?”Abu Yasid laughed. He said, “Yes, you can – if you want me to be crucified, declare. You declared about al-Hillaj and what happened? They crucified him. Whenever you declare that somebody has attained, people crucify him immediately. They don’t love you and they cannot tolerate your people, so if you want me to be crucified, declare.”And it is said that God never declared about Abu Yasid. He kept quiet.This has been the case.Somebody asked al-Hillaj Mansoor, the greatest mystic ever, “What is the ultimate in Sufi experience?”Al-Hillaj said, “Tomorrow, tomorrow you will see what the ultimate in Sufi experience is.”Nobody knew what was going to happen the next day. The man asked, “Why not today?”Al-Hillaj said, “Just wait. It is going to happen tomorrow – the ultimate.”The next day he was crucified. And when he was crucified he shouted loudly for his friend who had asked the question. He said, “Where are you hiding in the crowd? Now come on and see the ultimate in Sufism. This is what it is.”If you start living in God you become intolerable to the so-called society. The society lives in hypocrisy, it cannot tolerate truth. Truth has to be crucified. It can love the Church, but it cannot love Christ. It can love the Vatican pope, but it cannot love Jesus. When Jesus is gone then it is good – you can go on worshipping him. When Mansoor is gone you can go on talking about him. But when he is there he is a fire. Only those who are ready to be consumed by the fire will be ready to fall in love with Mansoor.Sufa means purity; purity in the sense that there is no content in the mind anymore. The mind has disappeared. There is no-mind, no thinking, no thought. It is a state of satori, samadhi.There is another possibility and that too is beautiful. And I accept all these possibilities. The third possibility is from another word, sufia, which means: chosen as a friend by God.Sufis say that you cannot search for God unless he has already chosen you. How can you search for God if he has not already searched for you? All initiative is from the side of God. He is searching for you, he is desiring you, he goes on groping for you: “Where are you?” When he chooses somebody only then do you start choosing him. You may not know it – because when he chooses, how can you know?The same is true about a master. You think that you choose a master? Nonsense, just nonsense! It is always the master who chooses you. The very idea that you choose the master is egoistic. How can you choose the master? How will you know in the first place who the master is? How will you decide? What criteria have you got? You cannot choose a master, the master chooses you.You have come to me from faraway lands – many more are coming, they are on the way. Soon this place is going to become really crowded because I have chosen many who are not yet even alert about it. But they have started moving. They think they are searching for a master; they think they are seekers. And it is natural. It can be forgiven. But they have been chosen by somebody.And so is the ultimate case with God. God chooses first, then you start feeling a hunger for him. And it is only Sufis who have said this. No other tradition has said so clearly that man cannot choose God, it is God who chooses man. It is a blessing. Even to feel a thirst for God is a great blessing. You should feel happy that you have been chosen, that God has already called you. The first call is always heard in the deep unconscious so you cannot figure out what it is, from where it is coming. You feel it as if it is coming from you. It is not coming from you.Man cannot take the initiative. How can man take the initiative? Man is so impotent, man is so helpless. Man cannot start the journey on his own unless he is pulled, unless some magnetic force starts pulling him toward some unknown goal.You can choose only that which you know. How can you choose God? You can take the initiative for other things, the worldly things, because you know them. You can have an idea of how to purchase a beautiful house, or how to have this woman as your wife or this man as your husband, or how to have more money, more power, more prestige – you can choose these things. How can you choose God? You have not even had a glimpse, not even in your dreams. How can you choose something so utterly unknown to you?But you are not unknown to God. He can choose you. Whenever he chooses, a great desire arises in you to find him. That is an indication that he has chosen you. You have become a Sufi – chosen as a friend by God. That is also beautiful.The fourth possibility is from the Greek word sufiya. Sufiya means wisdom. Wisdom is not synonymous with knowledge – knowledge is through scriptures, through others, borrowed. Wisdom arises in your own being; you are a light unto yourself. Wisdom means that you know, not that you believe. Knowledge is belief. Somebody says, “God is” and you believe. You believe the man, hence you believe that he must be saying the truth. Jesus says, “God is” and you believe; I say, “God is” and you believe – then it is knowledge. You love me, you trust me, you start believing – but it is knowledge.A man becomes a Sufi only when he has known. When he himself has known, when he himself has touched the reality, when he himself has seen the face of God, then he becomes a Sufi. He has become wise. He is no longer just knowledgeable, now it is his own experience.The English term philosophy comes from the same root, sufiya, but it has gone astray. Sufi also comes from the same root, sufiya, but it has not gone astray. Philosophy became just speculation – thinking and thinking and thinking, never arriving at any conclusion. And if you don’t arrive at any conclusion your life is not going to be transformed. Just by thinking, nobody is transformed; only when you arrive at some conclusions through experience do you grow. Philosophy is a game with words and logic – a beautiful game. If you like it you can play it, but you remain the same. It never changes you.That’s why science had to get a divorce from philosophy. The day science was divorced from philosophy it started growing. It became experimental, it became objective. Science does not depend on thinking anymore, it depends on experimentation. That is one possibility of getting a divorce from philosophy.Another possibility of getting the divorce is Sufism. Science moves toward the object and becomes experimentation, Sufism moves toward the subject and becomes experience. But both are concerned about reality – science for the reality that is outside and Sufism for the reality that is inside. Both have divorced philosophy.Science depends on experiment because with the object, experiment is possible; Sufism depends on experience because you can only experience the inner consciousness, you cannot experiment upon it. It is not an object, it is your subjectivity.And the last possibility is from the Hebrew root ain sof, which means the absolutely infinite, the search for the absolutely infinite, the search beyond the relative, the search for the unbounded, the eternal, the timeless.Yes, that’s exactly what Sufism is. Sufism is all these things and more. To indicate that “more” I will repeat the definition in the Persian dictionary: Sufi Chist – Sufi, Sufist. Who is a Sufi? A Sufi is a Sufi. Nothing more can be said about it. But you can enter the temple of Sufism and you can taste it.Before we enter this small story of today, a few more things will be helpful to understand. They will become a background.The Koran says there are three basic qualities that have to be in the heart of the seeker. The first is khushu. Khushu means humility, humbleness. The second is karamat. Karamat means charity, sharing, the joy of giving. And the third is sijd. Sijd means truthfulness, authenticity; not to pretend, but to be whatever you are. These three are the three pillars of Sufism.Humility does not mean the ordinary so-called humbleness. The ordinary humble person is not egoless. He carries a new kind of ego – of being humble. He thinks he is humble, “Nobody is as humble as I am. I am the topmost in humility.” But he goes on comparing. The ego has not changed, the ego has only taken a new posture, a new gesture, more subtle.First the ego was very gross. When you go on bragging about your money, it is very gross. One day you renounce your money and then you start bragging that you have renounced all. This is very subtle, but the bragging continues. First you say, “I am somebody.” In a thousand and one ways you try to prove that you are somebody. Then one day seeing the futility of it you drop the whole trip, you turn back, you take another gesture – you stand on your head and you start saying, “I am nobody.” But “I am” continues. The claim was for somebody, now it is for nobody. The claim was there, the claim is still there. Now it has taken a subtle form.Humility, khushu, means a man who has understood all the ways of the ego. And by understanding all the ways of the ego, the ego has disappeared. There is no claim, not even of being humble. When there is no claim, there is humility, there is khushu.This is one of the most essential qualities for those who want to move toward God – because if you are too much, you will not be moving. You have to be liquid, you have to melt; you cannot remain frozen in your ego. Only when you melt will you start moving. And when you start moving where else can you move? All movement is toward God. Only those who are ossified are not reaching toward God – otherwise, if you are moving, you are moving toward God. There is no other movement.The second is charity – karamat. Charity does not mean that you give and you feel very good that you have given, that you give and you oblige the person to whom you have given. Then it is not karamat, then it is not charity. Charity is when you give and you feel obliged that the other has taken it; when you give with no idea that you are obliging anybody in any way; when you give because you have too much – what else can you do? It is not that the other needs.Charity is when you give out of your affluence, when you give out of your abundance. It is not that the other is needy and you are helping him; the other is not the question at all. You give because you have – what else can you do? The flower has bloomed and the fragrance spreads to the winds – what else can the flower do? The lamp has been lighted and it shares its light, it spreads its light. The cloud is full of water and it showers – what else can it do?When you give out of your abundance, only then is there charity. And then you don’t bother who is worthy of receiving it. That is not the point at all.You must have read the beautiful parable of Jesus. Jesus is incomparable as far as parables go.A rich man called a few laborers to work in his garden. By the afternoon it was felt that there were not enough and that the work would not be completed by the evening, so a few more laborers were called. But by the evening it was felt that even those were not enough so a few more laborers were called.At sunset the rich man gave them money for all that they had done. But he gave equally to all of them: those who had come in the morning received the same, and those who had come in the afternoon they also received the same, and those who had come just when the sun was setting they also received the same.Naturally, the laborers who had come in the morning were angry. They protested and they said, “This is unjust. We came in the morning, we did the whole day’s work and we received the same reward. These people have just come and they have not done a thing and they are also receiving the same reward. This is unjust.”The master laughed and he said, “Whatever you have received is not enough for the work you have done?”They said, “It is enough. But what about these people who have not done anything and who have also received the same reward?”The master said, “I give to them out of my abundance. Can’t I give my money? It is my money. You have been rewarded for whatever you have done. Can’t I throw my money away? What protest is there? Why should you be worried?”And Jesus used to say, ‘“This man is the man of charity. He gives out of his abundance.” This is what Sufis call karamat.And the third is truthfulness. It does not mean saying the truth, it means being the truth. Saying is only halfway; being is the true thing. You can say the truth a few times when it doesn’t harm you – that’s what people go on doing. When truth is not going to harm them they become truthful. And sometimes, if truth is going to harm others, they persist in being very, very truthful. But when the truth is not going to help you then you drop it, then it is no longer meaningful.That’s why people say, “Honesty is the best policy.” But the man who says, “Honesty is the best policy” is not an honest man, remember. Policy? – the very word is dishonest. Truth cannot be a policy and honesty cannot be a policy. They can only be your very heart – not policies. Policies can be used and dropped. Policies are political. When honesty pays, you are honest – that’s what it means. “Honesty is the best policy.” When it does not pay, you become dishonest. You have no relationship with honesty. You use it. That’s what it means when you say “policy.”Sijd – the Sufi word means to be truthful, to be true. It is not only a question of policy. Whatever happens, whatever the result, not thinking of the result at all but just to be whatever is true. To risk all for truth – that’s what sijd is. It is to risk everything for truth. Because if truth is saved, all is saved, and if truth is lost, all is lost.Now this small story.Uwais was asked, “How do you feel?”Uwais is a Sufi master.He said, “Like one who has arisen in the morning and does not know whether he will be dead in the evening.”The other man said, “But this is the situation of all men.”Uwais said, “Yes, but how many of them feel it?”Now many things have to be understood. First, when Uwais said: “Like one who has arisen in the morning and does not know whether he will be dead in the evening,” he is saying many things. It is a very pregnant statement. You will have to go deep into it.First he is saying that a Sufi lives moment by moment; he does not bother about what is going to happen in the next moment. He has no plan for the next moment. A Sufi has no future. This moment is all. He lives in it, he lives totally in it because there is nowhere else to go.You cannot live totally in the moment if you have a future – a part of your being will be flowing toward the future, naturally. If you have a past you cannot live in the present, part of your mind will be flowing toward the past. You will become fragmented. The major part of your being will remain hanging somewhere in the past and the remaining greater part will have already moved somewhere into the future. Nothing will be left for the present. And the present is so small, so atomic, that you can miss it very easily. People are missing it. People have pasts and people have futures, people don’t have any present.The Sufi lives in the present. To live in the present, the basic need is to withdraw yourself from the past, to withdraw yourself from the future. Then there comes a concentration of energies, then this small moment becomes luminous, you pour your total energy into it – then there is joy and benediction. If you are miserable, it is only because you live in the past and in the future. A miserable man has a past and a future, a man who lives in bliss has only the moment, this moment. He lives in the now.Ashley Montagu has coined a new word – it will be very, very helpful to understand. He says that this newness, this constantly being new in the moment, this constantly dropping out of the past and not jumping into the future is a great art. He calls that art, neoteny. Neo means new, teny means stretched out, extended.A man can live his whole life in newness, a man can live his whole life like a child, a man can have the quality of a child extended all over his life – the art is to live in the moment. The person who lives in the moment never grows old. He matures, but he never grows old. He really grows. Growing old is not really growing. Growing old is only dying slowly; growing old is only slowly committing suicide. The man who lives in the moment never becomes old in the sense that people become old. He never becomes knowledgeable. He is always innocent, curious, thrilled, full of wonder. Every moment brings a new surprise. He is ready to explore new dimensions of life. He is always on an adventure. He is an explorer. He is never fed up with life. He is never bored.In a church, the priest declared that after the services there would be a meeting of the Board. Everybody left. Only the Board members were there. But a stranger was also sitting there just in the front row.The priest was a little puzzled. He said, “Sir, have you not understood? I said there would be a meeting of the Board.”The stranger said, “Yes. And who is more bored than me? You tell me.”Look at people. Look at people’s eyes. They don’t have the glimmer of surprise. Look at their faces, their faces say that nothing is going to happen anymore. They are bored, utterly bored. If they are not committing suicide it is only because they are cowards. Otherwise, there is nothing to live for; there is no meaning, no significance. There seems to be no joy. Just go to any street and stand at the side and watch people. Just everybody seems to be so full of dust.Why do people go on living? – because they are afraid to commit suicide. Otherwise, life has no joy. Or maybe they are so bored that they don’t feel that anything is going to happen even in death. They are so bored, nothing is ever going to happen. Nothing ever happens. And the reason? The reason is that they are burdened by the past.Sufism says, “Don’t be burdened by the past and don’t be burdened by the future either. This moment is precious, why waste it in thinking about things that are no more or in thinking about things that are not yet?”Let this moment be one of great joy, and that joy becomes a prayer, that joy becomes zikr, that joy becomes a remembrance of God. It is no use just repeating, “Allah, Allah, Allah”; it is no use just repeating, “Rama, Rama, Rama.” When you are full of joy then you remember Allah in the deepest core of your being. It is not that you repeat it verbally; your whole existence says Allah, your every cell, your every fiber of being, says Allah. It is not that you repeat it; it is not verbal, it is existential. It is there, it is constantly there. It becomes a climate inside you. You start living in that juice, in that joy.So the first thing Uwais says is, “This is my feeling. I live moment to moment, without any plan or future. I don’t know what is going to happen this evening – maybe death.” By death he simply means that anything is possible, even death is possible. “I live in surprise, I live in wonder, I live in mystery. And the greatest mystery is death.”There are only two mysteries: life and death. And the greatest is certainly death – because life is spread out and death is very intense. Life happens in seventy, eighty, a hundred years. Naturally it is spread out. Death happens in a single moment, it is very intense. Death is the culmination, the crescendo. Death is the greatest orgasm there is. Hence along the way, people are afraid of orgasm also because they are afraid of death. Many people don’t have orgasms. Or even if they do, it is a local orgasm, not very orgasmic – because of fear. The orgasmic moment is a death moment. And in death happens the ultimate orgasm. In that moment you utterly disappear into nothingness. It is the greatest experience.Uwais says, “I don’t know what is going to happen – maybe death.” Death is a door to God. Those who know how to die know how to enter God. Clingers, clinging to life, never know what God is because they don’t allow death. And death comes every day; as each moment passes by something dies. If you are thirty years old you have been dying for thirty years continuously. If you gather those moments of thirty years, those dead moments that you have already lived, if you gather them, then you are burdened. Then you start growing old. Then you are carrying such a load – how can you be in a dance? That load won’t allow it.If you can drop that load every day and you are again fresh, again innocent, again a child, then you know that death is also happening every day. Life and death are happening together. Then one day comes the ultimate death and one accepts it, welcomes it, celebrates it, disappears into it dancing. How you behave at the moment of death will show how you have lived. Your death moment will be a testament.Uwais is saying, “I am always facing death and waiting for it. And I am thrilled by the possibility of it.” But to face death means to live courageously. People avoid death, they have even avoided the very idea of it. They think, “Everybody else dies, but I am not going to die.”If you live in such innocence you live in ignorance. Ignorance is a great religious quality. A man of knowledge cannot become religious, but an ignorant man can easily become religious.Uwais says: “Like one who has arisen in the morning and does not know whether he will be dead in the evening.” Nothing is certain, nothing is predictable; everything remains open. For a Sufi all is possible. Nothing is absolutely certain, everything is possible – that is what opening means; an open mind.The other man said, “But this is the situation of all men.” Everybody is going to die but nobody knows when. The other has not understood the statement of Uwais. We understand only at our own plane.Uwais said, “Yes. But how many of them feel it?” They are going to die. Every moment the unknown penetrates life – that’s what death is. But they don’t feel it. They are not aware of it. People live in a kind of sleep, in a kind of slumber. People are almost sleepwalkers.The passenger in the taxi cab was more than slightly inebriated. Glancing at his watch he saw that the time was 7:00. Shortly afterwards he glanced at a clock in a jeweler’s store that registered 6:55.“Hey, what’s the time?” he asked the cabbie.“It’s 6:50,” the cabbie replied.“Stop and turn around,” he demanded, “we’re going in the wrong direction!”People are almost asleep, drunk; there is not even a ray of awareness.It happened…It was the first part in any play that he had managed to get in the last five years. True, it was only a small speaking part, but it was a start. The hero was to come on the scene and say, “Did you see this man get killed?” His part was simply to look the hero straight in the eyes and answer, “I did.”For weeks he practiced with those two words: “I did, I did, I did” – studying elocution, practicing facial expressions and intonations. Then came the big day. The hero walked in, glanced at the body on the floor, looked at the actor and asked, “Did you see this man get killed?”Looking full into the eyes of the hero, he answered clearly, “Did I?”People are not alert at all. They are asleep. A kind of dullness, a kind of fog surrounds your being. It is very foggy and confused. Very rarely do you become alert, very, very rarely. Rare are those moments. Gurdjieff used to say that if a man had them seven times in his life it is more than you can expect. Very rarely.In very great danger, sometimes you become alert. Somebody comes to kill you and puts a revolver on your chest – then for a single moment the fog disappears. Death is there. Or, if you are driving at ninety, ninety-five, a hundred miles per hour and then suddenly at a turn you see that now everything is gone, for a moment the accident seems to be certain, absolutely certain – the fog disappears. Hence the appeal of danger: because only in danger do you sometimes feel that you are. Hence the appeal of war: when people go to war and move into the clutches of death, sometimes rare moments come. But otherwise, in an ordinary comfortable, convenient life, people go on snoring.A traveler inquired the way to the post office from a drunkard. The drunkard was an old inhabitant of the town.“Well, you go down two blocks and turn right… No, you go down two blocks and turn left… No, that ain’t right either, you go up this street one block, turn right and go one block. Truth is mister, I don’t think you can get to the post office from here at all.”People are living in that fog. And it is not only that when you drink you become foggy – you are drinking a thousand and one kinds of alcohol every moment. Somebody is money-mad – then money is his alcohol. Somebody is power-mad – then he is drinking power and will become a drunkard. And there are different kinds of mad people. But everybody has his own particular kind of alcohol that makes him drunk.Have you seen the eyes of a miser looking at his money? He looks at the money as if he is looking at his beloved. He touches money with such tenderness. He feels one-hundred-rupee notes with such love and care. When the money is there he forgets the whole world.Watch a politician – power-mad. He is drunk. He need not have any other alcoholic beverages, he need not have any drugs, he is already drugged by power. He may even be against alcohol and against drugs, he may try to bring prohibition to the country, but he himself is drunk. And certainly the alcohol that is created out of power is more dangerous than any alcohol that comes out of grapes. These power maniacs are the really dangerous people of the world.But everybody is drunk. They drink different kinds of drinks, but they are still drunk. A Sufi is one who is not drunk. That’s what Uwais means when he says: “Yes, but how many of them feel it?”Remember, there is a difference. If the same question was asked of Bodhidharma or Rinzai they would have said, “How many of them are aware of it?” Uwais says, “How many of them feel it?” That’s the difference between two basic paths – the path of awareness, meditation, and the path of love, feeling.Sufism is the path of love, feeling. If Bodhidharma had been asked he must have said, “How many are aware of it?” He would have used the word aware, not feel. No Zen master would use the word feel – that is the basic difference, otherwise there is no difference.Sufism is heart-wakefulness – the arising of feeling. The Koran says: “It is not the eyes that are blind but the hearts.” By heart is meant the faculty that perceives the transcendent, the beloved. Sufis are known as those who have hearts. Says al-Hillaj Mansoor, “I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart. I asked him ‘Who art thou?’ and he answered ‘Thou.’”The eye of the heart… Remember this: Sufism is the path of love. It is more dancing than Zen, it is more singing than Zen, it is more celebrating than Zen. That’s why the countries where Sufism has existed have created the best and the most beautiful poetry that has ever existed in the world. The Persian language became so poetic, and it has created the greatest poets of the world. The very language has become poetic, the very language has become very juicy – because God is thought of as the beloved.That too has to be understood – the last thing today. For Zen people there is no God, your own awareness is the ultimate. Zen comes out of Gautam Buddha’s insight. Sufism comes out of Mohammed’s love affair with God.It happened…The year was 610 AD. Mohammed was in the cave on Mount Hira. He received his first spiritual experience and feared that he had become either mad or, as he said, a poet. He went to his wife trembling with fear saying, “Woe is me. Poet or possessed?” He had even thought of casting himself down from the high rocks to kill himself. It was such a shock, it was such a great voltage of love. For three days he was trembling constantly as if in a deep, dangerous fever.The fear was that he thought that he had either become a poet or he had gone mad. Out of this experience of Mohammed’s starts the river of Sufism. It has always remained both poetic and possessed. He was both. He had become a poet and he had become possessed. He had gone mad and he had become a mystic.You must have heard about the beautiful Sufi legend of Majnu and Laila. It is not an ordinary love story. The word majnu means mad, mad for God. And laila is the symbol of God. Sufis think of God as the beloved; laila means the beloved. Everybody is a Majnu, and God is the beloved. And one has to open one’s heart, the eye of the heart.That’s why Uwais says: “Yes, but how many of them feel it?” People have become completely unfeeling, they don’t feel at all. They have bypassed their hearts. They don’t go through the heart, they have reached the head. They have avoided the heart. Hence there seems to be no benediction in life. It is only through the heart that the flowers bloom and it is only through the heart that the birds start singing, and it is only through the heart that you come to realize life not as a dry awareness, but as a celebration.Sufism is great celebration. I invite you to celebrate it with me.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-1-02/

The first question:Osho,Has Sufism arisen as a rebellion against the establishment of Islam? Or is it pre-Islam?It is both. Anything that is alive is both. It is very ancient and it is very new – together, simultaneously.Sufism is pre-Islam and yet it is a unique, new phenomenon too. It is the essential core of Islam and yet it is a rebellion against the establishment of Islam too. That’s how it always is. Zen is also both – the essential core of Buddhism and a rebellion against the establishment.It has to be understood. Whenever a man like Buddha or Mohammed happens, the essential flowers. But sooner or later the human mind will make an establishment out of it. That too is natural because man needs something to cling to. Man needs something pseudo because the real transforms him. The real is dangerous. He needs something that only looks real, but is not real. He needs a toy to play with. That’s what the Church is, the establishment is; it gives an appearance of doing the real thing. So you can enjoy doing it and you can enjoy the ego trip and yet you remain the same. It does not penetrate you, transmute you, at all. Nothing is at stake.If a man really goes into prayer he will die. He will never come back the same again. He will come back, but as a totally different person. The one who has gone into prayer will never come back. Something new, something that has never existed before, something that is discontinuous with the past will arise. You will be lost, and only then will you find the real you. Real prayer is dangerous; it is a death and a resurrection.So man is very tricky – he creates a false prayer. He makes a ritual out of prayer, he pretends to pray. He only goes through the gesture, through the empty gesture – his heart is not in it. He goes to the mosque, to the temple, to the church; he prays. And he knows that he is deceiving, he knows that he is not in it. Yet it gives him a certain respectability. People think of him as being a religious man. That gives him a certain credibility. It is a formal gesture, it makes his social life smooth, it creates a kind of lubricant – but it doesn’t change him.So whenever a Mohammed or a Buddha happens, the real is brought into the world. But the real drives you mad, the real starts killing you. Only very rare people, courageous people, can have that date with the real.What about the cowards? They would also like to enjoy at least the idea that they have seen God, been into prayer, at least the idea that they are also religious. What about these cowards? And they exist in great numbers; the majority of humanity consists of cowards. These cowards sooner or later create a false religion. Christ is real religion, Christianity is false religion. Mohammed is real, Mohammedanism is false. When this false religion, this established religion becomes too much, again and again there will come people – courageous people – who will assert and who will say that this is all wrong. So these people will look rebellious. In fact, they are asserting the very spirit. The spirit of Mohammed is asserted by Mansoor; the spirit of Mohammed is asserted by Omar Khayyam; the spirit of Mohammed is asserted by a thousand and one Sufi mystics again and again.But now you can see what the problem is. Whenever somebody asserts the same spirit he is bringing the essential religion back – but he will go against the establishment, against the false religion. And the false religion has great power – the mass madness is behind it. The mass neurosis supports it. It can kill, it can destroy. It cannot create, but it can destroy a Jesus, a Socrates, a Mansoor. That is very easy for it.These people are like flowers, very fragile, and the mass neurosis is like a rock. If you throw a rock at a flower nothing is going to happen to the rock, only the flower will be destroyed. Remember, the higher is always destroyed whenever there is a clash with the lower. If there is a clash between poetry and prose, poetry will be destroyed, not prose. If there is a clash between God and the world, God will disappear, not the world. If there is a clash between lust and love, love will be poisoned, not lust.When the unknown descends, when the superior comes into this world, it comes like a flower.Yes, it is very rebellious. It is rebellious because it is essential. The essential is always rebellious. Mohammed was a rebellious man – his whole life he was haunted by enemies. Many times he was just on the brink of being killed. He had to fight his whole life – a mystic had to become a warrior, a mystic had to waste his whole life in being a warrior. He had to carry a sword. And you can see the contradiction, the paradox – on his sword he had written the words: peace, love. Love had to carry a sword because of mad people. Peace had to carry a sword because of neurosis.Mohammed had to wage war continuously; he was fighting and fighting. His whole life was wasted in fight. He could have brought more flowers from the unknown, he could have brought more of God into this world, but there was no opportunity.Once Mohammed has become established sooner or later the enemy will win again: the enemy who was fighting against Mohammed will become the priest. Watch it! The priests were fighting against Mohammed – the priest of the old establishment. Mohammed brings the essential religion back again, the eternal. Then the priest who was with the older establishment fights with him. If Mohammed wins, then the priest changes party. The priest is always with those who are victorious; the coward is always with those who are victorious. The priest changes party. He says, “I am converted by you.” He moves into the camp of Mohammed.But he has his old tricks, he has his old mind. He starts playing the same game. Maybe while Mohammed is alive he will not be able to do it, but once Mohammed is gone it will be very easy for him to have the same kind of establishment in the name of Mohammed. Then again whenever another Sufi mystic brings God back, he will be a friend of Mohammed and an enemy of Mohammedans. That’s why there is this paradox.It is both; religion is always both. Look at me. Whatever I am saying to you is the essential religion. It is the religion of Buddha, Christ, Moses, Mohammed, and yet all the priests are against me – all the priests. They may not agree on anything else but they agree on one thing – they all agree on being against me. The Mohammedan priest agrees with the Hindu. They will not agree on anything else, but they both agree about me being wrong. The Christian agrees with the Jaina. They have nothing similar, not a single iota of doctrine that is similar, but on one thing they will agree: if they have to condemn me they will all be together.Whatever I am saying to you is the essential core of all their religions, but they are against it. They pretend to be for it, they pretend to be the protectors – they are the enemies. The establishment is the enemy of religion. But it happens in the natural course of things because man is stupid. The establishment is bound to happen again and again. And again and again somebody has to assert and rebel.There is a beautiful parable in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov.Jesus comes back to the world after eighteen hundred years to see how things are going now. He is very hopeful. He thinks, “Now almost half the earth is Christian, I am going to be welcomed and received. The first time I was there on the earth people were against me because there were no Christians, there was nobody to receive me. There were Jews, and they killed me.”Now he comes with great hope. He descends into Bethlehem on a Sunday morning. Naturally he chooses Sunday – Christians will be free and they will be coming out of the church and he will meet them just in front of the church.People are coming out and he is waiting with great hope. Then people come around him and they start laughing, they start ridiculing him. They say, “You are pretending perfectly well. You look just like Jesus.”He says, “I am Jesus!”They laugh and they say, “There is only one Jesus. This is sacrilege to call yourself Jesus. You look like him, but how can you be him? It will be better if you escape from here before the priest comes out. If he catches hold of you, you will be in trouble.”But Jesus says, “He is my priest. If you cannot recognize me, it’s okay – you are lay people. But he is my priest, continuously reading my scriptures, thinking, meditating on whatever I have said before, continuously talking about me. At least he will recognize me. You wait!”And they laugh and they say, “You are wrong. Just escape from here, otherwise you will get in trouble.”Then comes the priest, and the people who have not even bowed down to Jesus touch the feet of the priest and give him a passage very reverently, very respectfully. And the priest comes in and looks at this young man and says, “Get down! Come follow me, come into the church. Have you gone mad? What are you up to?”Jesus says. “Can’t you recognize me?”Then the priest takes him into the church, puts him in a dark cell, locks the cell and disappears. In the middle of the night he comes back. The whole day Jesus thinks, “What is going to happen? Am I going to be crucified again by my own people, by Christians? This is too much!” He cannot believe it.In the middle of the night the priest comes with a small lamp in his hand. He falls at the feet of Jesus and says, “I recognized you. But please, you are not needed at all. You have done your work and now we are doing your work perfectly well. You are a great disturber. If you come again you will disturb the whole thing. It has been hard work for us. For eighteen centuries we have struggled, and somehow we have tried to manage things perfectly well. Half of humanity is converted and half is on the way. Just wait. You need not come! Master, you are not needed, we servants are enough. Just send messages from there.”Jesus says, “I’m happy that you at least recognized me.”The priest says, “Yes, I can recognize you when we are alone, but in front of the masses I cannot recognize you. And if you insist on creating trouble then I am sorry but I will have to crucify you the same way that the Jews did with you – because a priest has to look to the establishment. I am part of an establishment – Jew or Christian does not matter. I have to save the Church. If there is any conflict between you and the Church, then I am for the Church – I serve the Church. It is perfectly good: you live in heaven, you enjoy there and we are enjoying here. Things are perfectly good. There is no need of your second coming, the first was enough.”The essential religion will always go against the established religion. Sufis are the very heart, but the heart is bound to be against the mind, the intellect. The priest lives in the head; the man of prayer lives in the heart. They are two polarities, their languages are different. Their languages are so different that the priest cannot understand the language of the heart at all. He can spin theories; he has great expertise as far as doctrines are concerned. He has a very legal mind and is very knowledgeable. But as far as the heart is concerned there is a wasteland; nothing grows, nothing flowers, nothing flows.The head cannot understand the heart. The heart can understand the head because the heart is deeper than the head. The man of the heart can understand the man of the head and can feel compassion for him, but the man of the head cannot understand the man of the heart. The lower cannot understand the higher; the higher can understand the lower. The man who is sitting in the valley cannot understand the man who is sitting on the top of the hill. But the man who is sitting on the top of the hill can understand the man who is living in the valley.So people of the heart are very compassionate. They understand. They understand why the priest is against them; they understand why the majority of humanity is not able to fall in rapport with them.Let me tell you an anecdote.A man was walking along and he saw a snail lost in a crevice in a wall, and for no particular reason he said to it, “Hello snail.”Oddly enough the snail could speak and the snail could hear, and it said, “Hello,” and it moved its eyes around as best it could on their stalks to try to see what it was that was confronting him.So the man said, “Can you hear me?”The snail said, “Yes, of course. Who and what are you anyway?”And the man said, “Well, I am a man.”The snail said, “Whatever is that?”So the man said, “Well, we are something like you. For instance, you have eyes on stalks and we have stalks on the other end.”The snail said, “The other end?”The man said, “Yes, just a minute. It’s for putting our feet on, you see – and these feet…”The snail said, “Whatever are these feet for?”And the man said, “The feet are for moving along on very rapidly.”The snail said, “Really, you amaze me. Is there anything else peculiar about you?”And the man said, “Well, you know how you have your house on your back?”The snail said, “Yes, yes.”The man said, “Well, we don’t do that, you see. We have lots and lots of houses and we go in and out of them almost at will.”The snail said, “You really are a most astonishing creature. Is there anything else strange about you?”The man said, “Well, now, we are man, and a man can take a thing like a leaf – you know a leaf?”The snail said, “Yes, yes, I know a leaf.”And the man said, “Well he can make marks on this leaf and hand the leaf to another man, who could give the leaf to a third man, who could tell from the marks on the leaf what the first man was thinking.”“Ah,” said the snail, “you are one of them, hm?”And the man said, “What do you mean?”“You are a liar!” said the snail. “The trouble with you liars is you tell one lie and then you tell a bigger one, and then finally you overreach yourselves.”There are different languages at different planes. The Sufi speaks the language of the heart and the priest speaks the language of the head. The priest speaks the language of knowledge and the Sufi speaks the language of love. They don’t meet, they don’t communicate. Communication is impossible. The priest is blind – he has never seen the light, he only believes in it. The Sufi has seen the light; it is not a belief anymore. He knows it.Try to understand this paradox. The people who think they know, don’t know; the knowledgeable people don’t know because they can’t see. And the people who love and don’t talk about knowledge at all, know because they can see. Love opens the eye of the heart. And when you have seen, you will be constantly in rebellion. When you have seen, then no belief can satisfy you. Then your very vision will become destructive to all kinds of beliefs.When you have seen, then you cannot concede to and you cannot agree with stupid ideas about light. A blind man can only have stupid ideas about light. He cannot have the right idea. How can he have the right idea? He has no eyes. Whatever he knows about light is going to be wrong. He has not even seen darkness – what to say about light? A blind man cannot even see darkness.Never have the idea that blind people live in darkness. No, they cannot. Even to see darkness one needs eyes. To see anything one needs eyes. And there is no way to explain to a blind man what light is. You cannot even use darkness, you cannot say, “Light is against darkness.” He does not even know what darkness is. There is no way to make it clear to a blind man. The only way is to help him to see, the only way is to help him to open his eyes. Or, if he needs some treatment for his eyes, then apply the treatment. Be a physician to his eyes. It is pointless going on giving him explanations, philosophical doctrines, scriptures. They will simply muddle him more, confuse him more.The Sufi is rebellious because the Sufi has seen it. And naturally he will always find it difficult to explain it to people. That’s why Sufis don’t believe in explanations. If you go to a Sufi he starts giving you methods, not doctrines. That’s why they are called the people of the path. They give you a method. They say, “Work on the method. If the method goes deeper, changes your heart, opens your being, you will know.” They will not give you a single doctrine, a single principle – they have none. They have only methodology. It is very scientific. They give you a taste. It is hard, arduous work.If you come to me and ask “What is truth?” I can say something – within minutes the work is done. I have told you, you have known, and it is finished. I have neither told you nor have you understood anything, but the idea has arisen in you that now you know, and now you will carry this idea.If you are really interested I will have to give you a device, not a doctrine; I will have to give you a meditation, not a principle; I will have to initiate you into your inner lab. I will have to take you slowly, slowly into the deeper waters of your being. By and by you will start feeling, seeing – you will become more sensitive, more alert, more aware, and things will start penetrating your thick layer of unconsciousness. A few rays will start entering your dark night of the soul, and then you will know.The work of the Sufi takes years. Sufis don’t preach. They teach, certainly, but they don’t preach. And when they teach, they teach methods, not principles. To follow a method one needs to be really in search – because sometimes it takes twelve years, sometimes twenty years, sometimes your whole life. Sometimes many lives are needed.The people who are in search of instant enlightenment cannot have contact with a Sufi. That’s why Sufis go on hiding themselves. They don’t declare themselves, they remain invisible. They are available only to those who really search, who really seek.It is very difficult to find a Sufi master, and he may be living just in your neighborhood. He may be doing such an ordinary thing that you cannot believe. He may be a weaver, or he may be a shoemaker, or he may be running a hotel, or any other kind of work. You cannot even suspect that a Sufi master lives just by the corner. You may come across him every day and you will not have any idea who this man is – unless you are a seeker. If you are a seeker, then by and by you will be led to him. In fact, if you are a seeker he will start choosing you. He will be watching you. He will not allow you to watch him; he will be watching you, he will be seeing. And if he feels that there is a seeker, then by and by he will make it possible that you can see him. He can become visible if he wants to.There is a famous story.It happened that a well-known Sufi was asked, “What is invisibility?”He said, “I shall answer that when an opportunity for a demonstration occurs.”They believe in demonstrations and they believe in opportunities. They will not say a single word if the opportunity has not occurred, if the right situation is not there. You can ask the question to a master and he will say, “Wait, when the right opportunity occurs then I will show you” – because he does not believe in saying, he believes in showing.He said, “I shall answer that when an opportunity for a demonstration occurs.”Sometime later, the man and the one who had asked him the question were stopped by a band of soldiers. The soldiers said, “We have orders to take all dervishes into custody – for the king of this country says that they will not obey his commands and that they say things which are not welcome to the tranquility of the thought of the populace.”The Sufi said, “And so you should, for you must do your duty.”“But are you not Sufis?” said the soldiers.“Test us,” said the Sufi.The officer took out a Sufi book…a book that is tremendously respected by the Sufis. It is called The Book of the Books. It has only a few sentences written in it, otherwise it is empty.“What is this?” the Sufi master said, as if he had not even recognized the book. The soldiers had brought the book that would be a sign of a Sufi – the moment the Sufi sees The Book of the Books he will bow down. It is a great treasure.The Sufi master said, “What is this?” – as if he did not recognize the book. The Sufi looked at the title page. “It is something that I will burn in front of you,” said the master, “since you have not already done so." He set light to the book and the soldiers rode away satisfied.The Sufi’s companion asked, “What was the purpose of that action?”“To make us invisible,” said the Sufi. “For to the man of the world, visibility means that you look like something or someone he expects you to resemble. If you look different, your true nature becomes invisible to him.”The Sufi master is saying, “I have become invisible to these soldiers because they could not believe that a Sufi could burn the book. They have a certain expectation – that the Sufis revere this book. The moment I burned the book we were no longer Sufis. I had become invisible to him.”And that’s how Sufis become invisible to people. They do the unexpected. Gurdjieff learned his methods of invisibility from Sufi masters. Gurdjieff was a Sufi master in the West, one of the most important Sufi teachers who has penetrated the Western consciousness. He remained invisible to the masses, and he had such techniques to become invisible that in just a single second he could become visible and in a single second he could become invisible. Sometimes it used to happen that two people would come to see him. If he wanted to, he would become visible to one and remain invisible to the other. And both were talking to him, together. He had become so practiced that he could show one kind of emotion from one side of his face and another kind of emotion from the other side of his face.For example, if he did not want to become visible to you he would look so cruel, so murderous, that you could not believe that a Sufi master or any kind of master could be so murderous. And if he wanted to remain visible to you he would look so compassionate, so loving. And he could do it together, simultaneously, to two people. And one would go away with the idea that “Here is the master,” and the other would go away with the idea: “Never again am I going to see this man. This man seems to be a murderer, and it is dangerous to be with him.”Sufis live a very, very hidden life, for a certain reason – because they only want to live the essential religion. If you want to become visible you have to do many things. For example: I am here, but to Pune people I am invisible. I have made myself completely invisible, even to the people who live just in the neighborhood here. I am invisible to them. They cannot see. It is impossible for them to see. I am visible only to those who are seeking. Those who are seeking can come from thousands of miles, and those who are not seeking can live just by the side and will remain there and will be convinced that I am a wrong man.It is good that it is so, because it helps me to work only on those people who need work. Energies are not wasted.Sufis are not interested in the masses. No master has ever been interested in the mass. Masters are only interested in individuals, and only in those individuals who are really in search, in authentic search. It is simple to avoid the unnecessary people and it is simple to attract the necessary people who need help with just a few things. People are so insensitive – with just a small thing you can become invisible, because they don’t look deep, they only look on the surface.The second question is exactly what I have been talking to you about:Osho,Why do Sufis deliberately disguise and hide themselves?They want their energies to be used rightly because they are creative people. They are not interested in name and fame, they are not interested in anything else; they are only interested in giving a new life to people who desire God, long for God. Why should they waste their time and energy?There are many kinds of people in the world. A few are curious people, they come just out of curiosity, they are wasting their time. Then there are a few who come with inquiry. They are better than the curious people, there is some possibility that they may grow, but that is only a possibility. Then there is a third kind who is really a seeker, who is ready to stake his life, who is ready to lose something for it, who is ready to pay the price for it.The Sufi will work with the third person, he will remain available to the second kind of person, and he will become absolutely invisible to the first kind of person – the curious.The Sufi is very economical about his energy. He knows he cannot exist here for long, his days are numbered. In those few days that he will be here on the earth… An enlightened person will not be coming back again, he is here for only a short time – even if it is thirty, forty, or fifty years it is a very short time if you look at the eternity of time. What is fifty years compared to the eternal procession of time? He will be here for only a few days, a few months, a few years, and he can work on only a few people. If he becomes surrounded by curious people his energies will be wasted. Then he will be sowing his seeds in a desert. That will be foolish, stupid.Sufis are not stupid people, they are very wise people. They know how to use their energies, that’s why they deliberately disguise and hide themselves. And small things become helpful.This has been my own method. Whenever I see that there are too many of a certain kind of people around me and I want to drop them – just a single hint, just a single hint, and they disappear. Once it happened that I was surrounded by many Jainas – just because of my birth, the accident of my birth. I was born in a Jaina family so naturally Jainas were interested in me. Not in me – they were interested in a Jaina. They were happy that here was a Jaina who had become enlightened. They were not interested in me or in my enlightenment, they were on a kind of ego trip.Then it became too much; they were wasting too much energy and too much time. So I delivered one talk: “From Sex to Superconsciousness” – and they all disappeared. Just a single talk and they all disappeared. Then I didn’t see them. And since then, for fifteen years, I have not seen them.Then by and by many Gandhians started coming around. And I saw that again a desert was growing. These are the weeds; you have to be constantly uprooting them. You cannot rest if you are really interested in the garden and the roseflowers – and the orange people are my roses. If you are really interested in the roseflowers you will have to constantly uproot the weeds. They will come again and again.Gandhians gathered. Then with just a few statements against Gandhi they left me. It is so easy to become invisible to people. Now I almost don’t exist for them at all. They have forgotten all about me. Weeds have to be dropped.A master has to become invisible again and again to certain kinds of people so that he and his energies remain available to those who are really seekers.What do I mean when I say real seekers? I mean one who is ready to stake whatever is needed to stake, who does not just have an "itch" in his head, who is not only curious, but whose problem is that of life and death. Even if I demand that your life will be needed, if you are a seeker you will say, “I am available. Take this life, but give me God. If by giving my life God can be attained, then I am happily ready.” Life is worthless for a seeker; everything is worthless – except truth.That’s why Sufis are constantly in hiding. And remember, this is only half the story. On one side they constantly go on hiding themselves, on the another hand they go on making themselves available to those who are in search. The other part has not been discussed much. That other part is very essential. In fact, the first part is necessary only for the other part, otherwise what is the use of becoming invisible? If you simply become invisible to all people then you are almost dead, then you are in your grave. So you have to become invisible from one side – to people who are not the right people – and you have to become more and more visible to those who are in search. These both go together in a kind of balance.I don’t move in Pune, you will never see me on Pune streets, I don’t go anywhere. I am not interested in the masses. I have simply disappeared from the world. I have created my own small world – an alternative society. Soon the days are coming closer when I will absolutely establish my own small world, where every person will be a seeker – only a seeker will be allowed in. And then that small commune will become invisible to the whole world and we will disappear into ourselves. We will then start working in the deepest realm of being.One has to drop many things to go in. One has to gather one’s total energy to go in.The third question:Osho,Why don't people believe in the things that all the great mystics have always been preaching?They don’t understand and they don’t want to understand. The language is different, the approach is different, the longing is different.People understand only that which they long for. Your language is basically rooted in your longing. Your longing becomes your language.A man who is sexually obsessed only understands the language of sex. A man who is sexually obsessed, perverted, repressed, only understands pornography. To a man who is sexually satisfied, pornography will look absurd. He will not understand why people are so mad about it.A man who wants to forget himself will be interested in drugs, but a man who knows the beauty of remembering himself will not be able to understand at all why people should drug themselves, why they should try to forget. It is tremendously joyful to remember.Sufis say there are two types of people, or two states of humanity. One they call gofil – the people who are utterly oblivious of themselves, asleep, unconscious – and another, the people who remember, the people who have a certain remembrance of their being. Now, those who are searching to remember themselves will have a different kind of language. One who is searching for money knows only the language of money, and one who is searching for peace has a different kind of language. There are many languages in the world; they depend on your desires.The man who has started searching for God, truth, is mad in the eyes of the so-called worldly wise. The mystics have always been thought to be mad. You tolerate them at the most. And if they are very persistent then you start worshipping them – but either you tolerate or worship, you don’t become affected by them. You remain aloof, untouched. You keep a distance.The story is told of a preacher who went to the mountains to preach, and upon arriving struck up a conversation with the first old man he met.“Are you a Christian?” the preacher inquired.“Nope, Mr. Christian lives up the holler,” answered the old mountain man.“What I mean is, brother, are you lost?” persisted the preacher.“Well, I reckon not,” replied the old man. “I have been here nigh on for thirty years and I know every cow path in these here hills.”“You don’t understand,” said the preacher. “I mean are you ready for the judgment day?”“When’s it comin’?” asked the old man.“Well,” said the preacher, “it might come today or it might be tomorrow.”“For goodness sakes, don’t tell my missus,” cautioned the old man. “She’d want to go both days!”There seems to be no communication. The preacher is speaking one language, the old mountain man is speaking another kind of language, and they both seem to speak plain English.You may speak the same language, but in one language there exist many languages – within one language another, and within that another. A poet speaks one language, a scientist speaks another, a businessman still another.And a mystic? A mystic speaks a very absurd language, that’s why he is not understood. He speaks nonsense, exactly nonsense – because he says things that are not sensibly comprehensible. He says things that are not available to the senses. He says things that are not even possible to put in a logical form, that cannot be formulated in a rational way. He talks about some mysteries, vague, cloudy, and in an absurd way – because he talks in paradoxes.All true religion is paradoxical. A mystic uses contradictory terms so much that in the end nothing is left in your hands. If you ask a mystic if God is near or far, he will say, “Both. He is the nearest and he is the furthest.” Now what are you going to make of it? If you ask him, “Is God in the world or outside the world?” He will say, “Both, or neither.” What are you going to make out of it? Or he may laugh. Or he may remain quite silent. He may not say a single word.To understand a mystic you will have to become a mystic yourself. To understand a mystic you will have to be initiated in mysticism. To understand a mystic you will have to drop your old patterns of the mind, the old ways of thinking. Logical thinking has to be dropped. You will have to become illogical. You will have to be ready to accept the irrational too – because life is irrational and life is mysterious and you cannot put life in dogmatic forms.You cannot even say “God is,” you cannot say “God is not” – because God is both. He is so comprehensive that “is” and “is not” are both implied in his being. “Isness” is his periphery and “is not-ness” is his very center. At the very center God is nothing but pure nothingness. Out of that – ex nihilo – everything arises. The world is just on the circumference; at the center there is nothing, or, there is only no-thing.When mystics say these things you can hear, but how are you going to understand if something like this has not started happening in you already?You ask, “Why don’t people believe in the things that all the great mystics have always been preaching?” Another reason: How can you believe? You have to know. Belief is not going to help at all. Even if you believe you will suspect deep down, you will doubt deep down. Every belief carries doubt within it. Belief is not going to help.And belief will create just the opposite. For example, people who believe become very serious. You can find them in the temples, in the churches, in the mosques. People who believe become very serious, and people who know become very celebrating. The mystics don’t believe; they know. They have seen. They have experienced. And because they have experienced God there is a kind of playfulness around them. They exist in joy. You will find a dance around them. If you look into their eyes you will find cheerfulness, ecstasy. If you go and look at a person who believes, you will always find a long face.I have heard…A very young niece was visiting a holier-than-thou aunt in the country for the summer. Her puritanical attitude was in constant evidence. Every time the little niece wanted to do something, the long-faced aunt would say, “Don’t do that…you can’t do that.”One day the little niece was walking down the road, very unhappy, when she came upon a long-faced mule near the fence. She walked over, patted its head, and said, “Don’t feel bad, Mr. Mule, my aunt has religion too.”Religious people become very long faced. Religious people become very sad. Religious people have stopped living in the world and have not started living in God. They are stuck; hence the sadness. And religious people are not only sad themselves, they create all kinds of sadness in other people too. They cannot tolerate anybody happy. Wherever they find something happy they will be there to destroy it, to condemn it. They are against all joy. They are against all innocent joy. These people have poisoned humanity.Belief is not going to help. Become a mystic, but don’t believe in mystics. Become a Sufi, but don’t believe in Sufis. Become me, but don’t believe in me. If you believe in me you have gone astray.What is the need to believe? When you can have the taste, why believe in it? Belief means you are postponing. You are saying, “Yes, today I will believe, tomorrow I will taste.” But why not today? Why not now? If you feel my vibe, then rather than thinking in terms of belief, start thinking in terms of living it. And don’t believe a thing unless you have experienced it, otherwise you will become a hypocrite.This should be used as a criterion: a man of belief is sad and a man of knowing is tremendously happy. A man who only believes is just dull, dead, shrunken, frozen, ossified. And a man who knows, flows, flowers; much fragrance comes from his being. He is constantly flowing. He is never stagnant. He is always new.Let religion be lived, not believed.The fourth question:Osho,Once I loved a woman but she refused me, and ever since I have been miserable. I have lost all hope in life. What should I do?Meditate on this story:A visitor to an insane asylum found one of the inmates rocking back and forth in a chair in a contented manner, cooing repeatedly, “Lulu, Lulu…”“What’s the matter with this man?” the visitor asked the attendant.“Well, you see, sir, Lulu was the woman who jilted him,” the attendant explained.Baffled with the explanation, the visitor proceeded on the tour.Later he came to a padded cell, where an inmate was batting his head repeatedly against the wall and crying, “Lulu, Lulu…”“Now why is this man crying ‘Lulu’?” asked the visitor.“Oh, he’s the fellow Lulu finally married,” the attendant explained.Don’t be so miserable. Just find the man whom Lulu has married and all misery will disappear.The last question:Osho,I believe very strongly in religion. I follow all the prescribed rules of morality. I have always lived a life of discipline – then why am I always unhappy?What else are you expecting? Are you expecting some miracle? If you were happy it would be a miracle – and miracles don’t happen.It is a natural consequence. Just try to analyze your question. “I believe…” – this “I” is too much. “I believe very strongly in religion. I follow all the prescribed rules of morality. I have always lived a life of discipline – then why am I always unhappy?” This “I” is too much. And “I” is misery. When I disappears, misery disappears. Bliss is the absence of the ego and nothing else.But if you believe too strongly in religion, your “I” will become very, very strengthened. If you live a life of discipline, a life of control, your ego will become very decorated. If you follow all the rules of morality, naturally your ego will become very holy, pious. And when a person is very pious it is very dangerous. This “I” has to be relaxed – that is one thing.And the second thing: there is no need to believe strongly in religion. Belief simply shows that you don’t know, and deep down somewhere there is bound to be doubt. How can you dissolve the doubt without knowing? You can go on believing as strongly as is humanly possible, but all your strength will only repress the doubt, it cannot destroy it.Remember, a doubt is never destroyed by strength. By strength you can force it into the unconscious, you can go on forcing it into the basement of your being, you can force it so deep that you completely forget about it – but it is there. And the deeper it goes, the more dangerously it is there. It will affect your total being, your very quality, and it will affect it in such an indirect way that you will not even be able to detect it. It will become a cancer in the soul. No, unless you know, doubt remains.I have heard…When the late King George VI was a lad, he stood one winter morning with his older brother Edward, their noses pressed against a window of the palace, looking enviously at a group of cockney urchins playing snowball outside the palace.Finally, the temptation became too great for them and, seeing an opportunity as the governess left the room, they put on hats and coats and slipped outside to join the happy group.Soon a badly aimed snowball smashed right through the window of the palace and brought the palace guard running on the double. In no time at all the sheepish group of youngsters was ushered into the presence of the precinct sergeant.“What’s your name, boy?” the sergeant asked the first in line.“My name is Edward, Prince of Wales,” said the boy, standing haughtily at attention.“A smart guy, eh?” said the sergeant. “And what’s your name?” he asked the second in line.“My name is George, Duke of Windsor,” said the second lad.By this time the sergeant was furious. “I’ve never seen such a bunch of liars in all my life,” he exploded.“And what’s your name?” he asked the next little fellow.The little boy hesitated a moment, then wiping his nose on his sleeve, he replied, “I’m going to stand wiv’ my buddies, guvnor. I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury.”Yes, you can say you are the Archbishop of Canterbury, but deep down you know you are not. And the significant thing is what you know deep down. If you are, you are. Then there is a totality, no hesitation. Then you are totally into it.But when you only believe, you know it is not so. That creates a split, you become two. A duality arises. All belief creates schizophrenia. How can you be happy with schizophrenia? It is not possible.And you say, “I follow all the prescribed rules of morality.” Religion has nothing to do with morality. A religious man is moral, but he has nothing to do with morality. A religious man is naturally moral – it is not that he follows all the prescribed rules of morality, a religious man is naturally, spontaneously, moral. He has no idea of what is good and what is bad. He never chooses, the good simply happens. It is part of his religiousness.The moment you understand that you are part of God, then all immorality disappears. Not that you have to drop it, it is simply not found. And when there is no immorality, what is the need to follow moral rules? Only immoral people follow moral rules, only immoral people need to follow. A moral person has no rules to follow; his morality is innocent. He is good because he feels that being good brings more and more happiness. He is good because he is happy. Happiness brings more good to his life; more good brings more happiness to his life.You will be unhappy because really you want to be immoral. And you have to curb and cut and you have to always force yourself to be moral. You are not being natural. You will be unhappy, and these moral things will not satisfy you. They are false. They will not make you happier.It is as if one is eating the menu rather than eating the food. Food satisfies, but the menu…you can go on eating it, it will not satisfy. It is not food. The rules that have been given to you by others are menus, they are paper food, not real food. The real morality arises in your being. Become more meditative rather than becoming more moral. Morality follows meditation. And then you will be happy.And you say: “I have always lived a life of discipline…” The word discipline is very beautiful, but it has become very, very wrongly associated with the idea of control. Discipline comes from the same root as disciple. Discipline means, become a disciple. And disciple means nothing but the capacity to learn. A disciple is one who is ready to learn. A disciple is one who has an open mind. A disciple is one who has not become closed, who does not say, “I know.” He says, “I am open, available to learn, to know more. And I am ready to risk all that I know if something unknown can be known.”A learner is a disciple, and a disciple is in discipline. You cannot be in discipline unless you are with a master. And remember the paradox of it: a master never enforces any discipline on you, a master simply makes himself available to you. Seeing him, loving him, feeling him, a discipline starts arising in you.Remember, there cannot be a fixed discipline for everybody. Everybody has to find his own discipline because everybody is so unique, everybody is so individual. When you follow a dead discipline you will be putting a structure on your being. You will not grow naturally and you will not grow into yourself.If you follow Mahavira’s discipline… It was good for him, certainly good, but you are not another Mahavira. There will never be another Mahavira again. Existence never repeats. Existence always creates a unique person. No two people are alike – they never have been, never will be. Yes, Mohammed had a discipline of his own. It was beautiful for him. It was beautiful for him only because it grew out of him; he never followed anybody else’s discipline. But if you follow it, then it will be just a dead structure. How can life be happy caged in a dead structure?Hence the insistence of Sufism to find an alive master – because an alive master will not give you a dead structure. An alive master will give you only an insight into your own being. An alive master will give you only a vision of what is possible. And then you start working on your own. Everybody has to find his own discipline.Remember another thing too. Even when you have found your discipline it is not going to remain like a character. It will change every day – new situations and new disciplines will arise. You will have to respond to new situations in a new way. You cannot just carry a guidebook in your mind and you cannot go on behaving according to that guidebook. Then you will not be responsible, then you will not be responding to the situation that is facing you, then you will have a ready-made rule – and then happiness is not possible.Happiness is a function of freedom. Only free people are happy people. Let this be remembered always and always: freedom brings bliss, freedom brings benediction.If you are unhappy, that is simply logical. You have earned it. Now drop your belief and drop your discipline and drop your so-called rules of morality.And when I am saying drop it, don’t misunderstand me – because sometimes people misunderstand. Somebody has asked, “I understand you to say that knowledge is a barrier. Should I burn all the scriptures that I have always worshipped?”I have not said that. There is no need to burn the scriptures, that will not help. Your mind is not going to change by burning the scriptures. Your mind will be the same and you will find another kind of scripture. Maybe I will become your scripture, but that will be the same. You will have something to cling to. Your mind wants to cling to words, principles, doctrines. Rather than burning the mind you are asking about burning the scriptures. What have those poor scriptures done to you? Why be so angry with them?You remind me of a man, a man who came home on three occasions and, finding his wife on a couch with another man, decided he had had enough and threw away the couch. But what does the couch have to do with it?You can burn the scriptures and you can throw away the rules, but again you will find something. The situation does not change so easily. Something has to change within you.Always remember that whatever I am saying here concerns your consciousness, concerns your innermost center. Do something there; outer things don’t matter. Scriptures are so worthless that by burning them nothing will be attained. If something can be attained by burning the scriptures then they have some value. They don’t have that value. They do not have even that much value.Burn the mind that clings to the scriptures, burn that mind that wants to depend on something, burn that mind that always avoids responsibility, burn that mind that seeks dead, fixed rules, is obsessed with fixed things and is afraid of free flow, is afraid of dynamism. Why not live a life with free consciousness? Why not live a life without rules? You have lived a life with rules and you feel miserable. Now if you are really feeling miserable and you want to get rid of that misery, then the only thing that can be done is a radical change. Now start living a life without rules.Why do people cling to rules? Because to live in freedom means one has to be very aware. Those rules give you an opportunity not to be aware. You can depend on them, you need not be aware. If someone says something you have a ready-made answer. You need not be attentive to what is being said and you need not be creative in your response, you already have an answer. You can remain sleepy and still you can answer.It happened in a church…The priest asked, “Those who are ready to go to heaven or want to go to heaven should raise their hands.”All raised their hands, except one man who was fast asleep and snoring.Then the priest said even more loudly, to wake him up, “Now those who want to go to hell should stand up.” And he shouted so loudly that the man just jumped up.He had not heard what had happened, but he looked around and he found himself and the priest standing. He said, “Sir, I don’t know what we are voting for, but we both seem to be voting for it.”This is the situation. People are fast asleep and snoring and life can go on. With fixed rules there is safety, comfort, convenience. Drop that comfort, drop that convenience, drop that safety; start living a dangerous life. And a life is life only when you live it dangerously, when it is a great adventure, an exploration always into the unknown.Don’t carry any rules – that’s what is meant by burning the scriptures. And don’t carry any fixed disciplines. Remain available and act, don’t react. Act out of your consciousness. Be a mirror and act out of that mirrorlike consciousness and you will be happy, you will be tremendously happy.That happiness is yours, and just for the asking. “Knock and the doors shall be opened unto you. Ask and it shall be given. Seek and you will find.” It is all yours, and just for the asking.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Shah Firoz, who is remembered as the teacher of many very distinguished Sufis, was often asked why he did not teach them faster.He said, “Because even the most dedicated will, until a certain point of understanding, not be teachable at all. He is here in the flesh, but absent in every other way.”He also recited this tale.There was once a king who wanted to become a Sufi. The Sufi whom he approached about the matter said, “Majesty, you cannot study with the Elect until you can overcome heedlessness.”“Heedlessness!” said the king. “Am I not heedful of my religious obligations? Do I not look after the people? Whom can you find in all my realm who has a complaint against me on the grounds of heedlessness?”“That is precisely the difficulty,” said the Sufi, “because heedfulness is so marked in some things, people imagine that it must be a part of their texture.”“I cannot understand that sort of remark,” said the king, “and perhaps you will regard me as unsuitable because I cannot fathom your riddles.”“Not at all,” said the Sufi, “but a would-be disciple cannot really have a debate with his prospective teacher. Sufis deal in knowledge, not argument. But I will give you a demonstration of your heedlessness, if you will carry out a test and do what I ask in respect to it.”The king agreed to take the test, and the Sufi told him to say “I believe you” to everything that should be said to him in the ensuing few minutes.“If that is a test, it is easy enough to start becoming a Sufi,” said the king.Now the Sufi started the test. He said: “I am a man from beyond the skies.”“I believe you,” said the king.The Sufi continued: “Ordinary people try to gain knowledge, Sufis have so much that they try not to use it.”“I believe you,” said the king.Then the Sufi said: “I am a liar.”“I believe you,” said the king.The Sufi went on: “I was present when you were born.”“I believe you,” said the king.“And your father was a peasant,” said the Sufi.“That is a lie!” shouted the king.The Sufi looked at him sorrowfully and said: “Since you are so heedless that you cannot for one minute remember to say “I believe you” without some prejudice coming into play, no Sufi would be able to teach you anything.”Religion exists in three dimensions. That is the original source of the concept of the trinity, or the Hindu idea of trimurti – the three faces of God.Or we can say that religion exists on three planes – because man exists on three planes. Man exists in the body, in the mind, in the soul. Religion also has a body, a mind and a soul. If you only exist in the body you cannot relate to any other religion except the outermost. If you exist as a psychology – as a mind, as a psyche – then you can relate to the second layer of religion, otherwise not. And until you start existing as a soul, there is no possibility of coming to encounter the innermost core of religion – tasawwuf, the ultimate, what the Sufis are searching for.The Sufis have three names for these three planes. They have to be understood; they are very significant.The first is called sharia. Sharia means the body of religion. It may be alive, it may be dead – both are possibilities. When a buddha is alive, sharia is alive. When a Mohammed is alive, sharia is alive – because Mohammed breathes life into it. But when Mohammed is gone there will be a corpse. The corpse resembles the real body but it is not; it only resembles it.When life leaves you, your corpse will look just like you – but it is not you. The real has left, the subtle has left. Only the gross is lying there on the ground. That creates trouble because people become so acquainted with the face that they go on believing that the corpse is alive.Islam is dead. When Mohammed was there to breathe life into it, it was a totally different kind of religion. That is called sharia. Sharia means exotericism – the ritual, the formal, the Sunday religion. It does not affect you at all. It gives you a certain respectability in the society. It is more social than spiritual, and it is more political than religious. Islam without Mohammed and Hinduism without Krishna and Buddhism without Buddha are nothing but garbed political standpoints. In the name of religion, politics continues.When God is not there to breathe into the body, the Devil starts breathing into it. So a dead body is not only dead, it is very dangerous. It can be possessed by the Devil. The politician is the Devil. When the saint is gone the body is there – somebody can enter it, somebody can start having that body. It resembles the real. When the saint is gone the priest will use it, the politician will use it, and many will be deceived by it because they know only the face.Think of it in this way. When you look at another human being, do you know anything more than the face? Even your beloved, even your child – do you know anything more than the face? Have you ever penetrated farther than the face? Your acquaintance remains very superficial; it is not even skin deep. It remains formal – of the form. But the face is not the person, the personality is not the person. The outer shape is not the inner reality. Will you be able to recognize your woman if she comes as a spirit? You will not be able to. Will you be able to recognize your own child if the child comes as a spirit, not as a body? You will not be able to recognize your child at all. You will get so frightened, you will think that a ghost has come.Once a woman was brought to me. Her husband had died. Three months had passed, but she was still in agony, tremendous agony – crying and crying and weeping and not eating and not sleeping. It was okay for a few days, the relatives tolerated it, but then it became too much – she was driving the other people of the family mad too. So they brought her to me.I asked her what she wanted. She said, “I want my husband back. I cannot live without him. Life is meaningless without him.”I said, “Okay, I will arrange for you to have a meeting with your husband.”She could not believe what I was saying because she had said the same thing to many people and they had all consoled her – as people do console. But when I said, “Yes, I will arrange a meeting. Go into that room, close the doors, sit silently there and within half an hour your husband will be standing before you – as a spirit, remember.”She said, “As a spirit? What do you mean?”I said, “There will be no body. You have burned the body already. He will come as a ghost.”She said, “I cannot go into that room. If he comes as a ghost I will be very scared. As it is I am already suffering too much – no more suffering! Please, don’t do it to me.”I said, “But you loved the man so much…”“Yes,” she said, “I loved the man, but not as a ghost!”Nobody loves you as a spirit. That is why love never satisfies.After that day she calmed down. I had told her, “Calm down within three days, otherwise I will persuade your husband to visit you.”I went to her house every day to inquire whether she had calmed down or not. The third day she said, “Now you need not come. I have calmed down enough for my whole life! You have scared me so much, I cannot even sleep at night. A little noise outside, somebody walking, the policeman passing, and I become afraid. Maybe he’s coming!”And for the same husband she was crying and weeping and calling; she was ready to die. But she was not ready to encounter him without his body.But don’t laugh at her, you will not be able to do that either. We know people only by their faces. Why? Because we know ourselves only by our faces as seen in the mirror. You would not even recognize your own head if you had not seen it in a mirror before – or would you? If you had never seen yourself in the mirror, and some day somebody brought your head in front of you, would you be able to recognize it? You would not recognize it at all. Your acquaintance also with yourself is very superficial. It’s okay with others, you look at them from the outside; but at least with yourself you are not outside, you are inside – can’t you look at yourself from the inside? No, even to look at yourself you need the help of an outside mirror. So the mirror reflects, and you become an outsider to yourself – then you can see. And then you know that face, that body, that form.Our so-called knowledge of ourselves and others is very body-rooted. Hence we never enter deeper into any other dimension than the body. That dimension is called sharia. It is the outer dimension of religion. When a Mohammed walks on the earth, or a Buddha, or a Mahavira, simply watch the body. Watch his behavior, how he sits, what he eats, what he wears, how he talks, his gestures – watch these things. And out of these things you create a certain discipline and you start following that discipline. This is a dead religion; this is a corpse religion. At this point Mohammedanism exists, Hinduism exists, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism. All the “isms” exist at this point.The crowd believes in sharia, that’s why the crowd always remains irreligious. The crowd as such is irreligious. You can find only individuals religious, never a crowd. A crowd, by its very nature, is insane; a crowd, by its very nature, is political, never religious. In fact, if you are alone you cannot be political.Have you ever thought about it? If you are left alone on the earth you can’t be political. For politics the other is a must. If you are left alone on the earth you can be religious, there will be no hindrance, but you cannot be political. Politics needs the crowd, the collective mind. Religion needs only you – you are enough unto yourself. Your very aloneness becomes the passage toward religion. That’s why when a person wants to be religious he goes into aloneness, he seeks solitude. He goes to the mountains or to the desert. He wants to escape from the crowd because the crowd is basically mad. Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most perceptive thinkers of the West, has said, “The crowd is the untruth.”Truth is always individual – a Buddha has it, a Mohammed has it, a Jesus has it. Truth is always a flowering of the individual consciousness. But the crowd never has it, the crowd always has the untruth. Even from a Buddha or a Christ or a Mohammed the crowd gathers the superficial: what he eats, when he goes to sleep. People even come and ask me. They say, “Osho, when do you go to sleep? What time exactly? – because we would also like to follow it.” For what? “What do you eat – which vegetables, which fruit? – because we would also like to eat in the same way.” For what?But that’s how the mind of the crowd functions; it always goes for the nonessential. What I eat is meaningless, what I am is meaningful. What I do is irrelevant, what I am is relevant. Man is not equal to his behavior, he is more than that. And the greater the man, the bigger the difference.Ordinarily a man is exactly like what his behavior is. What you do, you are. But when a buddha is there then the difference is tremendous, the distance is vast. What he is doing is very, very ordinary and what he is, is tremendously extraordinary. The distance is so vast that you cannot fathom his being through his behavior.But the modern mind suffers so much from this disease. You can go and see B. F. Skinner and other psychologists – Pavlov and others – just watching the behavior of rats to decide what the human mind is. Watching the behavior of a rat to decide about man…!A rat is just his behavior. He has not yet grown an individuality, he has not yet grown a self. But one thing has to be said in favor of Skinner and others of his kind: about the masses they are right, about the crowd they are right. The crowd has the same state as the rat. But they miss the exceptional, and the exceptional is the essence of humanity.They can explain your behavior through the study of rats, but they cannot explain a Buddha or a Mohammed. But they try – and there they go berserk.The sharia is created by watching the behavior of the enlightened person. It is okay when the enlightened person is in his body, but when he has disappeared from it then what will you do? You will start worshipping the body, the clothes… And sometimes it happens that when a great man dies – like a Mohammed or a Buddha – for a few days something hovers around him, as if he is still alive. That also creates trouble.You must have heard the famous Greek story: the story is told that the runner of a marathon was dead an hour before he reached Athens. He was dead, yet he still ran. And as a dead man he announced the victory of the Greeks.It is a beautiful myth. It shows that the dead masters act for a while as if they were still alive. But only a little while – one year, ten years, fifty years perhaps. In any case, a finite period. Yes, this happens.When a Mohammed disappears from the body, the body has tasted so much joy, the body has known so much celebration that it goes on dancing – the runner goes on running. That myth is really beautiful and meaningful.At least about the great masters it is true. For a few years things go on happening as if they are still alive. This happens because of the tremendous energy released by the dying master. His very place becomes a sacred place for pilgrimage. That’s how a Mecca is created; that’s how Kailash becomes of great significance; that’s how Jainas have Girnar and Shikharji. On the mountains of Shikharji, twenty-three Jaina tirthankaras have died – out of twenty-four. Out of twenty-four great masters, twenty-three masters have died on a small hill. The whole hill has become suffused with the vibe of the beyond.But that continues only for a while. That also creates a problem; then the disciples think that the corpse is still alive because things go on happening. When I am gone things will go on happening for a few years, and for those who are deeply in love with me it will be as if I am still alive. Naturally, they will think that everything is as it was before.But that is a fallacy. Once the man is gone, within a few years those vibes that were created, and the echoes of those vibes that were created, will by and by disappear into nothingness.The sharia is the superficial core of religion – the body. Beware of sharia.The second layer is called haqiqa. The sharia is the circumference of a circle – haqiqa. The word haqiqa comes from haq. Haq means truth – pure truth. Haqiqat! That’s why Mansoor declared, “Ana’l haq! – I am the truth.” Haqiqa means the truth; pure, uncontaminated by anything. Haqiqa means the center of the circumference, the very soul of religion.At the point of sharia there is Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism; at the point of haqiqa there is Sufism, Zen, Hasidism, Yoga. Remember, to become a Mohammedan is not of much use, but to become a Sufi is immensely valuable. To become a Buddhist is just changing your clothes, but to become a follower of Zen is really moving toward transformation. To remain a Jew is nothing, but to be a Hasid is great splendor. This is the second point: the innermost core.At the first, sharia, there is politics, society, morality and a thousand and one things. Because of sharia the Koran is so full of social rules – so full of social rules. Because of sharia the Vedas are so full of rubbish. Because of sharia Manusmriti reads only as if it is a treatise on law. Only few and far between will you find real statements about religion. They are there – even in Manusmriti they are there. In the Vedas they are there, in the Koran they are there, but only few and far between. Only if you are really in search of them will you be able to find them, otherwise the diamond is lost in the mud – the mud is too much. The mud is sharia; the diamond is Sufism.Always rush toward the center; never become too attached to the body. Create this continuous awareness of looking into depth, of looking into the center of the circumference. And the circumference is big, the center is very small.Islam is a great crowd, so is Hinduism, so is Christianity. Sufis you can count on your fingers; yogis you can count on your fingers; Hasids or Zen masters you can count on your fingers. They don’t exist like the crowd, you will have to search for them. And if you have a real desire to find them, only then will you find them – otherwise you will miss.For the sharia you need not go in search anywhere, the sharia comes in search of you. The mullah comes to convert you to Islam and the Buddhist monk comes to convert you to Buddhism. But if you want to search for a Sufi or a Hasid you will have to move, you will have to become a sincere seeker. And you will have to learn many things on the way – because for one real master there are ninety-nine false masters, and the false will appeal to you more because you are false. The false will appeal to you more because you understand the language of the false. The real may not appeal to you at all, the real may even sometimes create fear in you.You will resist the real master and you will fall and become a victim of the unreal. Beware of that! You are unreal so naturally you are attracted by the unreal. The unreal promises you things that you want. He will say, “If you follow me, you will have more wealth, you will have more power, more prestige, this and that…” That’s what you are seeking.The real can only promise one thing: “If you come close to me, you will die.” The real can promise only death. The real can promise only one thing: “I am going to destroy you utterly” – because only after death is the resurrection. The real master is a cross; the real master is a door into death. You disappear into him. Yes, you will come out, but you will come out a totally new being. The real master is a fire – one gets frightened, one feels very afraid, one remains aloof. One watches a real master from far away.Just the other day there was a young man – he was very young – who said that five or seven years before he had promised Guru Maharaji that he would devote his whole life and his work to him. Now he is in trouble. He does not feel that he is growing in any way. He has not gained a small, even the smallest, insight through this contact or relationship. But now the promise that he has given… Now he thinks that he is being very religious because he goes on clinging to his promise. It is not religion, it is the ego. Now he cannot accept the idea of dropping his promise because that hurts the ego: “You are a man of your word. Once you have given your word you have to follow.”But this seems to be stupid. If you are not getting well, getting integrated, if you are not growing, then one needs the courage to drop it. And in these five years you have become wiser than you were when you gave the promise. A stupid mind gives a promise, and for five or ten or fifty years you go on following the same promise knowing perfectly well that nothing has happened – is it not suicidal? How can the past be binding?I am not saying don’t give promises and I am not saying don’t fulfill your promises. Give promises, fulfill them, but when you come to see that nothing is happening, then be courageous enough to drop the ego. This is just egoistic.I was reading a story:A man lived a very religious life – religious in the sense of sharia. He followed all the rituals of his religion, he followed the moral precepts that his religion prescribed, he followed a master – and yet both were in the same boat. He followed the master because the master was very, very perfect in following the same principles that he was following. He was ahead. The master was an extremist; he was absolutely devoted to the dead word, the dead letter. The scripture was his soul. He would not move an inch on his own. He was already a dead man. But he was perfect as far as ritual was concerned; you could not find a single fault in him. He was faultless. And the man followed this master.Then one night he dreamed a dream. He dreamed that he died and went up to meet St Peter, asking, “Can I come into heaven?” He was very confident about it because he had followed perfectly whatever had been told to him. He had followed all the commandments mechanically, never committing a single error. So he was very certain.He asked, “Can I come into heaven?” That was just to be polite.“Good heavens!” said Peter. “This is not heaven.” Peter then explained that the Pearly Gates were much higher up and could only be reached by a long ladder. He showed him a ladder which went up and up and disappeared somewhere in the clouds – beyond the clouds.The man looked at the ladder and became frightened. The ladder seemed to be endless. The man asked, “When will I reach? This ladder seems to be endless!”St Peter said, “Don’t be afraid. It depends how long it is. For each person it functions differently. I will show you the way. Take this chalk and start climbing. For each sin of adultery, fornication, lechery, or whatever you have committed or you have thought of committing, go on marking with your chalk. Each sin has to be marked on one rung. By the time when you have finished and you have made a mark for every single act or thought, you will come to the end of the ladder and the gate of heaven will be in front of you. So it depends. If you have committed many, many sins then it will be very long. If you have done very few it will not be so long. This ladder is flexible; it changes with the person who is climbing on it.”The man was very happy. He took the chalk and started climbing the ladder. He kept on going for ages. His legs ached, his arms ached, yet he met no one. And no sign of any gate, and the ladder was still the same, going beyond and beyond.Then one day he became very fed up with the whole journey. But now he was stuck because to go back would take those same ages again. “It is better to go on. One day, perhaps, there is a possibility, a hope.” And he was surprised – because although he had not committed any sins he had thought of committing all kinds of them, endlessly.A ritualistic religion makes a man repressive. This sharia – the body, the dead body of a religion – makes you crippled in the body, but your mind becomes very, very imaginative about all kinds of wrongs. You fantasize; you commit them in the mind.Your consciousness becomes more contaminated when things move in your mind than when you actually do them. When you actually do something, there is a possibility of getting rid of it by seeing it – its meaninglessness.If you are angry, sooner or later anger itself will make you aware that anger is useless – not only useless, it is poisonous; not only poisonous, it is very destructive and suicidal. But if you go on only thinking of being angry, murdering people, destroying people, you will never come to an understanding. You will never become able to get rid of anger.If you go into sex, sooner or later it will lose all the fantasies that you have been creating about it. Sooner or later it becomes a very ordinary thing. Sooner or later you start getting bored by it. But if you simply imagine, then you will never be bored. Then you are never going to become disinterested in it. One day or other sinners can drop it, but the saints, the so-called saints, they cannot drop it. They are sitting on a volcano.This man was surprised, because he went on marking those rungs on the ladder for ages and still they were coming and still he went on remembering. It was as if he had never done anything except commit sins in his mind.Then one day, all at once, he saw his guru descending the ladder. He was very happy to see his master.“Ah, my master!” he said. “Are you by any chance going back for more disciples to bring to heaven?”“No, you fool!” said the guru. “I am going back for more chalk!”Beware of the false gurus – they are many. The false guru will promise you things of this world; even if he is promising them in the other world he is promising the same things. He will promise you beautiful women in paradise – firdaus. He will promise you streams of wine in paradise. But he is promising the same thing. He may promise you golden castles, palaces studded with diamonds in paradise, but diamonds and gold and silver and women and wine all belong to this world. He is simply titillating you; he is simply befooling you.The real master only promises one thing: your death. So wherever you find death waiting for you, then gather courage. You have to disappear for God to be.This is the second dimension or plane of religion: haqiqa.The third dimension or plane is called tariqa. Tariqa means the path, the method – from the outer to the inner.The outer is a circumference, the inner is a center, and tariqa is the radius proceeding from the circumference to the center – the initiative path that leads from outward observance to inner conviction, from belief to vision, from potency to act, from dream to reality.This tariqa – method, technique, path, way, Tao, dharma – is the whole science of religion. The circumference is there, the center is there, but one has to move from the circumference, because we are there and we have to use a certain radius. Only a radius can join the circumference to the center. What is the radius that Sufis propose? They are called the people of the path, because they have devised many techniques.They have the most potential tariqa – it can transform you, it can transform you utterly. They are not concerned with theology at all, they are only concerned with methodology. They are not worried about whether God is or is not. They say, “Don’t talk nonsense! Here is a way. Go through it and see for yourself. This is the way to develop your eyes – and then see whether God is or is not.”They don’t argue, they don’t try to convince; they demonstrate. They say, “Come with me. I know a window from where you can look into the open sky. Remaining closed in this dark room, how can I convince you that there is open sky – infinite?”It will be as difficult as it was for the frog you have heard about, who lived in a small well. It is a Sufi story.One day it happened that a frog from the ocean came to the well – he must have been a tourist. He came into the well, introduced himself to the frog of the well, and said, “I come from the ocean.”Naturally, the frog asked, “Ocean? What do you mean by ocean? What is it?”And the frog from the ocean said, “It is very difficult to describe, sir, because you have never left this well it seems. It is so small. But still I will try.”The frog of the well laughed. He said, “Nobody has ever heard about anything bigger than this well. How big is your ocean?” And the frog of the well jumped one-third of the space of the well and said, “This much?”And the frog from the ocean laughed. He said, “No, sir.”So the frog from the well jumped two-thirds of the space and said, “This much?”Then he jumped the whole space and said, “Now it must be exactly like this well.”But the frog from the ocean said, “It is impossible to describe. The difference is not of quantity, it is of quality. It is vast! It is not circumscribed!”The frog from the well said, “You seem to be either a madman or a philosopher or a liar. Get out from here! Don’t talk nonsense!”That’s what the man of the world has always said to the mystic: “Don’t talk nonsense! Be practical and talk the language that we understand.”Sufis don’t say anything about God, they only talk about tariqa – they say, “This is the way to know. You will have to know to know. We cannot explain it to you. It is so mysterious that it will be almost a profanity to bring it to your level. Truth cannot be brought to your level; the only way possible, the only way left, is that you can be brought to the level of truth.”That is what tariqa is. Philosophy is an effort to bring the truth to your level so that you can understand it. Tariqa is to take you to truth so that you can see – so that you can see it on your own.Remember these three words. Everybody exists at sharia, and at sharia you will remain miserable because you are existing with only a dead body. Everybody needs to move toward haqiqa; only at haqiqa can you be fulfilled. And to reach the haqiqa you will have to follow a tariqa, you will have to follow a method, a discipline, a master.And beware of the false masters. They are there and they speak your language. They can be very convincing. Be a little more adventurous, courageous – seek somebody who can absorb you, who can transmute you, who can consume you, who is like a flame. The moth comes to the flame and is consumed – so is the disciple. He comes to a master and is consumed.And remember, before you reach the real master, the authentic master, the satguru, you will come across many false masters. So don’t get hooked.Even if you promise, you have to be alert that no promise can be binding unless it is fulfilling you. If it is fulfilling you then there is no need. That’s what I wanted to say to the young man who said, “I have promised to Guru Maharaji” Then why are you here? There is no need. If you are really growing there, there is no need to be here. The very fact that you are here shows that you are searching. And now, if you remain hooked with your so-called Guru Maharaji, then there is no possibility. Then I cannot be of any help because you will not be able to take any help – because your heart will not be open, because you will not become part of me, you will not come close.And another person has written to me that he has been following George Gurdjieff for a few years. Now Guru Maharaji is a false master; it is utterly stupid to follow him. But Gurdjieff was a real master – a satguru, a Sufi. If you are following Gurdjieff, perfectly good. But Gurdjieff is no more. Even if Gurdjieff is no more, a real master dead is more potent than an unreal master alive.But remember, if you can find a real master alive you will not be going against Gurdjieff. No two real masters are enemies; they cannot be. If you really followed Gurdjieff for eight years – as the seeker has written to me – if you have really followed him, then he has brought you here. Now, in the name of Gurdjieff, if you want to create a barrier between me and you, it is for you to choose. But it will be your responsibility, don’t blame Gurdjieff. He has brought you here. He has already done too much for you.What I am saying is exactly what Gurdjieff was doing. Of course I speak a different kind of language, I am a different kind of person. But only our fingers differ, the moon that we are pointing to is the same.If you have been following a real master and the master is no more, then it is the responsibility of the master to send you to another real master so that your growth can continue. Now don’t be obsessed by the past. Gurdjieff is no more – I am.Soon I will not be here either. And remember, I would like to remind my disciples especially: if you really love me, when I am gone I will direct you to people who will still be alive. So don’t be afraid of that. If I send you to Tibet or if I send you to China or if I send you to Japan or to Iran – go. And don’t say that because you belong to me you cannot belong to another real master. Just look in the eyes and you will find my eyes again. The body will not be the same, but the eyes will be the same.If your journey is not complete with me while I am here, if something is still to be done, completed, then don’t be afraid. By dropping me you will not be betraying me. In fact, by not dropping me and by not following the real, the alive master, you will be betraying me. Keep it in mind.Jean-Paul Sartre has written something that I liked: “People have often said to me about dates and bananas – you cannot judge them. To know what they are really like, you have to eat them on the spot, just after they have been picked. And I have always considered bananas a dead fruit whose real taste escaped me. The books that pass from one period to another are dead fruit too. In another time they had a different taste – sharp and tangy. We should have read Emile or the Persian Letters just after they were picked.”I like this passage from Jean-Paul Sartre. Exactly so is the case with masters. When they are alive they have a taste, sharp and tangy. When the fruit is right from the tree it has a totally different quality to it. A dead master is like tinned fruit. You can open the tin and you can eat the fruit, but something will be missing. Be courageous and always trust in life. My love toward you or your love toward me should never become a hindrance. Love liberates. Love makes you free.So don’t be worried. If you have been following Gurdjieff for many years and you have come here, and now your heart starts throbbing with me, don’t be worried. Gurdjieff was not very monogamous! I know him perfectly well. And if he gets angry or anything, that is my problem. I will take care. But don’t find excuses. When a master is alive his tariqa is alive. It has a taste – sharp and tangy.Taste a master while he is alive. Fools worship death; wise people worship life.Now the story.Shah Firoz, who is remembered as the teacher of many very distinguished Sufis, was often asked why he did not teach them faster.The same question is asked of me also, again and again. Many people come to me and they say, “Osho, do something fast!”I can understand your desire, I can understand your thirst, your longing for it. But nothing can be done fast, there is no shortcut: shortcuts are promised only by false teachers.There is no shortcut. Growth is arduous and nothing can be done faster than you can absorb. There is a certain limit to your absorption, there is a certain limit to your intelligence. Once you have absorbed something your capacities become bigger, then something more is possible. When you have absorbed that, then your capacities become still bigger and something can be done again. And that’s how it goes. Growth is slow.Growth is not like seasonal flowers. Growth is slow. It is like great trees that take hundreds of years to grow; but then they can have a dialogue with the stars. Seasonal flowers are only there for a few weeks. They come fast, they go fast. They are like dreams, they are not really real. They only pretend to be here.Be a real cedar of Lebanon. It takes time, it is hard. When you start rising toward the sky and the clouds and the moon and the stars, it is hard. It is hard because you have to grow roots, deep roots into the earth. The tree grows in the same proportion – if it has to grow a hundred feet into the sky, it has to grow a hundred feet underneath the earth. Those roots take time.You don’t see the roots; roots are not visible. When you come to a master, the master sees your roots. He sees how many roots you have. If you suddenly grow too fast and the roots are not ready to hold you that tall, you will fall down, you will topple down. You will not be able to grow at all. And once you have fallen down it is very difficult to get rooted again.So no master can help you grow faster. This speed mania has to be dropped. There is no need. Each step has to be enjoyed and celebrated.Just the other night a young sannyasin came. She took sannyas in her own country. I had sent her a name – Yatra. Yatra means pilgrimage. Last night she came and she was a little puzzled and troubled. She said, “I did not enjoy the name so much. Just pilgrimage? No goal?”She represents the Western mind – the goal is important, not the pilgrimage. Here in the East our perspective is totally different. The pilgrimage is important; the goal is just an excuse for the pilgrimage. Who bothers about the goal? Each moment passing on the way is so beautiful, it is so glorious – each tree and each bird that you come across is so infinitely beautiful, who bothers about the goal? Each moment is the goal.But I can understand her worry. She must have started thinking in her mind: “Pilgrimage, pilgrimage, pilgrimage… Then when and where does it end?” It ends nowhere. In fact, if it ends somewhere it will be very sad. Then what will you do? Then what next? Then you will be stuck with God sitting before you and you sitting before God; you will become like wife and husband – stuck. What will you do next? There is no other God and there is nowhere to go. No, God is not a goal; God is a pilgrimage. Let it be understood well.The idea of a goal is an idea of the greedy mind. And when you think of a goal, naturally you think of being fast. What is the point? Why go by bullock cart? Why not go with jet speed? And there are false masters like Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who says that his method is a jet speed method.No method, no tariqa, is a jet-speed method; no tariqa can be. But it will attract people because people want speed. They want something to happen immediately. So promise them that with ten or twenty minutes in the morning, ten or twenty minutes in the evening, they will be enlightened within two or three weeks. They will not become enlightened, but who bothers about their enlightenment; they have paid their fee. They can go wherever they want to go – they can go to hell! They have paid their fee… And there are other fools who will be coming. You can always depend on fools, they are very dependable people.Speed is unspiritual. The very idea of speed is unspiritual. Why not enjoy each moment of life? Then each moment becomes a goal unto itself. Then each moment is intrinsically valuable; it cannot be sacrificed for anything else.When you are going toward a goal you don’t look by the side – the trees are standing there and are waiting for a little caress from you, and the birds have been singing, singing for you – and you are hurrying. How can you look here and there? And a child was there smiling at you, and you missed. And a woman was crying, and you missed her tears. And a rose has flowered, and you were in such a hurry you could not see it.Yes, you can go at jet speed. Where are you going? You will miss the whole pilgrimage. And if you miss the pilgrimage there is no goal, there is no other goal. Life is its own goal.Shah Firoz, who is remembered as the teacher of many very distinguished Sufis, was often asked why he did not teach them faster.He said, “Because even the most dedicated will, until a certain point of understanding, not be teachable at all.”You can only teach so far – then you have to wait for the teaching to be absorbed. If somebody is ill you give him medicine in a certain quantity. You cannot pour in the whole medicine, the whole course, immediately. That will kill. Rather than bringing health it will bring more illness. You can give only in a certain quantity. The quantity, how much he can absorb, will be decided by the person’s capacity. When he has absorbed that, he will become a little healthier and then he can absorb a little more, and so on, so forth. That is exactly the case.“Because even the most dedicated will, until a certain point of understanding, not be teachable at all.” So one has to wait until he grows again, opens a little more, becomes ready, has a little more space, then again he can be taught.“He is here in the flesh, but absent in every other way.”When the seeker comes to the master for the first time, he comes only as a body. “He is here in the flesh, but absent in every other way.”So one has to start with sharia because you are in the body. People come to me: “Now what is the point of changing our clothes? Can’t we become sannyasins from within? What is the need for orange clothes, the mala and the new name? Can’t we become sannyasins from within?” Certainly, but you will have to wait. You are using the word within without even knowing the meaning of it. You have never been within. You have lived in the body, with the body. These are the same people who pay too much attention to their clothes. In fact, to protect their old clothes they are bringing in this argumentation: “What is the point of changing the clothes?” These are the same people.One Indian woman wanted to take sannyas, but she said, “I am ready for everything, but I have three hundred sarees and I love them, they are my only love. I can leave my husband if you say so. I can leave my children – I am fed up and tired of them – but three hundred sarees? Just think.”I know the woman. I have stayed in her house in the past and I know that she really has a great collection of beautiful sarees – the most costly possible. And it takes hours for her to choose which one to use that day.It was really a problem for me too! – because I would be going to a lecture and the husband and I would be sitting there in the car, and he would be honking the horn, and she would not come. And he would say, “She must be choosing a saree.”Now she says, “What is the point of changing the clothes? Can’t one become enlightened in any other color?”Now this is argumentation. And I know this woman; she is a saree – nothing else. Within the saree you will not find anybody. She is just her body. For hours she stands before the mirror – they are very rich so she need not work. She has to do only one thing: to stand before the mirror. I told her once, “Even the mirror will be getting fed up with you.”One day Mulla Nasruddin was catching flies, and he caught three. He told his wife, “I have caught three. One is male, two are female.”The wife was surprised. She said, “How did you know that one is a male and two are female?”He said, “Two were sitting on the mirror and one was sitting on the newspaper!”That’s how things are. You ask me, “What is the point of changing the clothes?” You are clothes and nothing else – hence I have to change them.Things start with sharia. Then, by and by, through tariqa, you will have to grow a psychology. People have a wrong notion that they have a psychology already. They don’t have. You don’t have a psyche, you have only heard the word. You have only a behavior, you don’t have a psychology yet.That’s why Gurdjieff used to say that the psychology has to be born – the science has not yet been born, the psychology is waiting to be born. Man does not have an alert mind, how can there be a psychology? At the most there can be an engineering, a mechanics, a science of behavior, but there cannot be any psychology.Only a buddha can have a psychology. Yes, Shah Firoz can have a psychology. You cannot have a psychology; right now you have only a behavior pattern, that’s all.He says that the disciple: “…is here in the flesh, but absent in every other way.” So he has to be made present in other ways. Only then, slowly, slowly, can teaching go deep into him. First the way has to be created, the psyche has to be created, the mind has to be created.Now, this is one of the most paradoxical efforts of a master. First he has to create a mind and then he has to destroy it. First he has to create a bridge from the circumference to the center, and then he has to destroy the bridge – otherwise you will start moving to the circumference again. Create the bridge, and then destroy the bridge behind you. Then one day one settles at the center. One becomes a Sufi. One has come to tasawwuf.He also recited this tale.There was once a king who wanted to become a Sufi. The Sufi whom he approached about the matter said, “Majesty, you cannot study with the Elect until you can overcome heedlessness.”Heedlessness means absent-mindedness, lack of awareness or lack of alertness, consciousness.“Heedlessness!” said the king. “Am I not heedful of my religious obligations? Do I not look after the people? Whom can you find in all my realm who has a complaint against me on the grounds of heedlessness?”Now, this is the man of sharia. He says, “I fulfill all my obligations, my responsibilities, my duties. I am dutiful to my wife, to my children, to my people, to my country. Nobody has any complaint. Have you ever heard of anybody complaining against my alertness, awareness, responsibility? Who has told you that I am not heedful?”This is what a Sunday churchgoer says: “I am religious.” This is what a Hindu says because he performs his puja every morning. This is what all the people who follow rituals say that they are doing. A Mohammedan thinks that he is a Mohammedan because he does his namaz five times every day. You can do it fifty times per day – it will not make you a Mohammedan. It will remain a ritual. You can perform it, you can perform it perfectly, you can repeat the exact words of the Koran, and still you will not be there. It will be just like a gramophone record unless your heart is in it, unless you do it with remembrance.Just the other day I told you that Sufis talk about the state of ghafla – unconsciousness. Gurdjieff obtained the idea of man being asleep from Sufis. Gurdjieff used to say that man is a machine. Man is asleep; man is not – because awareness is not. This is a Sufi idea of tremendous value.The state of ghafla, unconsciousness, has to be transformed into a state of zikr – remembrance. That’s what the Sufi meant when he said: “Majesty, you cannot study with the Elect until you can overcome heedlessness.”“Heedlessness!” said the king. He must have become angry. He must have felt it as an offense against him, as a complaint.The Sufi said:“That is precisely the difficulty.”Because you think you perform your obligations, you do your duties, do you think that you are a man of awareness?“That is precisely the difficulty…because heedfulness is so marked in some things, people imagine that it must be a part of their texture.”Unless awareness becomes a part of your very texture, unless awareness goes so deep that even while you are asleep you are aware, it is not of much use. Ordinarily people look alert and are asleep. They walk on the streets, go to their jobs, do their work, come back home, have children, have a wife, grow a family, and die. And they remain in the state of ghafla, they remain asleep.A man is called aware when he can fall asleep and still remain transparently alert deep down. Only then do Sufis say that this man has attained zikr – remembrance. And in this remembrance of one’s being one starts feeling God, experiencing godliness – the window opens, the door is no longer closed.But people who are dutiful, fulfilling their obligations, going to the mosque and the temple and the church regularly, start thinking that they are religious people. That is precisely the difficulty.I have heard…A farmer had a very sick mule so he called the veterinarian. The vet brought his little black bag and upon arrival took the mule’s pulse, temperature, and all the things that you do when you examine a sick mule.The vet said, “This is a very sick mule and I want you to give it these little white pills immediately. These white pills are very potent and will cure practically anything a sick mule has. But just to be sure, wait four hours and give the mule one of those red pills. They are so strong, they will cure anything.”The farmer and the doctor met in about two weeks, and the doctor asked the farmer what had happened to the mule.“Well, I gave him the white pills like you told me, Doc. And I never saw so much reaction from one mule in all my life. He kicked down the barn door and the back fence and took off across the country. I thought I had lost my mule.”“Did you lose him?” the doctor asked.“You know, Doc, if I had not the presence of mind to take that red pill myself, the mule would have been long gone.”But this man will start thinking that he has presence of mind, this man will start thinking that he has awareness.In moments when a crisis arises everybody functions as if he is alert, then he falls asleep again. That’s what happens. If somebody comes suddenly with a sword and jumps on you, for a moment you will become alert – the shock will bring you out of your foggy night. For a moment you will open your eyes; for a moment you will forget your forgetfulness; for a moment you will forget that you are an asleep person. For a moment you will be dragged out by the sword, by death, by the possibility of danger, into awareness – but only for a moment. Then it is gone again.Sometimes it happens to mountaineers climbing on a mountain. When they come to face real danger, when death and life are both facing them simultaneously – a single wrong step and they are gone forever – then they feel a new kind of awareness arising in them. That’s why so many people become attracted to mountain climbing. Mountaineering sometimes brings joy.That’s why many people are attracted to gambling. When you risk all, for a moment you become aware. That’s why people are attracted to risky games – the car race. When you are really in danger you have to become alert because of the danger.But the reason why people are attracted to these dangerous games – mountaineering, car racing, gambling, etcetera – is because of the joy that comes from those small moments of awareness. A man who has been practicing a tariqa to become aware need not go climbing mountains or competing in a car race or gambling. He can make himself alert without any outer situation forcing him to be alert. He can make himself alert without any cause from the outside. And then his joy is infinite. That’s what Hindus have called sat-chit-anand – utter bliss is his.But awareness should become the very texture of your being.“I cannot understand that sort of remark,” said the king, “and perhaps you will regard me as unsuitable because I cannot fathom your riddles.”“Not at all,” said the Sufi, “but a would-be disciple cannot really have a debate with his prospective teacher.”Remember, you can have a dialogue with your master, but you cannot have a debate. A debate from the very beginning, a discussion from the very beginning, prohibits disciplehood. You can have a dialogue; a dialogue has a different quality.What is the difference between a debate and a dialogue? The difference is that in a dialogue you are not carrying any prejudice, you do not have some obsessions of your own. You put aside your concepts. In a dialogue you want to understand, not to argue. You don’t have an egoistic defense. In a dialogue you are open, you are ready to listen, to learn; you are ready to be transformed.In a discussion, in a debate, you are resistant. You have armor, you are in a fighting mood. One cannot fight with one’s master – if you do you are not a disciple and that master is not your master.“…a would-be disciple cannot really have a debate with his prospective teacher. Sufis deal in knowledge, not argument.”A tremendously potent statement: “Sufis deal in knowledge…” Yes, they can show you the way to know, but they don’t argue because they don’t propose any philosophy. They have none. They are very nonphilosophical people, almost anti-philosophical. They don’t give you a dogma; not a single principle is proposed. They are physicians. They give you a medicine, and that medicine will open your eyes. They will give you a tariqa, and that tariqa will change you, will change your chemistry. Then you will be able to see something that you have never seen before.By arguing, your chemistry cannot be changed, and without changing your chemistry you cannot be convinced of anything that you have not known already. God is unknown. You will need a different chemistry to know him. The Sufi provides you with knowledge of how to do it – knowledge about tariqa, about method. But he provides no knowledge about principles.“But I will give you a demonstration of your heedlessness…”Sufis are always giving demonstrations; they are very practical people, very scientific people. They say, “It will be difficult now. I can argue, but it won’t help, I will give you a demonstration. You can see yourself whether you are a man of heedfulness or a man of heedlessness.”“…if you will carry out a test and do what I ask in respect to it.”The king agreed to take the test, and the Sufi told him to say “I believe you” to everything which should be said to him in the ensuing few minutes.Now, this is a small experiment in zikr, in remembrance. The king has to remember to say – irrespective of the statement made by the Sufi, he has to say, “I believe you.”The king thought, “This is so simple. This man seems to be a little stupid. If a man can become a Sufi so easily, can start on the path so easily…” The king was suspicious.“If that is a test, it is easy enough to start becoming a Sufi,” said the king.He must have said it in a way to ridicule the Sufi master. But the master didn’t answer it.Now the Sufi started the test. He said: “I am a man from beyond the skies.”“I believe you,” said the king.Listen. Each statement is significant. First the Sufi says: “I am a man from beyond the skies.” Now this is an utterly nonsensical statement, a very philosophical statement. There is no way to prove it or disprove it. He is talking absurd nonsense, but the king can remember to say “I believe you” because nothing is at stake. That is why people like metaphysics, philosophical argumentation. They are happy because nothing is at stake. How does it matter? If he says “I am coming from beyond the sky” – okay, it is perfectly okay. The king is not going to be changed by it, the king has nothing to risk in it.That’s why people go to listen to great discourses on God, the soul, esoteric principles, astral bodies, subtle bodies, and enjoy them so much. For these kinds of people, theosophy has provided great literature. They are always talking about things that don’t matter.Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me one day, “My wife and I never argue.”I could not believe it! It seemed almost impossible that a wife and a husband did not argue. I said, “Mulla, how do you manage it?”He said, “The day we married we decided one thing: I will only talk about great and lofty subject matters only, and she will take care of small trivia.”I asked, “For instance?”He said, “For instance, what house to purchase, what car to purchase, to what school to send the children, what kind of clothes I should wear, what kind of business I should do – these are small trivia. My wife settles them.”And I said, “What are those lofty, great subjects?”He said, “For example: whether God exists or not, whether war should be continued in Korea or not – things like that, great things. I decide great things, she decides small things.”The king has no problem. This is such a great thing, let this Sufi say it. The Sufi says:“I am a man from beyond the skies.”“I believe you,” said the king.The Sufi continued: “Ordinary people try to gain knowledge, Sufis have so much that they try not to use it.”Now he is coming slowly down. It is a great statement still, but not as great as the first. But still the king is not touched. It remains outside the arena of the king.“I believe you,” said the king.Then the Sufi said: “I am a liar.”“I believe you,” said the king.He must have said it very happily because that’s what he wanted to say. When the master was saying, “I come …from beyond the skies” and when he said, “Sufis have so much knowledge that while ordinary people seek knowledge, Sufis try to find ways of not using it because they have so much,” he must have been thinking deep down inside that this man is a liar. And the Sufi has seen the point. He says: “I am a liar.”It is a great experiment in mind reading. That’s what the king was saying inside – that the master was a liar. But the king still missed; he could not see the point.“I believe you,” said the king.The Sufi went on: “I was present when you were born.”Now he is coming closer, but he starts from the very beginning, from the primal scream. He says: “I was present when you were born.” Now he is coming to the king, but he starts from the very beginning, from ABC: “…when you were born.” Still not much is at stake, maybe. Even if he was present, what does it matter?“I was present when you were born.”“I believe you,” said the king.“And your father was a peasant,” said the Sufi.“That is a lie!” shouted the king.Now he forgot completely. This was the first statement really made about him – not actually about him, about his father, but it was coming too close. Now he forgot. Within a single minute he forgot that he had to remember to say “I believe you.” And nothing much was at stake, just a simple prejudice. What is wrong if your father was a peasant? Just a small prejudice: “I belong to a great family of kings. My father was a king, my father’s father was a king – we have always been kings!”“I was present when you were born.” The Sufi is coming closer. Then he touches the boundary. “And your father was a peasant…”He has not yet said anything directly about the king – otherwise the king would have taken his sword out of its sheath if the Sufi had said, “You are a thief!” He may have jumped on the Sufi.“That is a lie!” shouted the king.The Sufi looked at him sorrowfully and said: “Since you are so heedless that you cannot for one minute remember to say “I believe you” without some prejudice coming into play, no Sufi would be able to teach you anything.”A beautiful parable. Meditate over it.Yes, this is exactly the case with the greater part of humanity. You cannot remember for a single minute. One day, try a small experiment that Gurdjieff used to give to his disciples – a modern version of the same experiment. Put your watch in front of you and watch the hand that shows the seconds, just for a single minute. Remember only one thing: I am seeing this second hand… I am seeing this second hand… I am seeing this second hand. Go on remembering only this one thing. You will be surprised. Not even seven, eight, ten seconds have passed and you have forgotten. Again you come out of your sleep, you remember for a few seconds – again you have forgotten. In a single minute, at least three to four times you will forget. You will not be able to remember a simple thing.And no prejudice is involved. Nobody is saying that your father is a beggar or your father is a thief. Nobody is saying that your mother was a prostitute, nobody is saying that you are a bastard – nothing like that. Nothing is involved. Just a simple, factual statement: “I am seeing the second hand” – and again and again you will fall asleep. Again and again you will start thinking of something else and you will not be heedful.Now, the Sufis say that if a man has no awareness nothing can be taught. So the first thing to be taught will be awareness. And awareness takes a long time because you have lived many lives in unawareness. It has gone very deep in your blood, it has entered your very texture, into every cell of your body; every fiber of your psyche is full of sleep.This sleep has to be broken. Once this sleep is broken, then… Then the disciple is ready to learn. It will depend on how aware you are. The master can pour in only that much.A small parable…There was a tradesman in a small village in the East who sat on his knees in his little shop, and with his left hand he pulled a strand of wool from the bale that was above his head. He twirled the wool into a thicker strand and passed it to his right hand as it came before his body. The right hand wound the wool around a large spindle.This was a continuous motion on the part of the old man who, each time his right hand spindled the wool, inaudibly said, “La illaha illa’llah.” There could be no uneven movement or the wool would break and he would have to tie a knot and begin again. The old man had to be present every moment or he would break the wool.This is awareness, this is zikr, this is life. “Sufi” means awareness in life, awareness on a higher plane than that on which we normally live. This old man was a simple man, but he taught his sons his trade, and his sons taught the trade to their sons and a silsila was created – a tradition of masters and disciples.Out of such a small phenomenon he created awareness. You can create awareness in whatever you are doing. The only thing is: use it as a device. You are walking, walk – but be fully alert, remembering that you are walking. You are eating, eat – but be fully alert that you are eating. Taking a shower, let each drop of water fall on you fully alert, watchful.Hindus call it sakshin, the witness. Buddhists call it samyak smriti, right-mindfulness. Kabir and Nanak call it surati, remembrance; and Sufis call it zikr. But it is the same tariqa.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,When I feel deep love, I feel sad at the same time. Why?Real love always brings sadness. It is inevitable – because love creates a space that opens new doors to your being. Love brings a twilight situation.In the moment of love you can see what is unreal and what is real. In the moment of love you can see what is meaningless, what is meaningful, and at the same time you see you are rooted in the meaningless – hence the sadness. In the moment of love you become aware of your ultimate potential, you become aware of the farthest peak, but you are not there – hence the sadness.You see a vision, but it is a vision, and within a moment it will be gone. It is as if God has spoken to you in a dream and when you are awake you miss it. You know something has happened, but it has not become a reality. It was just a passing breeze.If love does not create sadness then know well it is not love. Love is bound to create sadness – the greater the love, the greater will be the sadness in the wake of it.Love opens the door to existence. Two hearts come close, very, very close, but in that very closeness they can see the separation – that is the sadness. When you are far away you cannot see it so clearly. You know you are separate, but when you desire to be one with somebody and you long for it and there is great passion for it, and you come close and you come close and then comes a moment when you are very, very close but beyond which you cannot go, you are stuck – suddenly you become sad. The goal is so close by and yet it is beyond reach.Sometimes after love you will fall into a deep frustrating night. Those who have not known love have not known real misery, they have not known real anguish. They live a flat kind of life. They have not known the peaks so they are not aware of the valleys. They have not reached the maximum so they think that whatever they are doing is what life is supposed to be like. In love, for a moment you become that which you should be. But it is only momentary.If you want it to become an eternal reality for you then love itself is not enough – then prayer will be needed. Love makes you aware of this need, and unless you start moving into prayer, love will create more and more sadness.You cannot become one in love. You can only have an illusion of becoming one. And that is the great desire – how to be one, how to be one with the whole, how to fall into rapport with reality, how to disappear utterly. Because if you are, there is misery; if you are, there is anguish; if you are, there is anxiety. The very ego creates the problem. When you melt and disappear, when you become one, there is nobody left behind. You are just a wave in this eternal ocean of existence. You don’t have a center of your own; the center of the whole has become your center. Then anxiety disappears, then anguish disappears, then the potential has become actual. This is what is called enlightenment, this is what is called nirvana or God-realization.Love is moving in the same direction, but it can only promise, it cannot fulfill. It cannot deliver the goods – hence the sadness. You feel you are coming very close to the point where you can disappear and yet you don’t disappear. Again you start falling away from your beloved. Again and again you will come close, and again and again you will fall back into your aloneness. But you will never become one. And unless you become one, ecstasy is not possible.A very famous existentialist, Nikolai Berdyaev, has written a few very pertinent things, very relevant to the question. He says: “I have always been afraid of happy, joyful experiences for they have always brought me the most vivid memories of the agony of life.”Certainly it is so. That’s why the really miserable people don’t rebel. The proletarians have never rebelled. Marx comes from a middle-class family, so does Mao, so does Lenin, so does Engels. All the revolutions and all the revolutionaries come out of the middle class, they don’t come from the lower strata. They cannot come from there. People are so miserable that they can’t believe that there is anything more. They have never tasted anything of joy. Because they have not tasted anything of joy, they cannot conceive of their life as being miserable. They have no comparison.Unless you know what illness is you will never feel what health is. If you have been ill from your very beginning – if the day you were born you were born ill – and you have never felt that well-being called health, you will not be very miserable with your illness. You will be perfectly satisfied with it. You will think that this is what life is.That’s why revolution does not arise from the lowest strata. It does not arise from the highest strata either because they have so much to lose. They cannot be revolutionaries; they have too much at stake. The poor have nothing to lose, but they cannot feel their misery; the rich can feel the misery, but they have so much to lose. Hence all revolutionaries are born from the middle class – those who have known both, a little bit of misery and a little bit of joy. Their perspective is very clear. They know joy is possible, and because they know joy is possible their agony is intolerable.Berdyaev says: “On great feast days I almost invariably felt anguish, perhaps because I was awaiting some miraculous transformation of ordinary workaday life. But it never came.” Yes, on a feast day, one feels more anguish because one hopes more. When you hope more, naturally you will feel more miserable if that hope is not fulfilled.In the moment of love there is great hope. You feel you have almost arrived – and yet you never arrive. You feel it is almost going to happen – now this is the moment – and the moment comes and passes by and you are left again in the same wasteland as you have always been in. The clouds gather and it never rains and the desert remains a desert. If those clouds don’t gather you will not be so hopeful. You know it is a desert. You accept it. You adjust to it. But one day suddenly you see great clouds gathering. You feel it in the winds that it is going to rain, you feel it all around that it is going to rain. Your heart starts pulsating that now this desert will no longer be a desert, now green trees will grow and birds will sing and there will be celebration. And those clouds start disappearing.Have you not seen it? Whilst walking in a dark night on a dark street, suddenly a car passes by with a flood of light. And after the car has gone the darkness is more than before. What happened? You were walking in the same night in the same darkness, but those lights, those headlights of the car, suddenly filled your eyes with light for a moment. Now in comparison the darkness is greater. For a few minutes you may not be able to see at all. You will be left completely blind. This has been done by the light.The situation is exactly the same: when you are in love you are flooded with light. But then it is gone – it comes and it goes, it is momentary. And in the wake is great sadness.Even while love is there, those who are very perceptive know that it is not going to be there forever. It is momentary. They are still trembling. Love is there, but they know it is going to go – hence the sadness.The question is from Abhinava. She must be very perceptive, intuitive. She must have a heart that can feel things even when ordinarily people don’t feel them. When there is love you enjoy; when it is gone you become sad. But if you are very, very perceptive you will become aware that exactly in the moment when love is there, just by the corner sadness is lurking.Says Berdyaev: “Love in particular seemed to me to carry within itself the seed of anguish, and I have frequently been amazed that people could experience the exaltation of love as sheer joy and happiness.” He seems to be puzzled.This man, Nikolai Berdyayev, was one of the greatest existentialists of this century. And existentialism has penetrated life’s mysteries very deeply – not to the very end, of course, but existentialism is a good beginning. One should not get stuck in it, because the beginning is negative. If you don’t go deeper into it, it remains negative. It starts turning into a positive quality only when you really go deep into it.Buddha is also an existentialist, but he went to the very end. Sartre, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel, Berdyayev, they are also existentialists, but they are stuck somewhere in the middle, they have not gone to the very end. So they remain negative. But the insight is right – on the right line, in the right direction. The existentialists talk of despair, anguish, anxiety, angst, depression, sadness, misery – all that is dark, dismal. They never talk of bliss, they never talk of joy, they never talk of celebration. Yet I would like to tell you that they are moving in the right direction. If they move a little more, soon they will find joy arising.I have heard about a very famous lady, a very respectable lady, well-known in the highest strata of society. In a get-together party, where all the prominent people of the country were present, she became too drunk. Somebody provoked her and she became so angry that she lost her usual control. She lost her temper and said some vulgar words. People were shocked, they could not believe such ugly words could come from such a respectable woman. They had never thought about it. They were so shocked that silence fell and then she was also shocked by their shock.Then she understood what she had done. She smiled – a sweet smile that only ladies know how to do – and said, “I am sorry. It seems I am turning existentialist.”Right now this is the situation. Existentialism has only been talking about vulgar things, the ill, pathological, negative – the dark side of life.It seems as if death is the object of meditation. But if you meditate long enough on death you will be surprised that in the very center of death arises life.Berdyayev says: “Love in particular seemed to me to carry within itself the seed of anguish, and I have frequently been amazed that people could experience the exaltation of love as sheer joy and happiness. Eros is in anguish for it is concerned with and deeply rooted in the mystery of time and eternity. It concerns time athirst for eternal fulfillment and yet never attaining it.“Likewise there is anguish in sex. Sex shows man wounded, fallen apart, and never able to attain true fullness through union. It bids man to go out into another, but he returns once more into himself and the anguish of his longing for unity continues unrelieved. The desire for wholeness cannot be satisfied through sex; on the contrary, it only serves to deepen the wounds of disunity.”The very word sex comes from a Latin root sexus, which means division. Sex divides. It promises to unite, but it never does. In fact, it divides. But there is a great desire in man to be united. The child in the mother’s womb is united with existence. He has no separate existence. He has no separate reality. He is part of the whole. He has no self, no higher consciousness. He is, but he is not yet an ego. And that remains our deepest longing – how to enter the womb of existence again.Psychoanalysts say that man’s effort to penetrate the woman while making love is really an effort to enter the womb again. And there is some truth in it. How to enter that state of absolute calm, quiet, when the ego has not yet been stirred, when everything is in peace and harmony?While a man and woman are joined in love they are trying to create a unity – hence the attraction of love and hence the appeal of sex. But it never happens. Or, it only happens for such a split second that it really doesn’t matter whether it happens or not. In fact, on the contrary, it creates more desire for unity – more desire and more longing for the ultimate union. And each time frustration comes to hand. If you have eyes to see and if you have a heart to feel you will become sad; whenever you are in love you will become sad. Again the promise and again you know it is not going to be fulfilled.Then what to do? Let your sadness in love become a pilgrimage into prayer. Let this experience of sadness become a great meditation in depth. First you have to dissolve the ego in your own inner being; you cannot dissolve it in anybody else, it will come back. Only for a moment can you create a state of forgetfulness.So sex functions like alcohol, a natural alcohol. It is provided in the chemistry of the body, but it is an intoxicant, it is a drug. It depends on chemistry. It is as chemical as LSD, marijuana – the difference is only that it is biochemical, it is already provided by nature in the body. But it is a chemical phenomenon. Through chemistry you attain a glimpse. That’s what happens when you take LSD – through chemistry you attain a glimpse. That’s what happens through all kinds of intoxicants – for a moment you forget yourself. Even that momentary forgetfulness opens a window.But forgetfulness is not a dissolution. You are not dissolved. You are there, waiting. Once the drug has worn off the ego will grab you again. The ego has to be dissolved, not forgotten. That’s the sadness of love: the ego is only forgotten, and that too for a moment. Then it comes back, and comes back with vengeance. Hence you will find lovers fighting continuously. The ego becomes even more solid, crystallized.That’s why you find lovers always thinking in terms of the other cheating them. Nobody is cheating. But you desired, you hoped, you fantasized a state of unity, and you were thinking that great ecstasy was going to happen and it didn’t happen – somebody has cheated you. Of course, naturally, the other becomes the object. And the other also thinks in the same way – that you have cheated him or her. Nobody is cheating; love has cheated you both, chemistry has cheated you both. Unconsciousness has cheated you both. Ego has cheated you both. If you understand this you will not fight with each other.This revelation of sadness through love will become a revolution, a radical change in your life. You will start moving toward a new direction where the ego can be dissolved.That’s all that Sufism is about – how to dissolve the ego.And love gives great insight, hence I am all for love. But remember well, you have to go beyond it. I am all for it only so that you can go beyond it. It has to become a stepping-stone. I am not against it, because people who are against it will remain below it, they will never go beyond it. People who have not known the ecstatic moment of love will not know the sadness of it – how can they know?How is a monk living in a Catholic monastery or a Jaina muni living the life of an ascetic going to know the sadness of love? They have renounced love. In that very renunciation they have renounced sadness also.Without knowing the sadness of love you cannot take off into the world of prayer or meditation. That experience is a must.A few more things: the sadness that love brings is very potential, it is very deep, it is very healthy, it is helpful. It will lead you to godliness. So don’t take it negatively, use it. That sadness felt in love is a great blessing. It simply shows that your aspiration is beyond the capacity of love, your aspiration is for the ultimate. Love can only give you a momentary satisfaction, but not an eternal contentment. Feel grateful that love gave you even that one momentary satisfaction and feel grateful that love made you aware of a tremendous sadness inside you.When people are together in love they feel very alone. Nobody else ever feels such aloneness as lovers feel. Can’t you remember it? While sitting holding the hand of your beloved on a full-moon night, have you not felt it? – utterly alone. The other is there, you are there and you are both for each other, there is no conflict – yet there is no bridge. You are alone, she is alone; two alonenesses sitting together, and each making the other more aware of his own aloneness or her own aloneness.Love is a great experience. It makes you feel one absolute truth – that you are born alone, that you live alone, that you die alone. And there is no way to drown this aloneness in drugs – whether those drugs are manufactured by nature in the trees, or by factories, or in the body. There is no way to drown this aloneness. One has to understand this aloneness, one has to penetrate this aloneness, one has to go into its very core. And when you have reached the very core of your aloneness, suddenly it is no longer aloneness, it is the very presence of God. You are alone because God is alone.Mohammed says again and again, “There is no God but God. God is one.” Following Mohammed, a great Sufi mystic, Shapistari, says, “Know one, see one, love one, be one.” You are already that, but you have to penetrate inside yourself.Your beloved will make you aware that there is no way to go out and become one. The way is inward. Go in. Love naturally leads people into meditation. Lovers become meditators – only lovers become meditators.So, Abhinava, it is a blessing that you have felt sadness while in those beautiful moments of love. Take the hint. Understand the message. Your unconscious has given you the message to now turn inward. The beloved resides in you; the beloved is not outside. The beloved resides in your very heart. No other love and no other beloved is going to satisfy except God – hence the sadness.The second question:Osho,Why is it thought that thoughts interfere in knowing the truth?Because they do. A constant procession of thoughts in your mind makes you blind. You cannot see beyond them. They create a fog and you become clouded. It is just like dust gathers on a mirror; then the mirror cannot reflect that which is. The dust has to be wiped off, washed; the mirror has to be made clean – then it reflects. Otherwise how can it reflect? The dust will distort.Thoughts are like dust. Thoughts are a continuous preoccupation. For example, you are sitting under a tree and suddenly a cuckoo starts calling – but you are absorbed in your thoughts. You will not hear the cuckoo. That beautiful song won’t enter you. You are too full of your own thoughts, you don’t have any space so it cannot enter you. It is simple arithmetic: if you want something to enter you, you have to give a little space. Your thoughts are filling your mind so much that nothing can enter.A Zen master was approached by a professor of philosophy. The professor said, “I have come to understand what truth is. What do you say?”The professor had come uphill, was looking tired, perspiring. The Zen master said, “Sit and rest a little and I will prepare tea for you. First things first. Then we can talk later on. And that is not important. Tea is more important than truth.”The professor could not believe it. Is this man mad? Tea is more important than truth?But the Zen master is right. What he means is, “You are too tired and too full of thoughts. Let me help you to relax a little bit. Cool down, please.” That’s what he is saying. He is saying, “Don’t be too much concerned about truth, otherwise you will miss it.”And then he prepares the tea, he brings it and pours the tea – and goes on pouring. The professor is holding his cup and saucer, the cup is full and the tea starts overflowing into the saucer, but he keeps silent. But then he feels that now the tea is going to overflow onto the floor so he says, “Stop! What are you doing? Why do you go on pouring? My cup is full of tea and it cannot hold a single drop more!”And the master said, “You are so careful about your cup, but you are not so careful about your mind. Your mind is so full. I see only junk and furniture in your mind, rotten furniture. And you want to invite truth? You will have to create a little space for truth to come in.”Truth is the ultimate guest. You will have to empty yourself utterly, only then can truth come in. Thoughts are a preoccupation. People who are too much in thoughts remain in a private kind of world. They have their own world of thoughts and dreams and projections and desires. They go on rushing here and there, but they don’t look at the trees, the greenery, the flowers, the birds, the people, the children; they can’t see anything.I have heard a very old joke, but one of tremendous importance.Michelangelo was working on his famous ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. For seven years he worked on a high scaffold. He was lying there the whole day on his back, working on the ceiling. Many times he had seen that in the afternoons, when there was nobody in the church, a blind old woman used to come to pray. Somebody would bring her in and leave her there and for hours together she would sit and pray.One day, one hot afternoon, he was not feeling like working so he turned on his scaffold and looked down. The old woman was there and there was nobody else, the church was utterly empty. She was doing her usual prayer, and tears were coming to her eyes. Michelangelo felt like joking; he was in a joking mood.He shouted from the top, “I am Jesus Christ. What do you want? Just tell me and I will fulfill it.” He was expecting that the woman would say what she wanted.The blind woman raised her face and her blind eyes and said, “You shut up! I am not talking to you. I am talking to your mother!”This is preoccupation. Who bothers about Jesus Christ? “Shut up!” she said.When you are in a certain thought or in a certain thought process you become closed. Only that much of a tunnel remains open. You move into that tunnel. And that tunnel of your thoughts has nothing to do with reality. It is your thought. It is just a vibe in your mind, just a vibration. That’s why it is said that if you are too much in your thoughts you cannot know the truth.All kinds of meditations presuppose one thing – thoughtlessness. And this point has to be understood in reference to Sufism too. Just as there are thoughts in the mind so there are emotions in the heart. Thoughts have to go if you want knowing to arise, and if you want loving to arise in your heart then your sentimentality and your emotions have to go.People are ready to accept that thoughts have to go – then your intelligence is pure. But they have not contemplated upon the second thing: that your heart is pure only when your emotions and your so-called sentiments have gone. Many people think sentimentality to be feeling; it is not. Thoughts are not intelligence, and sentimentality is not love. And there are only two ways. Sufis have two names; all the religions talk about two ways. Sufis say the first way is marifa; marifa means the way of knowing. And the second way is mahaba; mahaba means the way of love. These are what Hindus call jnana-marga and bhakti-marga – the way through intelligence or the way through love.But both need one thing: if you are searching through intelligence then drop thinking so that intelligence can function unhindered; and if you are working through the path of love then drop emotionality, sentimentality, so that your love can function unhindered. Either you will see God through the heart, the mirror of the heart, or you will see God through the mirror of your intelligence. Both are perfectly good – whatever you choose or whatever you feel is more in accord with you.Half of the people of the world will follow marifa and half will follow mahaba. It is exactly proportionate – just as there are half women in the world and half men. The yin and yang is divided that way in many dimensions. The path of the heart is the feminine path and the path of intelligence, meditation, knowing, is the male path. But remember one thing: you may be a male biologically, you may not be a male psychologically; you may be a female biologically, you may not be a female psychologically.You have to look into yourself psychologically. The physiology does not decide; the physiology is not decisive about it. Many women will find through knowing and many men will find through loving. So don’t just take it for granted that because physiologically you have a male body then the path of knowledge is your path, no.A man is both man and woman, and a woman is both man and woman. In many ways these two points meet. The only difference is of emphasis. And if you are a male in one way you will be a female in another way, to compensate. If you are a woman in one way you will be a man in another way, to compensate – because the total unity has to be absolutely in equilibrium. All your women inside and all your men inside – biological, physiological, psychological – have to come to a synthesis otherwise you cannot exist. They all have to be absolutely balanced.So look into your own self. Find out who you are. What gives you enthusiasm – knowing or loving? What makes you ecstatic – knowing or loving? What gives you a song in your being?Now, Albert Einstein cannot go through the path of mahaba. His joy is his intelligence. And you can offer existence only your joy, nothing else. That is the offering, the only offering. You cannot offer flowers from trees, you can offer only your flowering. Einstein has flowered as an absolutely beautiful intelligence – that is the flower that he has to offer to existence. That is his flower. In his own tree that flower has bloomed.A Chaitanya or a Jesus, they are a different kind of people. Their hearts have opened. They have flowered in love – they can offer their flower. You can only offer your flowering. And to flower you will have to remember to remove hindrances. A real intelligence is without preoccupation with thoughts. That’s why all the great scientists say that whenever they have discovered something, they have discovered it not by thinking, but when the thinking had stopped and there was an interval, a gap. In that gap was the insight – the intuitive flash like lightning. When thought stops, your thinking is pure. It will look paradoxical. When thought stops – let me repeat – your thinking is pure, your capacity to reflect reality is pure. When emotions disappear, sentimentality disappears; then your love energy is pure.Every seeker has to find it. If you cannot find it then ask your master – because sometimes it will be very confusing for you to decide. There are marginal cases who are forty-nine percent feminine and fifty-one percent male, or vice versa, and it is very difficult for them to decide who they are. And in the morning the proportion may be forty-nine percent man, fifty-one percent woman; in the evening the proportion may change. You are a flux. In the morning you may decide that you are on the path of love and by the evening you decide that you are on the path of knowing. In the morning everybody is more loving. By the evening it is very difficult to remain loving – the world is too much. By the evening everybody hardens, everybody becomes a more solid rock.That’s why beggars beg in the morning, not in the evening. They don’t come in the evening because they know every door will be closed and they will be shouted down from everywhere. In the morning they can hope. People have relaxed in the night, dreamed beautiful dreams, have become children again, become lost in a dreamless state. The ego was forgotten. In the morning they are more fresh, innocent, young. You can trust that they will have some compassion. They may not give you anything, but they will not shout you down. Or they may give.Hence all the religions have prescribed prayer in the morning. In India we call that special moment brahmamuhurt, the moment of God – just before the sunrise. That is the best moment to pray. Why? Because the whole night you were out of the world, out of the competition, jealousy, possessiveness, hatred, anger; out of the mathematical, out of the calculating mind. You had become part of nature for those seven, eight hours. Your eyes will be cleaner and your heart will be fresher – and prayer is possible. By the evening it will become more and more difficult. Seeing the people and their dishonesty and seeing the cutthroat competition all around, the violence, the aggression, the war, the exploitation – the misery that is being created by everybody for everybody else – one hardens, one loses heart.If you cannot decide then ask your master. The master has many functions: one is – the first, the beginning thing – he has to decide for you because he can look deeper into you. He can see your potential. And sometimes it happens that on the surface you are one thing and potentially you are another. Sometimes it happens that a man looks very, very manly and deep inside he has a very soft heart. Maybe it is just because of the soft heart that he has created an armor around himself of strength, of aggression – he is afraid of his own softness. He is afraid that that softness will make him vulnerable. He is afraid that if he opens his heart he will be exploited and cheated by everybody else, he will be nowhere in this competitive world. Being afraid of his softness he has become closed, he has put a China Wall around his heart. He has become very aggressive. He has become aggressive in the same proportion that he feels he is soft and vulnerable.So if he thinks, he will think he is a very hard man, a warrior type, a very calculative man, and he may be misguided by his own armor, he may be deceived by his own deception. He had managed that deception for others, but this is one thing to be understood: you dig a ditch for others and finally you fall into it yourself.Or there may be somebody who looks very, very feminine – soft, graceful, elegant – and deep down he may be a very dangerous man, an Adolf Hitler or a Benito Mussolini or a Genghis Khan. That too is possible, that too happens. When a person becomes very afraid of his own aggression and violence he creates a soft armor around himself, otherwise nobody will relate to him. He is afraid that nobody will relate to him so he becomes very polite, he learns etiquette, he is always bowing to people, always smiling so that nobody can see his violence that he is carrying like a poison, like a dagger. If you have a dagger you have to hide it, otherwise who is going to relate to you. You show carry it, you have to hide it somewhere. And once you have hidden it somewhere, by and by you yourself forget about it.The first function of the master is to look into your potentiality because that is decisive – not your armor, not your character, not you on the surface, but you in the deepest core of your being. You as existence has created you, not you as the society or you yourself have created you. Only from that point do things start growing.If you start working on yourself with your armor you will never grow – because armor can’t grow, it is a dead thing. Only your being can grow. Structures don’t grow, they are not alive. Only the life in you can grow – life that has been a gift from existence. But how are you going to see it?You will need somebody who can see to the very depth of your being. And you will have to allow somebody to go into your depth, that’s why surrender is needed. A master will not be able to function if you are not surrendered. You will not open up, you will not allow him passage; you will protect yourself even against him, you will be defensive even against him, you will keep a distance, you will not allow him too close an approach to you. Then there is no possibility.What is surrender? Surrender is only a trust that you are going to open your heart. It is a risk. Who knows what the master will do to you? Certainly it is a risk. That’s why religion is not for those who are very cowardly. And cowardly people are very cunning people – they go on rationalizing. They say, “Why should I surrender? Why should I surrender to anybody?” They think that surrender is a kind of weakness.They are absolutely wrong. Surrender is possible only if you are very strong. To surrender needs great strength, great courage, great risk. Weak people cannot surrender. They cannot trust themselves so much and they cannot be courageous enough to open their hearts before somebody else.Weaklings can never surrender, remember. Weaklings continuously go on fighting. They are afraid of their weakness; they know that they are weak. They cannot afford surrender – only very strong people can. This is my experience here. Whenever a strong person comes to me he is always ready to take a jump, and whenever a weak coward comes he talks and thinks and broods and finds rationalizations and explanations. And you can always find explanations, the mind is very fertile for that. For lies the mind is very fertile; for truth it is impotent.This is the beginning – the master has to look and decide what is your path; he has to decide what is going to be your tariqa, the method; he has to decide in what direction you are going to move and from what point in your being you have to work.Then there are a thousand and one functions. On each step of the journey there are problems because this journey is not like a plain highway. At each point there are diversions, at each point there are bypaths. It is a very zigzag journey. It is almost a riddle; it is a labyrinth. Unless there is somebody who has gone the whole way and knows the way, there is a greater possibility that you will be lost somewhere, that you will take a wrong route. From each step the wrong route is available. And of a hundred routes, only one is right, ninety-nine are wrong. This is the situation. You will need somebody to help you at each point of the journey.But as you grow, trust will also grow. When you take the first step with the master you will see something has happened. Then more trust naturally arises and something more becomes possible. Then something more happens, then more trust. By and by, trust becomes absolute and the disciple disappears. And the moment that the disciple has disappeared, the disciple is born. Now there is not going to be any trouble. Now things will become very smooth and the journey will be a joy, it will not be an anxiety. Alone, it will create anguish.And then at the ultimate point the master is needed finally to give you a push – because at the ultimate point everybody hesitates. It is death. The Sufis call it the great death. It is no ordinary death – in ordinary death only the body dies. It is the great death. In this death even the self dies, you are utterly annihilated. That’s why Buddha called this state nirvana, the blowing out of the candle. You are utterly annihilated. But only out of that annihilation does something arise.A great Sufi master, Master Farid al-Din’ Attar, relates the tale of the phoenix. It is a symbolic, mythological tale of the ultimate utter death of the disciple.The phoenix is a wonderful bird. It has no mate and dwells in solitude. Its beak is long and hard like a flute, and contains nearly one hundred holes. Each hole sounds a different tone, and each tone reveals a mystery. A mystic friend of the bird taught it the art of music.When the phoenix utters these sounds, all the birds of the sky and fish of the sea are affected. All the wild beasts are made silent by the entrancing music and experience of ecstasy.The phoenix lives about a thousand years. It knows the time of its death, and when this knowledge is tearing at its heart it gathers a hundred trees, heaps them in one spot, and begins a fire. Then it places itself in the middle of the fire. Through each of the holes in its beak it sounds a plaintive cry, out of the depth of its soul it utters its dying lament, and then begins to tremble.At the sound of the music all the birds gather. The wild beasts assemble to be present at the death of the phoenix. At this time they all become aware of their own death. When the moment arrives for it to draw its last breath, the phoenix spreads its tail and feathers and with these it kindles a fire that spreads swiftly to the woodpile and begins to blaze. Soon the fire and bird become one red-hot mass. When the glowing charcoal is reduced to ashes and only one spark remains, a new phoenix arises into life.But how can you trust that the new phoenix is going to arise? You will be gone, you will be utterly gone. The Buddhists say: “Gate, gate, parasamgate – you will be gone, gone, gone forever.” But in that very going something is new. You release the energy, the old pattern disappears, but that eternal energy takes a new form, a birth. It is a resurrection. That is the last thing the master has to do – to help you die, to help you disappear.Sufis say that without a master there is no way, because without the master it is almost an impossibility for a seeker to reach.The third question:Osho,You said that life is a pilgrimage without a goal. Is this only for the unenlightened? When an enlightened being leaves his body, does the pilgrimage continue?Yes, the pilgrimage continues, but the pilgrim is no more. The pilgrim disappears, the pilgrimage continues.In you, just the opposite is the case: the pilgrim is there and the pilgrimage is not there yet. The pilgrim is too much, hence it obstructs the pilgrimage.The dancer disappears, but the dance continues; the singer disappears, but the song continues. The song cannot die because the song comes from God. The dancer cannot live eternally because the dancer is only exists in your mind, just a fiction. The dance is the reality, the dancer is just a fiction – hence Sufis have developed many methods through dance: the whirling dervish, the turn.What happens in the turn? What happens for the whirling dervish when he goes on dancing and whirling and whirling and whirling? What happens? A moment comes when the whirler disappears, there is only whirling; the turner is no more, there is only the turn. There is energy, but there is no center to that energy. In that very moment there is meditation.Dance is one of the ancientmost methods, tariqa – hence my strong insistence for dance. Many people come to me – orthodox Jainas. Catholics, Buddhists – and they say, “Why is there so much dance?” Because they think that meditation can only happen when you sit silently under a tree with an absolutely unmoving body.Meditation can happen in two ways. Either all movement disappears – then you sit like a Buddha, stonelike, statuelike. When all movement disappears the mover disappears, because the mover cannot exist without the movement. Then there is meditation. Or, you dance. You go on dancing and dancing and dancing and a moment comes of such ecstasy, of such extreme movement of energy, that in that movement the rocklike ego cannot exist. It becomes a whirlwind. The rock disappears and there is only dance. The movement is there, but the mover is no longer there. Again, meditation has happened.For those who are following the path of love, mahaba, dance will suit perfectly. For those who are following the path of knowing, sitting buddhalike, in yoga postures, unmoving, will be helpful.The fourth question:Osho,Often it seems that a successful therapeutic relationship results in spiritual growth for both client and therapist. Please explain: To what extent is the relationship between client and therapist similar to that of disciple and master?It is not similar at all, for many reasons. But the most fundamental reason is that the client and the therapist relationship is a relationship, and a relationship between a disciple and master is not a relationship at all because the disciple has to disappear into it. The client, the patient, has not to disappear into the therapist; they retain their identities. They remain two. In the relationship with the master, the disciple has to disappear, and when there is no disciple, naturally the master has disappeared also – because the master cannot be there without the disciple.The master is the idea of the disciple. When the disciple has disappeared the master has disappeared and there is only existence; one existence.This is very significant. Remember it. If you are ready to disappear I am already not there. I exist only in your mind. As far as my own existence is concerned, it is not there. If you are ready to dissolve, suddenly you will become aware that you have dissolved into a nothingness; there is neither master nor disciple. How can there be a relationship? The relationship is possible between the teacher and the taught, yes, but not between a master and a disciple.There are two kinds of people around here. Those who are disciples… For them there is no relationship with me – I am them, they are me. But there are a few who are students. Then there is a relationship: I am the teacher and they are the students. There may be a few who are here as patients too – then I am the therapist and they are the patients. It depends on you. But the relationship between a patient and a therapist is a relationship.The second thing to remember: the patient and the therapist are not different as far as their beings are concerned. The therapist may be suffering from the same pathology as the patient, he may have the same problems. But he is an expert, a knowledgeable person. He knows more than the patient. He is not more than the patient, he knows more than the patient. He can be helpful.He is like a plumber. The plumber knows more than you about your bathroom, but that doesn’t mean that he is more than you. When something is wrong – the heater is not functioning and the water is not flowing – you call the plumber. He knows more; he will be helpful, he is an expert.The therapist is the plumber of the mind. Something is blocked – he knows, he will help you. I have many plumbers around here and they do good work, they really know what they are doing – but remember, a plumber is a plumber.A master is not a plumber. A master is not quantitatively different from you; he is qualitatively different from you. Sometimes it can happen that the disciple may know more than the master. It is possible, there is no problem in it, but the disciple is not more than the master. And that is the difference.The master has being; he has arrived. He has no problems, his problems have disappeared – because he has disappeared, the basic problem has disappeared. The problem-creator has disappeared. He has no problems. When you relate to a master you are relating to a person who has no problems. He is utterly quiet. There is absolute silence. No question, no problem, nothing to be solved, nowhere to go, nothing to do. All has already happened. There is no more to happen. Happening has disappeared. He simply is. It is a pure isness, a pure existence.A therapist is a man just like you, but he has a certain expertise. He can help you so far.I have heard…A fellow had two parrots and he wanted to know which was the male and which was the female. A man standing near said, “I am a bird expert, and I can tell you.”“If you look you will notice that every time the birds eat worms, the male bird always eats the male worms and the female bird eats the female worms.”“Well, how do you know which is the male and which is the female worm?”“Well, I don’t know that. I’m just a bird expert.”A therapist can go so far, but don’t push him too much. Take his help. He knows much more about how the human mind functions and how man behaves than you know. He has studied it. He can be helpful. If your mind is not functioning well he can put things right. He can make you readjusted.A master does not readjust your mind, he helps you to dissolve it. He is not concerned in adjusting you to the society, adjusting you to particular norms, standards, principles. He is not concerned with adjusting you at all – because this society is sick. It is as sick as it can be. To adjust you to this society is to adjust you to great sickness. This society is mad, it is neurotic. And all your psychotherapists are in the service of this neurotic society. When somebody starts going beyond the limits of the commonly accepted neurosis the psychotherapist has to be brought in – you are going too far. Come back. He helps you to come back to the accepted boundaries. He makes you normally abnormal, that’s all. He is in the service of the society.That’s why psychotherapy is very anti-revolutionary. If it is a capitalist society, the therapist will adjust you to the capitalist society. If you live in America, he will adjust you to the American society, the American way of life. If you live in Soviet Russia, he will adjust you to the communist society, the communist way of life. He serves the state. He serves the status quo. Wherever he is, he is in the service of whomsoever happens to be in power.A master serves no power. A master serves no society. A master is basically rebellious. Rebellion is his very flavor. He serves no imprisonments, he serves no conditionings. He makes you simply free – free of all conditioning, free of all societies, free of all man-made laws and disciplines. He gives you freedom.A psychotherapist gives you a psychological readjustment so that you can function better, that’s all. The psychotherapist looks at you as a function in the society. You are a doctor, you were doing perfectly well, then one day you go cuckoo. Now the psychotherapist comes and helps you to get back to doing your things in the same way you were doing them. You were doing such a good service to the society, you were such a good physician, you were a good professor, and then something goes wrong. You were doing such a utilitarian thing, you were such a good commodity.A professor of philosophy told his class that if any of them could answer one question he would allow that individual to forego the regular examination. The question was: “If a boat floats five miles downstream while a crow flies eight miles across an open field in the same time that a sparrow flies ten and half miles counter-clockwise, then how old am I?”“You are forty-four years old, sir,” answered one of the pupils.“Remarkable!” exclaimed the professor. “Tell me, exactly how did you arrive at that figure?”“That was easy, sir,” replied the student modestly. “You see, I have a nephew who’s twenty-two, and he’s only half crazy.”Now this professor will need a psychotherapist to bring him back. He has gone too far – far out.The psychotherapist helps the society to remain as it is. Freudians, Jungians, Adlerians and all, they are all anti-revolutionaries because they all serve the society. Whatever they say, howsoever they guard their principles, basically they serve the status quo.They are the modern version of the priest. In the ancient days the priest used to serve the same function. He used to keep people under rule, under control; he was serving the king. There was a conspiracy between the priest and the politician. The politician would touch the feet of the priest and the priest was enforcing a certain kind of society on people in the name of God. Then by and by God died. Naturally the priest became unemployed. The kings disappeared. Now there are only five kings – four of playing cards and one of England. The others have disappeared. The king disappeared, the priest disappeared, God disappeared, the society became democratic.But the society needs the priest. Without the priest the politician cannot function. The priest has come back with a new name: the psychotherapist is the new priest and psychotherapy is the new religion, religion in the sense all so-called religions have been. It is not Sufism, it is not Zen, it is not Hasidism; it is Judaism, Mohammedanism, Hinduism, Buddhism. It is the new religion, and the psychotherapist is the new priest and they are serving old purposes – old wine in new bottles.The master has always been against the priest and the master is going to remain against all kinds of priests, whatever their name.The relationship between a master and a disciple is something utterly different. First it is not a relationship; second it has nothing to do with society, adjustment, normality. In fact, the master helps the disciple to go beyond the mind. The therapist keeps the person below the mind, in the mind. Their functions are almost contrary.And the last question:Osho,Why did Gurdjieff use to say that if you want to get rid of religion, live close to a priest?It is simple. The priest remains significant only if you don’t know his heart, if you don’t know his reality. If you start knowing his reality you will be surprised: the priest is the last person to believe in religion. He never believes, he only pretends. It is his profession to believe. The priest is the only person who knows that God does not exist, but he cannot say it because his whole business depends on it. It is his trade secret. Gurdjieff is right.Listen to a few stories. That will do!A member of the Catholic Church approached her priest and said, “Father, my dog died, and I want to know if you think it is all right to have a funeral for him.”The priest said, “Yes, I think it’s all right, if you desire one.”“And who do you think would be a good minister to conduct it?”The priest wasn’t too happy with the thought of this funeral so he said, “I know a good Presbyterian minister down the street. I believe he will conduct it for you.”“Oh, thank you, Father, and just one more question. How much do you think I should pay him for it – two hundred dollars or three hundred dollars?”The priest’s eyes lit up, and as he slipped his arm around his parishioner, he said, “Why, my friend, why didn’t you say it was a Catholic dog?”And another:A Baptist Deacon had advertised a cow for sale.“How much are you asking for it?” inquired a prospective purchaser.“A hundred and fifty dollars,” said the advertiser.“And how much milk does she give?”“Four gallons a day,” he replied.“But how do I know that she will actually give that amount?” asked the purchaser.“Oh, you can trust me,” reassured the advertiser. “I’m a Baptist Deacon.”“I’ll buy it,” replied the other. “I’ll take the cow home and bring you the money later. You can trust me. I’m a Presbyterian Elder.”When the Deacon arrived home he asked his wife, “What is a Presbyterian Elder?”“Oh,” she explained, “a Presbyterian Elder is about the same as a Baptist Deacon.”“Oh dear!” groaned the Deacon, “I have lost my cow!”Gurdjieff is right. If you want to remain religious in the old sense never go close to a priest, it is better to keep away. If you really want to become religious then it is very good to go and watch a priest as closely as possible. That will show you the reality of the so-called priests and the reality of their so-called religions. That will annihilate Mohammedanism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism in your mind.And then for the first time you will inquire. You will start inquiring what true religion is beyond the dogmas and the churches and the creeds, beyond the conflicts, beyond the theologies. You will start inquiring what true God is.And that makes a man a Sufi or a Zen seeker or a Hasid.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A man came to Bahauddin Shah and said, “First I followed this teacher and then that one. Next I studied these books, and then those. I feel that although I know nothing of you and your teachings, this experience has been slowly preparing me to learn from you.”The Shah answered, “Nothing you have learned in the past will help you here. If you are to stay with us, you will have to abandon all pride in the past. That is a form of self-congratulation.”The man exclaimed, “This is, to me, the proof that you are the great, the real and true teacher! For none whom I had met in the past has dared to deny the value of what I had studied before!”Bahauddin said, “This feeling is in itself unworthy. In accepting me so enthusiastically and without understanding, you are flattering yourself that you have perceptions which are in fact lacking in you.“You are still in effect saying, ‘I am of some worth because I have recognized Bahauddin as a great man.’”A young man has asked why there seems to be no meaning in life. Because meaning does not exist a priori. There is no meaning existing in life – one has to create it. Only if you create it will you discover it; first it has to be invented. It is not lying there like a rock, it has to be created like a song. It is not a thing, it is a significance that you bring through your consciousness. Don’t wait for it. It never comes by just waiting. One has to become a lab, one has to become a womb, one has to give birth to it.This is one of the most significant things to be understood – otherwise you will go on missing meaning. People have a wrong notion. They think that meaning is already there, existing somewhere. It is not so. Buddha creates the meaning and then he discovers it. That’s why his meaning will never become your meaning. The meaning remains individual. Each one has to create it for himself, it cannot be borrowed.That’s the difference between the scientific truth and the religious truth. The scientific truth is a dead thing. Once discovered by one it is discovered for all. Once Newton has discovered something – for example, the law of gravitation – then you need not discover it again and again. Then it becomes a collective property. Newton may have worked for many years to discover it, may have devoted his whole life to it, but now a schoolchild will learn it within minutes. He will not have to go through all the bother.Scientific truth is a dead thing – it is a thing. Hence once discovered, it is discovered forever. When one person has discovered it then it becomes the property of all.Religious truth is not a thing. It is significance, it is meaning. Each one has to discover it, each one has to go on the exploration. Buddha’s truth disappears with Buddha. Mohammed’s truth disappears with Mohammed. It was the fragrance of a flower that had opened in the heart of Mohammed – how can the fragrance remain when the flower has gone? Now the Koran is dead, so is the Dhammapada, so is the Gita, and so are all the scriptures. A scripture is alive only when the flower is there. With the flower, the fragrance is alive; when the flower is gone, all is gone.Scientific truth can be learned. You can go to school, you can learn it from a teacher. Religious truth cannot be learned. It has to be created, not learned. You cannot go to a teacher. It cannot be taught, there is no way to teach it. You will have to go to a master not to a teacher – and that is the difference between a teacher and a master: a teacher deals in dead things, a master lives his truth.If you are in the presence of a master you will start vibrating, pulsating. Truth cannot be given to you, but you can smell the perfume of it and then you can start searching for it in your own innermost core, in your own being. It has to evolve. It is growth; meaning is growth. You will have to devote your whole life to it.So don’t ask why there is no meaning in life. There is none because you have not created it yet. There is for me. I have created it. But my meaning cannot become your meaning. Even if I give it to you, in the very transfer the baby will die. You will carry a dead corpse. There is no way of transferring it.The Sufis are very particular about it – that’s why they deny knowledge. They say there is no knowledge possible. Knowing is possible, but knowledge is not possible. What is the difference between knowledge and knowing? There is no difference in the dictionary, but in existence there is a tremendous difference. Knowledge is a theory, knowing is an experience.Knowing means you open your eyes and you see. Knowledge means somebody has opened his eyes and he has seen and he talks about it, and you simply go on gathering the information. Knowledge is possible even if you are blind. Knowledge is possible… Without eyes you can learn many things about light, but knowing is not possible if you are blind. Knowing is possible only if your eyes are healed, cured, if you can see. Knowing is authentically your experience; knowledge is pseudo.Don’t depend on knowledge, otherwise you will go on missing meaning. Knowledge can only give you a false promise. It is never fulfilled. Knowledge can only give you pseudo coins. They are worthless, beware of them. Knowledge can make you feel very, very good because it enhances your ego. You start feeling as if you know. But remember, it is “as if,” it is not really the case. And when you feel “I know,” “I” is strengthened.Before a man can become a man of knowing he will have to drop all knowledge. That is the real renunciation. I have seen people renouncing their children – that is foolish because children are not standing in the way of God. I have seen people renouncing their wives, their husbands – that is stupid because God is present in the husband and in the wife, God is alive there. When you renounce your wife you have renounced God – God in the form of your wife. When you renounce your husband, you have renounced God who has come in the form of your husband.I have seen people renouncing children, wife, husband, but people don’t renounce their knowledge. They go on carrying their knowledge which is the real obstruction, which is the real hindrance – the only barrier there is.Look… A man renounces life, goes to the Himalayas, but if he was born a Jaina he remains a Jaina. He carries the knowledge. If he was born a Hindu he remains a Hindu. Even in the depth of the Himalayas, sitting in a cave all alone, he remains a Hindu.If you are a Hindu you are still part of the society called Hindu, you are not in the Himalayas. How can a single man be a Hindu? To be a Hindu one needs to belong, to be a Hindu one needs a society; to be a Mohammedan one needs a sect, a crowd. Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Islam, Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism are all names of different kinds of crowds.And you say you have left the world? Then why have you brought in this crowd and this belonging? And what do you mean by calling yourself a Hindu? You mean that you carry a certain kind of knowledge – knowledge imparted by the Vedas, the Gita. Or if you think you are Mohammedan, then it is knowledge imparted by the Koran. You have not renounced knowledge.Sufis say that if you want to renounce anything at all, renounce knowledge. That is the greatest courage – because when you renounce knowledge, the ego starts disappearing. The ego dies of its own accord, it cannot exist. The moment you say “I don’t know,” have you felt the purity of that moment? Have you felt the innocence of that moment? Have you felt the silence of that moment? When you utter, “I don’t know,” this is one of the greatest statements a man can make – and this is the beginning.The first step of Sufism is to come to know that you don’t know. And this should not be a mere idea, it should be a lived experience. You should not only say it, it should not be only on your lips, it should be deep in your heart. You should feel it from your very guts: “I don’t know.”What do you know? Do you know God? Do you know truth? Do you know anything about death? Do you know anything about life? Yes, you are alive, but you don’t know anything about life. Yes, God is in you and has lived in you from the very beginning – the beginningless beginning – but you have not yet made any acquaintance with him. And truth is everywhere. You are surrounded by truth, you live in the ocean of truth, but you don’t know anything about it. You are as ignorant about truth as a fish is ignorant about the ocean.But you go on thinking that you know because you have read a book, because you can recite the Koran, the Gita, the Bible. Not only do people think that reciting, remembering, is knowledge, they think this is the only kind of knowledge there is.Remembrance, memory is not knowledge. What do you know by remembering something? A parrot can do that, a machine can do it – and in a far more efficient way than you can do it. What is there? A computer can remember the whole of the Vedas and the Koran and the Bible and all the scriptures and can present all its knowledge whenever you ask. But the computer has no consciousness, no awareness, no soul.A man who trusts his memory too much and thinks that it is knowing starts disappearing as a man and finally becomes a mechanism. Memory is mechanical.So Sufis say that if you want to renounce anything, renounce the knowledge that you have accumulated in the memory. That is the real barrier. Because of this idea that you know, you can’t become innocent, you can’t become like children. When you are a Hindu, how can you be innocent? You are already corrupted, you have already gathered opinions. Scriptures, ideologies, concepts and philosophies have already entered your mind. You have already become cunning. You are clever. How can you be innocent?When a child is born and opens his eyes for the first time, is he a Christian or a Mohammedan or a Hindu? Those eyes are the real eyes. Soon dust will start gathering. Soon we will start throwing ideas into the innocent consciousness of the child. Soon the mirror will gather much garbage and will not reflect reality anymore.This garbage has to be dropped. The memory has to be used, but one should not get identified with it. I am not saying that you have to drop your memory, just the identity has to be dropped.You will be surprised. When the identity is dropped you can use your memory far more efficiently than before – because then it is just a mechanism, whenever you need it you can use it. But you remain aloof, distant, pure. You remain a child.Jesus goes on saying, “Unless you are like small children you will not enter the Kingdom of my God.”Jesus was standing in a crowd in a marketplace one day and somebody asked, “Who will be the worthy ones? Who will enter your Kingdom of God? Who will be the chosen few, the elect ones?”Jesus looked around… Naturally the rabbi of that small village was present and he thought, “He must choose me and show that I will be the worthy one.”But Jesus bypassed him. The rich man of the town was there and he bypassed him. And the professor was there and he bypassed him. And an ascetic was there and he bypassed him. And then his eyes fell on a small child who was just standing in the crowd, completely innocent. He took the child up and he showed the child to everybody saying, “Those who are like this child, innocent, mirrorlike, only they will be able to enter my Kingdom of God.”That’s why it should not be a surprise if the rabbis were very angry with Jesus. If the learned people were against him, it should not be a surprise. If the religious priests were against him, it should not be a surprise. If they all gathered together to destroy this innocent man, this Sufi, Jesus Christ, it is logical.Sufis talk much about Jesus Christ, and they talk in a far more loving way than Christians do because their understanding about Jesus is deeper. Christians’ understanding becomes again that of dogma. Sufis have an insight and the insight comes because they have come to know the moment of not knowing. Remember these words: the moment of not knowing. Attain it. From that moment the journey starts.So a master has to take away all your knowledge. He has to destroy all ego in opinions, philosophies, creeds. He has to be very hard. He has to hammer you. Once knowledge disappears and clouds are not there and the sun of consciousness burns brightly, things start happening, miracles start happening.The first miracle is that when you don’t know you start knowing. When your eyes are no longer full of opinions they become clear, transparent. You attain insight.Before we enter this beautiful parable of one of the greatest masters, Bahauddin Shah, a few more things have to be understood – in reference, particularly, to the modern mind.The modern mind is feeling more meaningless than has ever been the case because the past centuries lived in a kind of stupor, sleep. There was much orthodoxy. Convention was heavy and strong. The citadel of religion was very, very great, powerful, dictatorial. People lived for centuries in belief.This century has dared to drop beliefs. Those beliefs used to give people a feeling that there is meaning in life. Now those beliefs have disappeared. This is good. As far as it goes, it is good that beliefs have disappeared. This is the first age of agnosticism. For the first time man has become mature, mature in the sense that he does not rely on beliefs, on superstitions. We have dropped all superstitious beliefs.So a kind of vacuum has come into existence. The beliefs have disappeared – and with the beliefs the false sense of meaning has disappeared. An emptiness has settled in. We have done the negative part, we have demolished the old building. Now the positive part has to be done – we have to erect a new building. The old temple is no more, but where is the new temple? Belief has been destroyed, but where is trust? Belief has gone – this is good – but this is not enough. It is necessary, but not enough. Now you will have to grow into trust.Let me explain these two words to you. Belief is borrowed; somebody else gives it to you – your parents, your society, your priest, your politician, they give it to you. Immediately the child is born we start – either we circumcise the child or we baptize the child. We do something. Immediately we start conditioning him. Before he becomes alert, beliefs have gone deep into his blood and bones, even into his marrow. Before he becomes alert and before he can think clearly, he is already poisoned. The beliefs have become unconscious. He has already been conditioned. He is not free to think.That’s why all religions are so interested in teaching children religion. They are interested immediately: the first thing they want to do is to teach children religion. Psychologists say that the only possibility to teach a child religion is to teach him before he is seven. Once he has passed the age of seven then it will become more and more difficult to teach him because he will start questioning, he will start arguing. He will become doubtful, he will become skeptical. Up until the age of seven a child simply trusts the parents, he believes that whatever they do is right. He has no doubt. This is a natural phenomenon. The child has to trust the mother. The child is so helpless that he cannot exist on his own. It is a necessity, a must for his survival, to trust the parent. And he trusts.Religions use that natural trust to condition the child. The mother takes him to the church or to the temple, to the priest or to the minister, and the child follows the mother and the parent and the family. By the very atmosphere of the family a subtle conditioning starts going in. By the time the child can think, can formulate, he is already conditioned. Those conditionings have gone so deep now that he will never be able to drop them easily.A master will be needed to hammer. You will need somebody whom you can love more than you love your father, whom you love more than you love your mother. You will need a master – only then. The master can go to those deepest layers of your being where conditioning has happened, and he can destroy. Unless the master becomes more significant than your parents it is not possible, it is not psychologically possible.That’s why Buddha says, “Until you destroy and kill your father and mother, you cannot come to me.” A strange statement. Jesus says, “If you don’t hate your father and mother you can’t follow me.” It does not look very good. Jesus, the apostle of love and peace, Buddha, the most compassionate human being that has ever walked on earth, talking about hating? Not only hating, but killing?What do they mean? They don’t mean your actual parents, they mean the parents that have gone deep into your being, that have become your base. That base has to be destroyed. Once that base disappears you will become again a child. Once that conditioning has been dropped you will suddenly become again a child, innocent. And this time you will be in a far better situation because you will not be helpless, you will be on your own feet – and innocent like a child.This is the meaning of sannyas. This is the meaning of initiation. This is the meaning when Sufis say that somebody has become a sadhaka, somebody has become a disciple.In this age, slowly, slowly belief has disappeared. And nothing has appeared in its place.You must have heard about a German thinker, Ludwig Feuerbach. He seems to be the herald of the contemporary mind. Feuerbach explained God away in terms of the infinite desire of the human heart. He said, “There is no God. God does not exist as an objective reality. It is only a wish-fulfillment. Man wants to become omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. Man wants to become God – this is man’s desire, the desire to become infinite, the desire to become immortal, the desire to become absolutely powerful.”This was the first hammering on the belief of God: that God is not objective; that God is not there; that God is just a projection in the human mind; that God has no ontology, he is only a psychological dream; that man is thinking in terms of God because he feels himself impotent. He needs something to make him complete. He needs an idea that gives him a feeling that he is not a stranger here; that in this world there is somebody who looks after him. God is nothing but a projected father. Man wants to lean upon something. It is just a pure desire. It has no reality.Then came Karl Marx. Marx explained God away in terms of an ideological attempt to rise above the given reality. Marx said that because people are poor, in suffering, in misery, they need a dream – a dream that can give them hope. People are living in hopelessness, in such utter misery, that if they cannot dream that somewhere in the future everything will be perfect they will not be able to tolerate this intolerable reality. So God is the opium.Religion is the opium of the masses. It is a drug. It helps, consoles. It is a kind of tranquilizer. You are in such pain that you need a painkiller. God is a painkiller: the idea that today, yes today is miserable, but tomorrow everything is going to be good.Marx says that’s why Jesus’ beatitudes have become so important: “Blessed are the poor.” Why? Why, “Blessed are the poor”? Because “They shall inherit the Kingdom of God.” Now the poor can hope. Here he is poor, but there he will inherit the Kingdom of God. Not only that, Jesus says, “Those who are the first here will be the last there and those who are the last here will be the first there.” Now the poor man feels really happy. He forgets his poverty. He is going to be the first there. Jesus has different meanings for these statements, but Marx thinks these are just drugs.Marx also looks very logical. When people are in misery they have only one way to tolerate it: to pass the time away they can imagine a better future. You are in hospital – you can imagine that tomorrow you will be getting out of hospital and you will be going home and everything will be okay. It is only a question of a few hours more. You can tolerate it.This world is a question of a few years, don’t be worried about it; soon paradise is waiting for you. And the poorer you are, the higher you are going to be in paradise. And all that you are missing here is abundantly supplied there. You don’t have a beautiful woman? Don’t be worried. In paradise everybody will be having as many as they want – and the most beautiful women you can conceive of, apsaras. They are so beautiful that they never age, they never become old, they have golden bodies and they always remain stuck at the age of sixteen. They never grow beyond that. These are the dreams of man.Here you can’t get alcohol – or even if you can it is difficult or it is costly, or there are a thousand and one problems in getting it. The politicians are always thinking about prohibition. But in firdaus, in paradise, there are streams of wine, alcohol – all kinds. You can drink as much as you want, you can swim, you can absolutely soak yourself in it.These dreams are just consolations for those who are downtrodden, oppressed. So Marx says that religion is just a trick, a trick to exploit people, a trick to keep them under rule, a trick so that they cannot rebel. He hammered very hard on the old beliefs.And then the third hammerer came in with Friedrich Nietzsche. He said, “God is nothing but a weakening of the will to live.” When a person becomes old or a society becomes old, rotten, dull and dying, it starts thinking of God. Why? Because death is coming close by and you have to accept death. You are going to renounce life, life is slipping out of the hands, you cannot do anything about it – but you can accept death. God is a trick to accept death. And death is accepted only by those who have become weak, weaklings.Nietzsche used to say that the very idea of God comes out of the feminine mind. He used to say that Buddha and Christ are both effeminate. They are not really masculine, they are too soft. They are the people who have accepted defeat. They are no longer fighting, they are not fighting for survival. When a person stops fighting for survival he becomes religious. When the will-to-power is no longer functioning, you start shrinking and dying and you start thinking of God and other related things. God is against life. Life is the will-to-power. Life is struggle, constant struggle. Life is conflict, and one has to win. When people become too weak and cannot win, those defeated minds start becoming religious. Religion is defeatism.Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, these three together created the atmosphere where it could be declared that God is dead and man is free.This is the situation in which you have been born. If you are contemporary at all, this is the situation. You are more in tune with Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche than you are in tune with Patanjali, Kapila, Kanada. They are far away; we don’t belong to them, they don’t belong to us. The distance is too much. Our real prophets are these – Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin. And these people have destroyed the whole fabric, the whole structure, the pattern of belief. And I would like to tell you that they have done a great service to humanity.But don’t misunderstand me. They have cleaned human consciousness completely of belief, but this is only half the job. Now something is needed. It is as if you are preparing for a garden and you prepare the ground and you throw away all the weeds and you throw away all the stones and the ground is ready – and then you simply wait and you don’t bring the rosebushes and you don’t sow new seeds.These people have done a great service to humanity. They have uprooted all the weeds. But just by uprooting the weeds the garden is not ready, cannot be ready. It is part of preparing a garden to uproot the weeds, but this is not the garden itself. Now you have to bring the roses. Those roses are missing, hence the meaning is missing.People are stuck. Either they have become communists or they have become Freudians or they have become fascists. And they think that this clean patch of ground where no belief grows, where no desire springs up about the unknown and the beyond, is the garden. Then you are looking all around and there is nothing, it is a desert. These people have cleaned the ground, but have only created a desert out of it.Man has become very, very anxious. Anxiety has been created. The anxiety has been repressed for centuries because of conforming with the political party, with the religion, with the sect, with the society. For thousands of years the anxiety has remained locked. Man has functioned as a slave. Now the lock has been broken, man is no longer a slave and the whole anxiety, repression, of thousands of years has broken loose. Man is turning mad.What these people have done can turn into a great liberation or it can become just a loss. It depends. If you use this situation rightly and you start growing rosebushes in your heart, soon you will find a great thankfulness toward Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and all the people who have destroyed belief, who have destroyed the old religion. They have prepared the way for a new kind of religion – more mature, more adult, more grown up.I am all for them, but I don’t stop with them. If you stop, meaninglessness will be your destiny. Yes, it is good that there exists no God – the God of belief – but then, then start finding what exists in your inner being. Then go on an exploration and you will stumble upon God. And this God will not be the God of the belief. This God will be the God of your experience.They have created a situation in which you can say, “I don’t know” – that’s what agnosticism is – now use this as a jumping board to go into the unknown. You are ready to go into the unknown. Knowledge is not binding, nobody is fettering your feet. You are free for the first time – but what are you doing standing there? You were standing there because you were chained and now you are still standing there although the chains have been removed. Move forward. Now explore! The whole of existence is yours. Explore it with no concept, with no prejudice, with no a priori philosophy. Explore it with an open mind and you will be surprised to find that God is.But this will be a totally new God, utterly new, absolutely new. This will be the God one comes to know, not the God one believes in. This will be an alive God that throbs in your heart, that breathes, that flowers in the trees, that sings songs in the birds. This will be the God of the mountains and the rivers and the stars. This will be the God of life. This will not be a God who exists somewhere in heaven, no, this will be the God who exists herenow – in me, in you, in everybody. This is the God that is equivalent, synonymous with existence.But this God can come only through knowing, not through knowledge. Knowledge has been destroyed and that’s good. These three people – Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche – have done a good job of clearing away the whole nonsense of centuries, but remember, even they were not benefited by it. Nietzsche died in a madhouse, and if you are stuck with Nietzsche you are waiting for madness and nothing else. Nietzsche did a great service, he was a martyr, but he became stuck in his own negativity. He destroyed the belief, but then he never went to explore what is there. Without belief what is there? With no belief what is there? There is something. You cannot say there is nothing. There is something: What is it? He never went into meditation. Thinking, logical thinking, can do one thing: it can destroy belief. But it cannot lead you into truth.You can be led into truth only by the door of meditation or by the door of love – marifa or mahaba, either by knowing or by loving. Either by becoming a lover, an ashik, a bhakta, a devotee; or by becoming a yogi, dhyana, a meditator. These are the only two ways – either through intelligence or through feeling. These are the two doors to godliness.Man has to create meaning now. The meaning is no longer given by the society, no longer by the church – is no longer given by anybody else. Martin Heidegger says, “Once one has become aware of the meaninglessness of life and existence there arises great anxiety, angst, anguish. This happens through unlocking that which subjection to conformity and conditioning of centuries had locked. Once this liberation has happened one can act – but not according to norms given by anybody or anything. One has to fall upon oneself.”Heidegger is right. You have to fall upon yourself. Now you cannot lean on anybody. No scripture will help. The prophets are gone, the messengers are no longer there. You will have to lean upon yourself. You will have to stand on your own feet. You will have to become independent. Heidegger calls it resolve. You will have to come to a resolve, a resolution that “I am alone and no help is coming from anywhere. Now what am I going to do? And I don’t know anything. No belief exists to give me a map. No chart exists and the uncharted is all around. The whole of existence has again become a mystery.”It is a great joy for those who have courage because now exploration is again possible.This is what Martin Heidegger calls resolve. This is what Hindus have called sankalpa. Now you have to resolve. He calls it resolve because through it the individual becomes resolute, the individual becomes individual. No God, no conventions, no laws, no commandments, no norms, no principles – one must be oneself and one must decide where to go, what to do, and who to be. This is the meaning of the famous existentialist motto: Existence precedes essence. That is, there is no essential human nature. Man creates what he is, man projects himself.The meaning has to be projected, the meaning has to be created. You have to sing your meaning, you have to dance your meaning, you have to paint your meaning, you have to live your meaning. Through living it will arise, through dancing it will start penetrating your being, through singing it will come to you. It is not like a rock lying there, it has to bloom in your being. It has to become an inner lotus.Now this beautiful parable.A man came to Bahauddin Shah and said, “First I followed this teacher and then that one. Next I studied these books, and then those. I feel that although I know nothing of you and your teachings, this experience has been slowly preparing me to learn from you.”When you go to a man like Bahauddin you are coming close to danger, you are coming close to fire, you are coming close to death. This man must have gone to this teacher and to that. There are millions of teachers; masters are rare. You can find teachers by the dozen very easily, they are cheap. To go to a master you are taking a risk.This man says to Bahauddin – as he must have said to other teachers – “First I followed this teacher and then that one.” People are like that. They think that this is something very glorious. People come to me and they say, “First I have been to Guru Maharaji and then I went to Muktananda and then I went to this and that. Now I have come to you.” They think that they are great pilgrims, they think they are great seekers. By enumerating all the names they feel very good. They are simply showing that they are still stupid.A real seeker will not be bothered by teachers, will not become attached to teachers. Even if he goes to a teacher he will see through and through that this is just a teaching and he will escape as fast as possible. He will not go on bragging about it because there is nothing to brag about.One has to find, one has to go on groping in the dark. But when you are groping for a door sometimes you fall in one corner of the room and there is a wall, and you are struck and your head hurts. And then you fall on some furniture and then this and that. And then you come to the door. When you come to the door, do you relate how many times you have stumbled before? In what corner? With what furniture? How many times your head has been hurt? You don’t. All that is meaningless. When you have found the door all those gropings and stumblings in the dark are finished. Then there is nothing to brag about.In fact, when you say that you have been to Muktananda or Guru Maharaji or Sai Baba or this and that, you are simply saying that you don’t have eyes to see. You are simply showing your unintelligence. This has been my experience. People come and relate these things to me.There are three kinds of people in the world. The stupid people, they are the majority; then the mediocre people, a little better; then the intelligent people.The stupid people are in three divisions – as every kind of people are in three divisions. One: the person who functions through his mind. He does not have much, but still he functions through it – so, the stupid intellectual. Whenever somebody says, “I have been to Prabhupad,” then I know he is the stupid intellectual. The second is the man who is stupid but emotional. He functions through emotion. Then he will go to Guru Maharaji. He will become a premi, a lover. Or, the third possibility: the stupid person who has will, stubbornness, or is seeking some willpower. He will go to Satya Sai Baba – miracles. He will be interested in magic.When you come to me and you say that you have been here and there, you are simply showing all the nonsense that you have been doing in your past.The second kind, the mediocre minds, are also in three divisions. If the mediocre mind functions as intellect then he will go to Sri Aurobindo. Or if he functions through feeling then he will go to Muktananda. Or if he functions through will then he will follow some hatha yogi. He will find some gymnast and will start torturing his body. Or he may become a follower of a Jaina muni. He will be a kind of masochist. He will enjoy torturing himself. Through torture he will feel powerful.And then there are the intelligent, the really intelligent people. They also have three approaches. If a person really functions through intelligence then he will go either to Krishnamurti or Ramana. Or if he is a man of feeling then he will find some master like Meher Baba. Or if he is a man of will then he will find a master like Gurdjieff.But if you have found a master, you will not need to come to me. Once you find a master you will not go anywhere. Your journey is complete. If you have not yet found a master, only then do you go on looking. So when you say, “I have been with this and I have been with that,” it simply shows that you have not found yet.It does not show that you have gained anything, it simply shows that you have been stumbling here and there but you have not found yet. It simply shows that something has been missing and has not been found. It is not really your autobiography because it has not even started yet.When you find your master – finished, full stop. Then the door has arrived. You enter through it. Then you don’t go anywhere else. So if you have not found yet, then all that you think you have been to is meaningless.This man came to Bahauddin and said: “First I followed this teacher and then that one.” What is he saying? He is saying, “I am no ordinary man, I am a great seeker.” He is introducing himself and showing his autobiography: “You should not take me for an ordinary person. I am a great seeker, a great devotee. I have been to this teacher and to that.” That’s his idea. But he does not know Bahauddin, what Bahauddin will think of it.“Next I studied these books, and then those.” Then there are people who will enumerate what books they have been reading. Just a few days ago I received a long list from somebody in a very high post in Nepal. He sent a list of books: “I have been reading these books. What do you think?” Why should I think about what books you are reading? “And if you think that any books are missing, can you suggest…?” he asked me. I have suggested that he burn all these books. Books are not going to help. But by the way he has written the letter, he was feeling very great – as if he has been doing something great, as if he has been obliging the whole of existence by reading these three hundred books. He must have gathered much knowledge, and through knowledge, the ego.“I feel that although I know nothing of you and your teachings, this experience has been slowly preparing me to learn from you.” Look at the foolishness of it. He says, “Although I feel that I know nothing of you and your teachings, still this experience of going to this teacher and that, and my studiousness with this book and that has been slowly preparing me to learn from you.” He does not know what Bahauddin has to teach – because a master has nothing to teach. A master destroys all teaching. A master takes away all that you have learned; a master does not give you anything more to learn. He puts you into a different kind of process – the process of unlearning. A teacher teaches. A teacher gives you so much to learn. If you want to learn, go to a teacher; if you want to unlearn, go to a master. The master takes away all that you know. He has to be very destructive because only when all that is useless is destroyed will you be able to be born anew.The Shah answered, “Nothing you have learned in the past will help you here.”It must have come as a shock to the great seeker. Bahauddin says, “Nothing you have learned in the past will help you here.” Nothing, unconditionally. He says, “Nothing you have learned in the past is going to help you here because here we don’t help learning. Here we help unlearning. So all that you know has to be dropped irrespective of what it is.”All that you know… If a Hindu comes to me he has to drop his Vedas; if a Mohammedan comes to me he has to drop his Koran; if a Buddhist comes to me he has to drop his Dhammapada; if a Christian comes to me he has to drop his Bible. It is not relevant to know what he has to drop – all that he carries within him has to be dropped.Conditioning has to be dropped. Who has done the conditioning is not the point. A mind has to come to a point where it can feel a deconditioning – a freedom that brings insight, eyes that are no longer foggy with concepts. Life is very green; theories are very gray. When your eyes are full of theories you cannot see the greenness of life. Life is new each moment, theories are always old. When your eyes are full of the old you cannot see the new. Life is very, very silent; theories are clamoring, noisy. Theories create a marketplace in your head and life is very meditative. Through theories you will not be able to contact this eternal silence.And let me tell you – it may look paradoxical, but it is so – even if you find sound in life it is the sound of silence. It is only man who creates noise. These birds, they sing silence; these trees, they sing silence; these rivers rushing toward the ocean, they sing silence. Yes, there is sound, but the sound is born out of silence. The sound has no noise in it. It is only man who is noisy, chattering. It is man who has brought language into existence. It is man who has brought words into existence – and through words he has lost all. He has become lost in the jungle of language.A master helps you to burn the whole jungle of language. He brings you to a nonlinguistic space.Hence Bahauddin says:“…Nothing you have learned in the past will help you here. If you are to stay with us, you will have to abandon all pride in the past. That is a form of self-congratulation.”Bahauddin seems very hard. One feels he should have been a little more courteous with the poor fellow. But masters are hard; they can’t be courteous with you. They cannot follow the ordinary etiquette, they have to be rude because only through their rudeness are you shocked. And if you are not shocked you are never aware. Only through shocks do you by and by become alert.Gurdjieff used to say that people have created shock absorbers around them. Etiquette is one of the shock absorbers. It is like a spring. You sit in a car, the car has many springs. Those springs are helpful – you bump less. The road may be rough, but you don’t feel the roughness too much. Trains have buffers, between two compartments there are buffers. If something happens those buffers absorb the shock.Man has created many buffers, many springs, many shock absorbers. You see somebody, you meet somebody on the way, you say, “Hello! How are you? Good morning.” This is a buffer. You may not feel good. You may be feeling very bad seeing this man early in the morning, but you have to say, “Good morning,” you have to say, “Glad to see you.” This is a buffer so that you can hide the real fact. And he also says, “Very glad to see you.” Both are miserable at seeing each other. They are not seeing into each other at all, they are avoiding. They are just throwing out these words so that an ugly situation can be avoided, an uncomfortable situation can be avoided and polished.But a master has to hit you so that you can become alert and awake. There is no other way; you have to be shocked into wakefulness. So the master never misses any opportunity. Whenever you make any opportunity possible, if he can hit, he hits. He certainly hits. He never misses any opportunity.Now, this man must have been shocked. He was being polite, mannerly, and he had not said anything wrong to the master. He was just saying, “I have been to this master and to that and I have been reading these books.” He is simply saying, “I am worthy of your attention, please. You can accept me. I am ready. I have prepared. All my studies and preparations have led me to you.” Now, he could not have expected this. The shock has to be unexpected, remember. If you can expect it, it is meaningless. If you expect it, you are already ready to absorb it. When you cannot expect, when it comes suddenly, from a corner you would never have expected it to come, only then does it enter you – otherwise you become ready, you become defensive.So a master cannot repeat. He cannot use the same situation again and again in the same way. With each disciple he is different because once it becomes a stereotyped thing it doesn’t create the shock, the needed shock.“Nothing you have learned in the past will help you here. If you are to stay with us, you will have to abandon all pride in the past.” You have to abandon the past and the pride in the past. All pride comes out of the past. You are born to a very rich family, you are born to an aristocratic family, you are born to a very famous family, you are born into a very, very noble family. You have studied at Harvard or at Oxford or in Varanasi. You are a brahmin, your father was a great scholar, you have many degrees. The pride comes from the past and a disciple has to drop the past. When you drop the past the future opens its door. If you cling to the past you remain looking backward. And this is the situation – that’s why you are constantly in trouble and constantly moving into accidents. You are like a car driver who is driving ahead and looking backward. An accident is certain. If sometimes it doesn’t happen it is a miracle.People go on looking back. The rearview mirror is always in their eyes. They see the path that they have traveled already and they don’t see the path that is ahead. And that has to be seen; if you want to avoid accidents that has to be seen. One has to be utterly free from the past, only then are the eyes open to the future. You cannot see both together, remember.The master makes the future available, and it can be made available in only one way – the past has to be burned, totally. Sometimes when I say to my sannyasins, “Drop the past,” they say, “All? Total? Do you think all is wrong in my past?” They are saying that some good things can be saved – there may be some bad things, they can be burned. But that is not the point. You can save the good things, but again you will be looking at the past. It is not a question of good and bad, it is a question of a choice between the past and the future, remember. It is not a question of you having to choose the good and drop the bad – you have to drop it all. Only then will the eyes be turned toward the future. And the future is potential – because the future is the future.“…you will have to abandon all pride in the past. That is a form of self-congratulation.” Bahauddin is saying that this “I have been to this teacher and to that, have been reading this book and that, have been practicing Yoga and doing Zen and have been into Subud and all that” is a kind of self-congratulation. He has hit hard.The man exclaimed, “This is, to me, the proof that you are the great, the real and true teacher!The man is also extraordinary. He must have been with many teachers and sometimes may have even stumbled upon some masters. He is trying to defeat Bahauddin. Look, he has a shock absorber there too. He says, “Okay, you are hitting me, but you cannot hit me. I have a defense there too.” He suddenly turns. He is defensive in a very subtle way. He says:“This is, to me, the proof that you are the great, the real and true teacher! For none whom I had met in the past has dared to deny the value of what I had studied before!”He is really a cunning and knowledgeable man. He would have deceived if there had not been a man of the quality of Bahauddin there. If there had been even a small iota of ego in Bahauddin, this man would have deceived, would have managed.Now he seems to be saying something perfectly true when he says, “This is precisely the case. Now I see you are the real teacher, the real master as you have dared to say such a thing.” Otherwise teachers persuade, they are salesmen; they try. If you say something to them they always pat you. They say, “Good. What you have done is the right thing to do.” They will not hit you so hard because they are in search of disciples. They can’t miss a customer so easily. A customer has come and you are the shopkeeper – how can you hit him? You have to persuade him, you have to tolerate his nonsense, you have even to appreciate his nonsense.If you go to a teacher, an ordinary teacher, and if you say that you have been studying this and that, he will say, “Very good. This is how it should be. You are a great soul.” If you say, “I can recite the whole of the Vedas,” he will say, “This is the right thing to do. Now you are ready. So I will not have to work much on you. You have already done half the work.” He will make you feel very good.Remember, only somebody who is not trying to exploit you in any way can hit you. If he has some ideas of exploiting you he cannot hit you.“This is, to me, the proof that you are the great, the real and true teacher!” Now he has praised Bahauddin like anything.“For none whom I had met in the past has dared to deny the value of what I had studied before!”Bahauddin said, “This feeling is in itself unworthy.”He hits again and hits even harder.“In accepting me so enthusiastically and without understanding, you are flattering yourself that you have perceptions which are in fact lacking in you.”“Now don’t try to befool me,” says Bahauddin. “What do you think you are doing? Do you think you are praising me? In an indirect way you are praising yourself. You are praising yourself and saying that you are so perceptive – and you are not. You are trying to prove that you can recognize when there is a great master in front of you. How can you recognize? You are blind. All your praise of the sun is meaningless.”Bahauddin can see that the man is blind and yet he is saying, “You are the greatest light.”“How can you see? You are without understanding and you are praising me so enthusiastically?” It takes time to praise a master. It takes years to praise a master. Only through understanding… If you praise a master through understanding he will accept it. If you praise him only out of enthusiasm he will not accept it. Only your insight can be accepted, not your flattery – because the flatterer indirectly only flatters himself.Bahauddin said, “This feeling is in itself unworthy. In accepting me so enthusiastically and without understanding, you are flattering yourself that you have perceptions which are in fact lacking in you.”“You are still, in effect, saying, ‘I am of some worth because I have recognized Bahauddin as a great man.’”This is the quality of a master, and particularly of a Sufi master. It is very difficult to befriend a Sufi master. It is very difficult to have his grace, his baraka. It is very difficult to become worthy of receiving him in your heart. But it has always been so – because if you become worthy of receiving a master, you have taken a great step toward God. You are becoming worthy of accepting God. The master has to make you utterly naked because before God you will be standing utterly naked.The master has to be hard. It is his compassion. It is only because of his compassion that he is hard. Remember, when you can come across a master who is hard, recognize it as a fact that he has compassion for you. If he has no compassion he will be polite: Why bother?I go on hitting on your head mercilessly for only one reason – that I would like to help you.Just the other day I said something about theosophy and some woman has written: “Your remark was very derogatory. Theosophy has helped many people and theosophy is a great science. What about Madame Blavatsky? She says exactly the same things that you are saying.” Remember, I did not condemn theosophy, I condemned this woman. What have I to do with theosophy? Madam Blavatsky is not here. What is the point? But I am hitting all those here who think they are theosophists.When I say something against Satya Sai Baba, I am not saying something against Satya Sai Baba. What do I have to do with Satya Sai Baba? I have no business… But I am hitting all those who think they are related to Satya Sai Baba. Remember it always. What do I have to do with Muktananda? A poor fellow. But when I say something about Muktananda, I am hitting you. This has to be remembered always, otherwise you will misunderstand me.When Bahauddin said to this man that he would have to drop all his past, he was saying, “All those people who have come in your past were wrong.” He was not saying, “You will have to forget all your scriptures because they are wrong” – no, not at all. He was saying only one thing, a simple thing: that pride in the past is egoistic, and a man cannot grow through the ego. If you want to grow you will have to drop all pride in the past.If you are here with me and if you want to stay here with me, meditate over this small parable. This will give you an indication of what I am doing here with you and what I am going to do again and again. In a thousand and one ways my hammer will always be destroying your skull, your head. If I really love you then I have to behead you, I have to destroy you; I have to become a crucifixion for you – because only after crucifixion is resurrection.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am not clear. Is being a Sufi a matter of will? Is it a blessing? Or is it something else?The Sufis have a very beautiful saying. They say, “God is not found by seeking, and never found by those who don’t seek.”First a man has to seek and then he has to surrender his seeking too – because in the seeking the seeker goes on existing. The seeker is the ego. Of course if you never start seeking, you will never find. You have to be thirsty for God. You have to start moving, groping in the dark. But don’t become addicted to your groping.A moment comes when you start feeling that your will is not succeeding. But that moment comes only through will, effort, arduous effort. A moment comes when you start feeling that your will has failed, that you are utterly defeated. In that utter defeat is the victory. In that utter defeat you surrender. In that utter defeat you start crying. In that utter defeat you say, “Now I cannot do any more. I am finished. Whatever I could do I have done.” In that moment when you have this total failure, this feeling of utter defeat, you disappear. You are no longer there. The seeker has disappeared through seeking.To seek God is to seek the impossible. By seeking you cannot find it. If you can find God by your seeking then God will be something that you can possess, then God will be in your fist, then God will be your property – then God will not be greater than you. That which you can seek is bound to be smaller than you, it cannot be bigger than you. The lower cannot seek the higher and the smaller cannot seek the bigger.You cannot possess the infinite, the eternal – that is absurd. But to understand that this is absurd, one has to start seeking. You will not know it in any other way. One starts longing for God and that means that one is moving, desiring, longing, for the impossible. That’s why I call religion the passion for the impossible.One day or other defeat is absolutely certain. In that defeat something transmutes, transforms. In that defeat the seeker disappears, the will disappears – surrender happens. You cannot surrender without that defeat. How can you surrender? Deep down you will continue thinking, “I could have succeeded.” Or you may even think that this surrender is something that you are doing – that you are the doer of the surrender too. But then it is not surrender. Surrender can happen only in utter defeat. Only utter defeat prepares you to surrender – not a single hope remains, not a single ray of light in the dark night of the soul. You have put everything at stake, now nothing is left. You are empty.In that emptiness…surrender. That emptiness flowers into surrender. In that emptiness you are not, something new arrives. The seeker is no longer there, the will has disappeared, but the seeking is there, the longing is there – even more so, because the energy that was involved in the seeker has also become longing. Now you are simply thirsty, knowing perfectly well that you cannot do anything. That moment of utter despair brings grace – that’s what Sufis call baraka, what Hindus call prasad.When you have fallen flat and you cannot move even a single inch on your own, when you have again become a small child and you are crying and screaming for your mother, the mother comes. But you have to become helpless again.The question is important. You ask, “I am not clear. Is being a Sufi a matter of will?” Yes, in the beginning it is a matter of will. Each journey toward God starts in will but never ends in will. The first step has to be of will – and will takes you a long way toward your utter defeat. Half the journey is done by willpower and the other half is done in surrender. Will leads to surrender.This will look paradoxical to you. Will flowers ultimately into surrender because it is will that makes you aware that on your own you cannot do anything. You have done it. You have seen it fail. So the first step is in will; half the journey is in will. And when will has disappeared there is blessing, prasad, baraka.So if you ask me definitively whether it is will or surrender, I will say it is both and neither. Will and surrender are like two wings of a bird. They both help, they complement each other. Even while they are opposed to each other they complement. Their very opposition creates movement. It is just like your two legs – they are opposed to each other. Through their opposition, energy is created and you can move. Will and surrender are opposites but deep down part of one whole.Every seeker starts in will and ends in surrender.The second question:Osho,Why do great philosophers and so forth say such beautiful things and yet remain such a mess?Philosophers are like fences – they run round a lot without getting anywhere at all. Yes, they are exactly like a fence – it goes round and round, but it never reaches anywhere. Thought is a vicious circle. One thought leads to another and so on, so forth, but you go on moving in a circle. You do a lot of running, but you never reach anywhere. Thought is inconclusive. Thought cannot give you the conclusion, it only pretends. It is a pretender. Conclusion comes through experience – that’s why scientists have moved toward the lab, experimentation, and the religious mystics have moved toward the inner lab, the experience. Religion is the science of the inner and science is the religion of the outer.Philosophy is a mess; it is just pure speculation. One sits and thinks without experimenting, without experiencing, and only experience or experiment is conclusive. Experiment is conclusive about the objective world – that which exists opposite to you, the other; and religion is experience, experiment of the inner, of the subjective – that which you are. Both are conclusive. Philosophy is inconclusive, it is an endless game. But philosophers can say beautiful things. In fact, only they can say beautiful things. Philosophers can afford to say beautiful things, but they are only sayings. These statements may have a certain poetry, but they don’t have any reality, any truth. Yes, those statements can be beautiful, they can have a logical consistency, a logical harmony, but they don’t relate to reality at all. They are all false.There is nothing to choose between one philosophy and another – all philosophies are false. The philosopher is one who has become stuck in the mind.Man has three layers: first, the body; second, the mind; third, the soul. This has to be understood. The soul is a reality, so is the body a reality. The mind is nothing but a bridge between the two; in itself it has no value. A bridge has no value in itself. It has value only because it bridges the two banks. It has no intrinsic value. The banks can exist without the bridge, but the bridge cannot exist without the banks. It is just a utility, a means. The mind is where the soul and the body overlap. Where body and soul overlap, a new kind of illusory reality is created. That reality is the mind.Science trusts in the body, religion trusts in the soul, philosophy goes on trusting in the mind; it is a mind game. And remember, when you are totally in your body, the mind disappears. Or when you are totally in the soul, the mind disappears. If you are making love and you are totally in the body, for a few moments there is no mind. You are so totally involved in the reality of the body that the mind cannot exist. Or, if you are deep in meditation, absolutely in, then the mind disappears. Reality is always a no-mind thing; whether you are in the body or in the soul doesn’t matter, reality is always a no-mind thing. The mind is maya, the mind is illusion.You must have heard the often-repeated statement of Vedanta that the world is illusion. That is not exactly right – because by “world” you understand the world of objects. When Vedanta says the world is illusory, what it means exactly is that the mind is illusory. The mind is the world. That is where you live, your world. You don’t live in reality, in the real world, you live in thoughts, desires, fantasies, imaginations. You live in a mind world. That mind is maya; it is a magical thing. Nothing really exists – it is almost like a dream.Every night you dream and when you are dreaming you think that the dream is real. How many times have you been deceived by the dream? When are you going to understand that the dream is not real? And every day, when you awake in the morning, you know it was not real. And again you sleep and you dream and again it becomes real. When you are asleep the dream appears to be real. The dream appears to be real in the same proportion as you are asleep. If you become a little alert then the mind is no longer real and the dream is no longer real.When one becomes perfectly awakened, when one becomes a buddha, then the mind is no longer real. The morning has come. You have become awakened. That is the meaning of the word buddha – one who has awakened. Now the body is real, now the soul is real, but the mind has disappeared. The mind is a twilight phenomenon.Nikolai Berdyaev says in his autobiography, “I am very afraid of the twilight time, when it is neither day nor night. It frightens me.” When I read it I was puzzled about why he should be troubled by the twilight. It is so beautiful – when the day is no more and the night has not come yet. But he is right. He does not mean only the twilight, he means all twilight phenomena.The mind is a twilight phenomenon, neither body nor soul. A little reality has been imparted by the soul and the real reality has been imparted by the body. The mind is borrowed – something of the soul and something of the body. It is just midway; it is neither this nor that.Philosophy lives in the mind, hence philosophy lives in illusion. Dreams can be beautiful, illusions can be tremendously sweet.You ask me, “Why do great philosophers and so forth, say beautiful things and yet remain such a mess?” By saying beautiful things you cannot sort out the mess. It is not so easy and not so cheap. If you sort out the mess, if you want to get beyond the mess, you will have to do some real work – that’s what Gurdjieff used to call it. He used to call his system “the work.” Real work is needed. Beautiful aspirations, poetry, beautiful philosophies can console, but that is not going to help. It is as if somebody is hungry and you go on talking about delicious food; as if somebody is hungry and you give him a beautifully printed menu. As if somebody is hungry and you give him a cookbook to read.That is exactly what philosophy is. Philosophy is a menu. It talks about food and sometimes it can start your saliva flowing. Even thinking about a lemon, juices start moving. But that is not going to satisfy. Philosophy affects people because they live in the mind.I have heard…A philosopher went to the bus station to catch a bus, but found he was early. He saw a little fortune-telling machine so he put a nickel in, and a little card came out that said: You are John Jones – you are sixty-five years old, you are a great philosopher, and you are on your way to Chicago on a business trip.He said, “I don’t believe this machine. I can’t believe that this machine knows this information. There must be someone behind it.” So he put another nickel in and another card came out saying: You are still John Jones, you are still a great philosopher, you are still sixty-five years old – and you are still on your way to Chicago on a business trip.“I just don’t believe it,” said the man again, as he put another nickel in. This time a card came out saying: You are still John Jones, you are still a great philosopher, you are still sixty-five years old, you are still on your way to Chicago – but you’ve fooled around and missed your bus.Philosophy is a fooling around – and mind you, you will miss your bus.Just thinking is not going to help; it is a luxury. You can rest and you can think and you can spin theories and you can make castles in Spain and you can dream beautiful dreams. These are all childish.But if you can be logical, if you can be consistent with words, if you have a certain capacity and skill with words you can feel very satisfied. You can start feeling that you have the key, that you know.The pet shop delivery boy was not exactly the brightest lad in the world. One day he was asked to deliver a pet rabbit to Mrs. Jones, Route 2, Box 4.“You had better write that down in case I forget it,” said the boy.Slipping the address into his pocket he started off on his errand. Every few minutes he glanced at the address and said, “I know where I’m going: Mrs. Jones, Route 2, Box 4.”Everything went smoothly until he hit a crater in the road. The truck he was driving landed in a ditch and the rabbit began to run for its life across an open field.The boy stood there laughing uproariously. When asked by a passerby what was so funny he said, “Did you see that crazy rabbit running across that field? He doesn’t know where he’s going because I’ve have the address in my pocket.”All philosophy is like that. It is not concerned with reality. Philosophers think they know the address of God. They don’t know, all they know is rubbish. It is all their own fantasy. To know God one has to become religious.There are only two ways to know reality: if you are interested in objective reality, become a scientist; if you are interested in subjective reality, become religious. That’s why philosophy is disappearing by and by. In the future there is a possibility that there may be no philosophy at all, or it may only be in the madhouses.Science has taken the bigger part of it. Many questions that used to be thought philosophical are philosophical no longer. Science has taken them over, they don’t have any philosophy about them anymore. Science knows the exact answer. Philosophy can exist only in the twilight when the exact answer is not known. So the major part, the objective part, has been taken over by science. And the other part, the other half, has always been taken by the mystics – the Sufis, the Hasids, the Zen people.Philosophy is dying. Now it has nothing to think about. The mystic knows what reality is and the scientist knows what objective reality is – what is left for the philosopher? There is nothing much left. Philosophy has no future. It had a glorious past, but it has no future. Out of philosophy, two systems have arisen that are more relevant: science and religion.Philosophy is a primitive approach, a magical approach. When you don’t know anything, you need to think about it. That thinking gives you a kind of substitute; it feels good that at least you know something. Either science will take it away from philosophy, or religion will take it away from philosophy. Both are decisive.The future is with science and religion, and the final future will be a new kind of approach that will be religio-scientific. The ultimate future will be where science and religion meet and disappear into a new kind of system, a new kind of synthesis. That will be the greatest day in the history of human consciousness.Just the other night an old French poet took sannyas. I gave him the name Ananda Kavishwar. It means “great poet of bliss.” He was asking me when the revolution was coming. Of course, he is French so he thinks in terms of revolution. He is very old, must be beyond seventy, but a Frenchman is after all a Frenchman – they don’t grow old. “When is the revolution coming?”I would like to tell him that this is the revolution – what I can call real revolution – when science and religion meet and disappear into one metaphysics, into one synthesis. That will put humanity in a totally new kind of light. That will bring a new harmony into the world.That will help all schizophrenia to disappear – because the body and soul are two realities. I am saying two because science and religion are still separate. In fact, they are not two. The body is the visible soul and the soul is the invisible body. They are not really two – they appear to be two because in between them stands the mind. Once the mind disappears then the division disappears, then all demarcation disappears, then there is no possibility of deciding where the body ends and where the soul begins, then they melt and merge into one. That one has been called God by Sufis. The body and the soul have disappeared into each other, they don’t exist separately. It is the mind just standing in between that keeps them separate, that divides and defines them.Once philosophy is gone, once the mind is no longer there, who is there to divide the objective from the subjective? Then the outer and the inner will be one. They are one. The outer is the inner and the inner is the outer. Division disappears, duality disappears. Philosophy is dualistic.That ultimate system for which no name exists yet, or, if you allow me, I can use the Indian term, darshan – which may become the name for the ultimate synthesis…Darshan is not philosophy, as it is ordinarily translated in Indian universities. Books on darshan are called Indian philosophy. It is not true. It is very, very falsifying. Philosophy means love of thinking. Sophia means knowledge, wisdom, and philo means love – love of knowledge. Darshan means not philosophy but philosia – love of seeing. Not love of thinking – love of realizing, an effort to attain a vision of the ultimate reality as it is. In that ultimate reality there are no divisions. It is one piece, it is one melody.With that vision all schizophrenia disappears – otherwise man remains divided. When you divide the inner and the outer you divide man. When you say body-soul, you divide man. And when you divide man you create conflict, you create tension. Then there is always a war going on inside.I would like you to learn the ways to drop this war, this constant ongoing war. The body is you and you are the body. Respect your body, love your body. Respect your soul, love your soul. And don’t create any conflict between the two. Listen silently and you will find that their voice is one. With that one voice there is peace, there is benediction.The third question:Osho,Please explain the difference between following you and surrendering to you.There is a great difference. Following me, you are still on the path of will; surrendering to me, the will has disappeared. Following me, you are important. You are: it is your decision to follow me. You can change your mind any moment you want; you can cancel your decision.Surrendered to me, you have disappeared. Now it cannot be canceled. There is nobody to cancel it. Now there is no way to reverse it. Following, it is possible you may turn back. Surrendering, how can you turn back? It is irreversible. Following me, you are there, I am here. There is bound to be conflict.Surrendering, you disappear. And when you disappear then you will be able to see that I have never been here. In your disappearance you will see the disappearance of the master too. A master is a master only because he has already disappeared. He does not function as an ego. So to have real contact with a master is possible only when you also stop functioning as an ego – that is the meaning of surrender. The master is without any ego. If you want to communicate with him, if you want to be in communion with him, if you want to be in deep love with him, you have to disappear. Only when you also become an emptiness will there be a meeting. When the disciple is not, suddenly all barriers disappear.If you are, you go on defending. If you are, you go on choosing. If you are, then you will keep a certain space – protected, defended. You will keep a fence around you. You will go only so far. The moment you see that your identity is at stake, you will turn back. The moment you see that now you can be completely taken over, you will start moving away. You will go only to a certain extent, defending yourself, remaining yourself. This is not the way to be a disciple.A follower is not a disciple. A follower is convinced through his intellect that whatever the teacher is saying seems to be logically right. It is convincing, it is intellectually satisfying. That’s what a follower is. A follower is from the head. And the disciple? A disciple is not only intellectually convinced that the master is right in what he says, the disciple is convinced that the master is right – not in what he says but in what he is. It is a heart-to-heart approach. It is a dialogue – deeper than the head; two beings communing. The disciple surrenders.And the beauty is – it is very paradoxical – the beauty is that when you surrender to a master you become yourself for the first time, because surrendering to the outer master is really surrendering to the inner master.Everybody is carrying godliness somewhere deep in the innermost core of his being. Godliness is present in you, but you don’t know how to approach it. You have forgotten the ways and means of coming to your own inner reality. You have locked the door and lost the key. And for centuries you have never been in. You don’t know how to turn in. You have become paralyzed. You can only see outside, hence the outer master is needed. The outer master will only help you to go to your inner master; the outer master will become the door. You will have to go via the outer master because you cannot go directly. If you can go directly there is no need for a master.A few people – very rarely it happens – go without a master. Yes, sometimes it happens. Sometimes it happens that a person reaches directly into his being, but it is very rare. It is so exceptional that it cannot be counted, it is so exceptional that it only proves the rule. Hence no tradition: Sufi, Zen, Hasid – no tradition talks about it. They all insist that a master is needed.Why don’t they talk about it? Don’t they know? They know. It has happened. A few times down the centuries it has happened that a man has attained his self without going via an outer master; he has reached directly to his innermost core. But why don’t they say it?People think that Krishnamurti is talking about it for the first time; people think Krishnamurti is very original about it. That is not the case. All the masters have known about it, but they have not talked about it for a certain reason. The reason is that if it is told to you that you can go on your own, this very statement will become a barrier to your surrendering.Only one in a million can go. What about the remainder? They will also think that they can go: “What is the need to surrender?” Their ego will exploit the idea. Their ego will say, “Then it is perfectly okay. Why should I surrender to anybody? I can go myself.” To protect these fools it has never been said before.Krishnamurti is not saying anything new, it has always been known. It is one of the oldest, ancientmost truths that a rare person sometimes enters. But it is accidental, it cannot be made a rule. And to talk about it is dangerous because the egoist will fall upon it, will immediately jump upon it.That’s why you will find all kinds of egoistic people around Krishnamurti. One who cannot surrender will sooner or later reach Krishnamurti. One who is not able to surrender, whose ego is really very hard, who does not want to surrender, will be very happy with Krishnamurti. Of course, that happiness is not going to change him.Many people come to me and say, “We have been with Krishnamurti for thirty years, forty years. We have been reading and listening, and whatever he says is perfectly true. What do you say about him?”I say, “He is saying the truth, but he is talking to fools. It is the truth, but he should not have told it to you.”They feel very offended. “Why? If it is the truth then why should he not tell it to us? Forty years are lost and even maybe forty more lives in the future.”“What have you attained?”They become restless and they say, “I have not attained anything. But is it not the truth?”It is the truth, but you are not ready for it.A truth is truth only when you can use it. It has to be in such a way that it is helpful. Buddha has said that by “truth” only one thing is meant – that it works. If it works it is true, if it doesn’t work, what is the meaning of calling it truth? It is inhuman.Krishnamurti’s truth has not worked. It cannot work. It can work only in a rare case. And the person with whom it can be of any use will not bother to come to Krishnamurti. Why should he bother? He can go directly. Why should he come via Krishnamurti? These people who are surrounding Krishnamurti are still in need of somebody and are still so egoistic that they cannot surrender. So this is a good support for their ego: they need not surrender and they can have a master.But you cannot have a master without surrendering. Krishnamurti is a master without disciples. Those disciples cannot surrender. His own teaching prohibits them to surrender. He has lived a very lonely life. And sometimes he gets very angry – angry that his whole life has been a wastage.Buddha helped thousands. Thousands became enlightened. Not only while he was alive, even when he was gone the chain continued, the silsila continued. The continuation has remained. Even now, here and there a flower blooms and bows down in deep gratitude toward Buddha – still, after two thousand five hundred years.And Krishnamurti is a man of the same caliber and intelligence as Buddha. Nothing is lacking. There is just this idea that the disciple need not surrender. Even if it is a truth it is still dangerous. It has allowed only egoistic people to come around him; those who would like to surrender will not come to him because he won’t allow surrender. Those who don’t want to surrender and are still in search of a master – they cannot depend on themselves and they cannot surrender – these people have gathered around him.Now they are stuck. Krishnamurti is stuck with them and they are stuck with him. Krishnamurti cannot say surrender: the day he says surrender, they will escape because they are there only because he goes on saying that there is no need to surrender to anybody. They are feeling very good, perfectly happy with this idea. Their ego need not be at stake.But nothing is happening. I have come across many Krishnamurti people – nothing is happening. They have become very, very intellectual, very refined intellectuals. They can talk a lot. They can discuss and argue a lot, but nothing has happened. No fragrance has happened. The ego won’t allow it.You ask me, “Please explain the difference between following you and surrendering to you.” One who is following me is not with me, remember. He is maybe using me, but he is not with me. He may be choosing a few things from me, but he remains the decisive factor. Deep inside he is still defending himself. He may find a few bits and pieces of wisdom, but they are not going to help. They will become a philosophy.Only those who are surrendered to me are with me. And I can only be with those who are with me. If you are not with me, it is impossible for me to be with you even though I would like to be. But it is impossible. It is not possible in the nature of things. Only if you are surrendered can I be with you; only then are you available, receptive.That’s what sannyas is all about. Drop following and move into surrender. Sannyas is surrender. The day you take sannyas, if you have really taken it from your heart, you are no more. Then you become part of me or I become part of you. Then you breathe for me or I breathe for you. Then you don’t think about yourself as a separate entity.And the paradox is that you don’t become dependent. For the first time you become independent individuals – because the ego is not the thing that makes you independent; the ego is a prison, an ugly prison. When the ego has gone, your flame burns bright for the first time.The fourth question:Osho,Why does religion create so much guilt?Religion does not create guilt – if it creates guilt it is not religion. Yes, Mohammedanism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, they create guilt. Let that be your definition of religion: if it creates guilt it is not a religion. It is something else pretending, something else garbed as religion, posing as religion – but it is not religion. Religion creates celebration, not guilt.These are hidden things that don’t want to expose themselves. These so-called religions are more political than religious. Their whole idea, desire, ambition, is how to dominate people, how to control people. And naturally, guilt is one of the best mechanisms ever evolved to control people, to dominate people. Make them feel guilty! Once they start feeling guilty they are in your control. All dictators do that, all politicians do that.And your priest is just a politician behind the mask. The popes, the shankaracharyas, are all politicians; they are not religious people. They have a very hidden politics on how to dominate humanity, how to control people, how to make slaves out of people. And, of course, there is no better trick than creating guilt. It is a psychological technique.How does it function? To create guilt you first have to create an impossible ideal. You have to give an ideal that cannot be fulfilled, that is inhuman, that is not possible at all.For example, in India they have created guilt about sex. If you have any sex desire you start feeling like a great sinner. Sex has been condemned.Now, sex is such a natural thing – as natural as any other thing, as eating, breathing. Only one thing is different about sex: it can be transcended. But there is nothing intrinsically wrong about it. One can go beyond it. And when one goes beyond it there is great freedom, there is great joy – greater than sex can ever bring. But still sex is not sin. Sex is beautiful, healthy.But if it is condemned then you have a great trick, a great technique in your hands. Millions of people will be then controlled because they will not be able to get beyond sex. In fact, the more they think it is a sin, the less is the possibility of going beyond it – because to go beyond one has to go through it. So it is very cunning to keep people in sexuality, and keep them feeling guilty and keep them continuously afraid that they are doing something wrong.When a person feels that he is doing something wrong he is trembling inside. He cannot be a rebel. He cannot stand on his own, he knows he is guilty. He is not good, he is not worthy enough of anything. He cannot hope to be happy. He knows he is a sinner; hell is waiting for him. Now you can manipulate, you can do whatever you want to do with this man; he is available, he is ready to become a slave.This is a psychological slavery. You have taken away his respect for himself, you have taken away his worth. He feels himself dirty – how can he love himself? How can he respect himself? He will be a victim of anybody who wants to control him: the parents will control him, the wife will control him, the husband will control, the children will control, the society will control. Everybody will control him because something immensely valuable has been destroyed in him – his respect for himself. He has lost that. And he will remain miserable, continuously miserable. How can you be happy if you don’t have any respect for yourself?And such a natural thing as sex – and so difficult to get rid of it! Yes, people can transcend, but nobody can get rid of it.Let me tell you something. Just the other day I was reading that the psychologist, Dr. Paul Cameron, reports that males spend a great deal of time thinking about sex. In a survey of four thousand people, he found that males between the ages of twelve and seventeen think about sex once every two minutes. This rate continues into young adulthood and drops to once every five minutes in middle age – that is, forty to forty-five – and finally tails off to once every ten minutes after sixty-five.Females give thoughts to sex every two and a half minutes as teenagers – they are little more saintly, half a minute’s difference; once every three minutes in young adulthood; once every ten minutes in middle age – forty to forty-five; and once every twenty minutes after sixty-five.And that too seems to me to be just because of conditioning – because females down the ages have been conditioned more than males against sex. They were expected to remain virgins. That too is male ego.Why? Why should you try to find a virgin to get married to? Why? – the male ego. The male ego always wants to be there first, to be the first everywhere! Hence the woman has to remain a virgin. And boys are boys. Virginity was not expected of boys, but girls were very protected. Women have been more repressed. But out of thousands of years of repression there is only half a minute’s difference. Not much. So ladies, please, don’t feel too saintly.But this survey is very important. It shows how natural sex is. Now, if you create guilt, if you make people feel that it is sin, you are destroying their respect for themselves. And you are making them afraid. The so-called religions make you afraid that you will suffer in hell and they also make you greedy – you will have your rewards in heaven if you follow their dictates. So greed and fear… And between the two, guilt is created.When the father of Sirhan, the assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy, was asked why his son did it and how he could do it, the old man said, “I just don’t know. I am crushed and confused. I taught my children to fear God.”The man said, “I taught my children to fear God so I am very confused about how he could do such an ugly, ghastly act, such a horrible thing.” But the old man does not know that fear of God is not a good thing. It is precisely because of the fear that he could do such a thing.If you are too afraid – if you are too afraid of being yourself – then there are two possibilities: either you become a so-called false saint, you pretend to be that which you are not, or you become a criminal, you assert whatever is the case. But in both ways you become abnormal. Fear creates abnormality. Either you become a saint – the so-called saint, the mahatma, a hypocrite – or you become a criminal. It depends how you react. If you are a cowardly man you will become a mahatma and if you are a brave man you will become a criminal. But both are wrong. Neither cowardly saints and hypocrites nor brave criminals are needed.Brave saints are needed, courageous saints are needed – that is a totally different thing. You cannot create that out of fear. And for small things man has been made so afraid.Listen to this story:There was a young English boy by the name of Orrie. He was from a home of very meager circumstances. On nights when they didn’t have enough food for supper they resorted to a dish known as sparrow pie. He was met at the back door by his mother one day, and she told him to go for some sparrows for sparrow pie.The best way to hunt them was to go to a group of trees in a cemetery, late in the evening. He carefully crept up – and was ready to make a mighty sweep with a big stick, when suddenly he fell into a freshly dug grave, as yet unoccupied. He tried to get out, but it had rained and the sides were as slick as glass.He knew his mother would send someone for him, and she did – his big brother. But just as he got near the grave another terrible thing happened – his brother also fell into the grave. It was dark and he thought he was alone so he pushed and shoved, but it had rained in his end of the grave as much as in the other end, and the harder he pushed and shoved, the further he slipped towards the bottom.Young Orrie had enjoyed the show, but knew that all good things must come to an end, so he decided to make as much of the dramatic situation as possible. He sat up very straight in his end of the grave, gathered all his diaphragmic tones well underneath him, and with all the eerie, ghastly tones he could muster he said, “Friend, can’t you let a man rest in peace?”There was a deadening silence in the other end of the grave, then something that resembled a rocket zoomed by young Orrie’s head, and his brother, who hadn’t been able to make six feet to the top of the grave, made twenty feet past it on his first jump.Fear works! The priests came to know it very early on – fear works. Create fear and then you can make people do anything you want them to do. Fear creates such an intensity that one puts one’s whole life at stake.Go to the monasteries: it is because of fear that people are in the monasteries, struggling hard with sex, with food, with sleep. It is just fear, fear of hell. Or greed – that is another aspect of the same thing. Greed and fear are two aspects of the same coin. A greedy person is an afraid person and a fearful person is a greedy person. A really courageous man has no greed and no fear. He lives his nature in a natural way.When a prominent politician was a candidate for an important municipal office, he said to three Negroes that he would give a fat turkey to the one who would give the best reason for being a Republican.The first one said, “I’se a Publican cause de Publican set us darkies free.”“Very good, Peter,” said the politician. “Now, Bill, let me hear from you.”“Well, I’se a Publican cause dey done give us de protective teriff.”“Fine,” exclaimed the politician. “Now, Sam, what do you have to say?”“Boss,” said Sam scratching his head and shifting from one foot to the other. “Boss, I’se a Publican cause I wants dat turkey.”People are religious either out of fear or out of greed, they are not religious out of awareness or out of love. And all these religions that have created guilt in man have created an irreligious world.Beware – because the same mechanism has also been put in you. Everybody carries guilt inside himself – as if you are naturally wrong; that to be natural is to be wrong. Anger is wrong, sex is wrong, joy in food is wrong, laughter is wrong. All good things seem to be wrong.Then one goes on repressing. And however you repress, nature goes on asserting. You repress it and it asserts. When it asserts and you have to do something against your mind, then there is guilt – then you know that you have fallen again, you have committed the sin again.Be free from guilt. If you really want to go closer to God, be free from guilt. Accept nature, welcome it. It is perfectly good.Sex is good, sometimes anger is good. When I say sometimes, I mean whenever anger is spontaneous it is good. And if you allow anger its spontaneity, you will never accumulate anger and you will not explode out of proportion. Your system will be clean, it will be a momentary thing: something happens and you respond.If your anger is spontaneous, relevant, responsible, true to the moment – is not a reaction but a response – it has beauty. You simply say that you are alive, nothing else.But if you go on repressing your anger – feeling that anger is wrong; anger is wrong, don’t do it; when you are feeling angry, smile, go on smiling – you are gathering poison. After a time there comes a limit. When the poison is too much it will explode. And it will explode in a situation where you will look foolish, stupid, mad, because the situation didn’t demand it. Have you not observed it? When you really become angry out of repression you are always irrelevant, your response is not to the point. It comes from the past.For example, for many days you have been repressing anger in the office, in the marketplace, with the friends, in the club. Then one day suddenly it breaks through on your child: you hit him hard, and you pretend that you are doing it for his own good. You know that he has just been an excuse; that the poor child is suffering from your anger absolutely unnecessarily. And the child can see that he has not done anything, at least not in the proportion that you are being hard with him. You know that in the face of the child you have projected the face of your boss, you have projected the face of your wife, you have projected so many faces, so many situations. Now the poor child is a victim.This anger is ugly. This anger comes because you have been taught that anger is wrong, never be angry. All that is spontaneous is beautiful. And I am not saying there are not states of consciousness where anger disappears – but it disappears only by being spontaneous. Anger, greed, fear, sex, all disappear. A moment comes, slowly, slowly – when you have experienced life in its truth, in its reality, when you have lived it in all its possibilities you grow beyond it. Then those things become toys, left behind. They look childish, immature, juvenile. It is not that you condemn them and it is not that now you hope you will get to heaven – there is just nothing in them. You have not sacrificed anything, there is no sacrifice.Mr. Khrushchev wanted to find out what people really thought of him. Naturally they would not tell him if they recognized him, so he dressed in an elaborate disguise, put on glasses and a false mustache, and flew to a small town in the Urals.There he met a farmer and said, “Tell me, what do you think of Khrushchev?”The farmer answered, “Sh-h-h-h…you crazy or something?”He looked around furtively and took the premier inside his farmhouse. He closed all the windows, bolted the doors, pulled down the shades, then whispered, “I like him.”This is the situation of man – so much fear. So much fear has been put into your system, into your blood. With your very mother’s milk it has gone into you. You have been brought up in fear.If you really want to be with me, drop guilt. The same energy that has become a guilt complex becomes celebration once it is released. Celebration is the right attitude. Celebrate all that God has given to you. I promise you that if you can celebrate all that God has given to you, you will become worthy of more.Sex disappears one day and you become capable of love. One day love disappears and you become capable of prayer. One day prayer disappears and you become a god yourself. But you have to start to live that which has been given to you.I have heard…Sister Agnes was walking through the park near the convent when she was attacked and raped several times by an assailant.Hearing of her horrible misfortune the Mother Superior hurried to the hospital and met the doctor on duty.“Oh, doctor! How is poor Sister Agnes?”“She is doing fine,” said the MD. “They should be through with the plastic surgery in a few hours.”“What!” exclaimed the Mother Superior. “Why in God’s name would she need plastic surgery?”“We are trying to get the smile off her face.”That’s what your so-called religions have done to people: repression, repression, repression. They have not allowed you to be yourself, to be a natural being. They have crippled you, paralyzed you. Of course, it is easy to control paralyzed people, it is easy to control crippled people, it is easy to dominate dead people.People who enjoy their life are difficult to control. It will be difficult to send people to war if they are really living their sex life truly. It will be impossible. Why? Why should a man who is immensely satisfied go to war? Because some stupid politicians are fighting about some stupid problems – where the boundary should be of one country, a few miles here or a few miles there? Can you convince people to go and die for those stupid things? You cannot. If they are really living their life they will laugh at the whole ridiculousness of it: “Why?”But right now it is just the opposite. People are so ready to go to war because they are dead. War gives them a feeling of life, at least some thrill. They are so bored – bored with the wife, bored with the husband, bored with the children, bored with the whole thing that is so-called life. War brings a little joy.People feel happy when there is war. You can see a subtle joy on the face of the soldiers going to the war. You can see thrill, adventure, all around. Why? Their life is so dull that in comparison even death seems to be far better.If people’s life is a celebration you cannot drive them to war. You cannot drive people to war for foolish reasons – ideological, religious. They will simply refuse. They will laugh at the whole nonsense of it. You cannot force people to do ugly jobs, jobs that simply destroy their souls.But dead people can be forced anywhere. You can make a man a clerk, and for his whole life he will simply move files from here to there. His whole life he will shift files; there will be no joy in his life. But a guilty person cannot expect more. Even this is too much; it is God’s blessing that he is employed.Dead people will go on living. A man will go on sleeping with a woman he does not love. He is so guilty that he feels it is God’s blessing that he even has a woman who is okay. A woman will go on living with a man she hates, feels repelled by. Guilty people can be forced into any hole, into any dungeon.But when people are happy they will live their life. When they are happy they will become woodcutters, gardeners, farmers, fishermen, they will be singers, dancers, poets, painters. Or if somebody enjoys being a clerk, that is another thing. Then he chooses it. But it is his choice.And people will not be so mad after money. Money is a substitute for love. When you don’t get love you start trying to have more money, more money. Money is a substitute for love. That’s why people who are very miserly about money are very loveless people. They cannot afford to be loving. If they are loving they cannot be miserly – these things don’t go together. A loving person is never a miser and a miser is never a loving person. He does not need love. His love is money, his God is money, he worships money. That’s enough.Then there are power addicts who spend their whole life trying to become more and more powerful – how to reach New Delhi or Washington or Moscow. Their whole life seems to be just an effort to reach the capital. For what? Why do people enjoy power so much? Why this madness, this political madness? The reason is that they don’t have any power over themselves. They need a substitute. They can feel happy if they have power over others.A man who has power over himself need not bother. Why should he bother to have power over others? It is enough, it is more than enough that he has power over himself.That’s why in India we call a sannyasin “swami.” Swami means one who has power over himself. His whole search is that “I should be myself. It is enough, it is immensely satisfying that I am a master of my own self.” That’s enough. Why should you bother to be master of others?But people are missing that basic mastery, hence they are driven into mad ways, into mad paths – politics, money, power, prestige, fame. These are all ugly things. These are neurotic things.And religions have not only condemned your being natural, they have created a subtle mechanism for you to condemn yourself. The priest cannot follow you everywhere, the parents cannot go with you everywhere, so they have created a very subtle mechanism – almost like Delgado’s electrode – they have put a conscience in you that goes on condemning.If the parents have said, “Don’t make love to this woman, she is not yet your wife and love is prohibited,” you may be alone with the woman, it may be a full-moon night and you may be feeling like loving and she may be feeling like loving and the parents are no longer there – they are far away, miles far away, maybe dead – but the conscience is there. Deep in your heart somebody goes on pulling on you: “Don’t do this. This is wrong.” Even if you do it you will not enjoy it because the parents will go on interfering. If you don’t do it you will be miserable, if you do it you will be miserable – either way you will be miserable.I have heard that parents nowadays, particularly in America, are too busy even to punish their kids! Mothers are running to bingo games, fathers are running off to golf courses and bowling alleys. And mothers have their boyfriends and fathers have their girlfriends. Before they leave the house they just say, “Son, we left a strap on the bed. If you do something wrong, hit yourself six times.”It may not actually be done like that, but that is what conscience tries to do. Hit yourself: whenever you do something that has been taught as wrong, hit yourself, punish yourself. This is the most criminal act to do to a child. To create a policeman in him against himself – that’s what conscience is.My whole effort here is to kill your policeman. I am not saying become irresponsible and I am not saying go mad or insane, I am saying be free of the policeman. Rather than having a conscience, have consciousness – that is the true thing. Let consciousness decide, not conscience.Conscience is borrowed, it is parental, it is suicidal, it is political. A man who has a conscience is never a free man, he is a slave. He is not inside a prison, the prison is there inside him. The jailer is sitting there just in his own heart, pulling his strings.Drop this policeman. Say good-bye to it forever. Become more alert, become more loving, become more natural, become more ordinary, drop ideals. Don’t try to be extraordinary – that’s how you have been befooled. And don’t try to become perfect images of something that does not exist in reality.Don’t try to become a Christ or a Buddha or a Krishna. Just try to become yourself – that’s what God wants you to be. If he had wanted Buddhas he would have created more Buddhas. He never creates again; once is enough. He has created you as a unique human being. Respect this unique human being that you are and live it authentically. Drop all guilt, fear, greed. Enjoy each moment of life as a great blessing from God, a baraka.The last question:Osho,What is wrong in studying religious scriptures?Who will be studying? You will be studying. When you read a statement of Jesus, who will interpret it to you? You will interpret it. The statement will no longer be Jesus’, it will become yours. You will have pulled it down to your level.How can you read scriptures unless you attain that consciousness out of which the scripture has flowed? If you want to understand Krishna, his Gita, you will have to attain Krishna-consciousness. There is no other way, otherwise you will corrupt the scripture.When I say “Please burn the scriptures,” I am not against the scriptures, I am trying to save them, otherwise you will corrupt them. If you want to understand Jesus you will have to attain christ consciousness – at least a little bit. When a little window opens in your heart that gives you a vision of the sky that was fully available to Jesus – only then. Otherwise, you will go on interpreting in your own way. That’s what is always happening. Rather than learning the word, learn the ways of being more conscious.The young convert worked as a clerk in a store operated on strictly Christian principles.One day an elegant lady came in to buy some tapestry. Producing a roll from the lowest shelf, he said, “This is $1.98 a yard, madam.”“Young man, I can afford the very best and I want the very best,” the prospective customer declared.“Well, this is $2.98 a yard,” said the clerk, producing the most expensive price range they had in fabrics.“Young man, I don’t think you understand – I want the very best!” the customer said emphatically.The clerk reached for another roll of $2.98 quality material. “We have this one at $9.98 a yard,” he said.“Fine,” responded the customer, “that’s just what I want!”The owner came into the store later and was told of the transaction. “But how can you reconcile a deal such as that with the scripture?” he asked – because the store was run strictly on Christian principles.Scratching his head, the young man replied, “She was a stranger and I took her in.”He is quoting a scripture!Or this beauty…It was somewhat disconcerting to the minister’s wife to hear him exclaim, “Oh Jesus, sweet Jesus!” every time he reached orgasm, and she finally asked him about it.“It is perfectly proper, my dear, and in accordance with the Bible,” he answered her. “Don’t you remember where it says: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord?”Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Najrani said, “If you say that you can ‘nearly understand,’ you are talking nonsense.”A theologian who liked this phrase asked, “Can you give us an equivalent of this in ordinary life?”“Certainly,” said Najrani. “It is equivalent to saying that something is ‘almost a circle.’”Man is not yet man. He can be, but he is not. The potential is there, but the potential has to be actualized, it is not yet a reality. By birth we are only born into an opportunity to grow. Birth itself is not life, and the person who thinks that by being born he has already become man is befooling himself.That is the original sin. That is the only sin there is – to think that you are already that which you can be.Life has to be discovered, created, realized. If you don’t realize it you remain more or less a machine. That is one of the basic principles of Sufism: that man as he exists is a machine.The machine has deceived itself into believing that it is conscious. Consciousness is a promise, but one has to explore it. It is also a task. Consciousness is a possibility, but you can also miss it. Don’t take it for granted: it is not yet a fact. You are a seed for it, but you have to grow into it.A seed can remain a seed and may never become a tree, may never become capable of blooming, may never be able to release its fragrance to the world, may never be able to offer itself to the divine. That possibility also exists. And remember always that many miss; only a few arrive.This creates an anxiety – that man is a promise, that man is an adventure, that man is not yet. It creates an anxiety in the wrong kind of person, but it creates joy in the right kind of person. Whom do I call the right kind of person and whom do I call the wrong kind? The coward is the wrong kind of person. In the coward it creates anxiety. At the very idea of going on an adventure, on a pilgrimage into the unknown, the coward shrinks. He stops breathing, his heart no longer beats, he becomes stone deaf to this call, to this challenge. This challenge becomes an enemy. He becomes defensive against it.And the courageous I call the right kind of person. To him this is not an anxiety, this is thrill, this is challenge, this is adventure. Existence has called him forth. He starts moving, he starts seeking and searching. If you seek, there is a possibility of finding; if you don’t seek, there is no possibility. If you start moving, then one day or other you will reach the ocean, as every river does. But if you have become very, very afraid of movement, of dynamism, of life, of change, then you become a small pond. By and by you die. You become more and more dirty, dull, stale, stagnant. Then your whole life is ill. Then your whole life is a pathology. And many – the majority – live in a kind of pathology.A modern thinker, Lewis Yablonsky, has coined the right word for this pathology – he calls it robopathology. The man who suffers from it he calls a robopath. Robo means a machine, an automaton; one who lives a mechanical kind of life, a repetitive kind of life; one who has no adventure; one who simply goes on dragging himself. He fulfills the day-to-day demands, but he never fulfills the eternal demand, the eternal challenge.He will go to the office, to the factory, he will come home, he will look after the children and the wife, and he will do a thousand and one things – and do them very efficiently but he will never be alive, you will not find aliveness in him. He will live as if he is already dead.Robopath is a beautiful word. Sufis have always talked about this pathology – they have called it by many names. For example, they say that man is a machine. Gurdjieff introduced this Sufi idea into the Western consciousness. Sufis say that man is asleep. Sufis say that man is dead. Sufis say that man is not yet. Sufis say that man only believes that he is, but that belief is a kind of dream.You may remember sometimes dreaming that you are awake. Yes, it happens in dreams. You can dream yourself awake, you can think you are awake – and when you dream in a dream that you are awake you feel as if you are awake. Only in the morning, when you are really awake, will you be able to compare notes. Then you will laugh at the ridiculousness of it. The dream deceived you.Sufis say that people are not awake, they only believe they are awake. And their very belief is a hindrance to their awakening. If you already believe that you are awake, then what is the need of doing anything for it? It is pointless. If a man feels he is healthy, then what is the point of going to a physician? Then what is the point of taking any medicine or treatment? Then what is the point of having very, very painful surgery? He believes he is healthy already.Cowards believe they are healthy because they are afraid of the medicine, of the physician, of the operation, of the surgery. They are afraid of everything. They simply exist in fear, they go on trembling deep inside. They are just protecting themselves. Their whole life is a long story of protection, defending. They don’t have time to live and they don’t have energy to grow.This robopathology has to be understood. It is one of the fundamentals of Sufism.A few things… “A robopath is a person whose pathology entails robotlike behavior and existence.” He is man only for the name’s sake. He could have been a computer: he may be. “A robopath is a human who functions insensitively, mechanically.” – in short, in a dead way. “A robopath is an automaton. His existensial state is not even inhuman.” He is not human certainly, he is not even inhuman – because to be inhuman first you have to be human. His existential state can only be described as the Sufis describe it – they call it ahuman. It has no human value, neither this way nor that. He is neither human nor inhuman, he is ahuman.“These are the characteristics of this disease.” Ponder over them because they are your characteristics, everybody’s. Until you become enlightened these characteristics will follow you like a shadow. We can define enlightenment as getting out of robopathology, becoming consciousness for the first time, dropping the mechanical, no longer being identified with the mechanical, becoming a witness, awareness, awakenedness.“The first characteristic is sleep.” You will find the robopath always asleep. He walks, but he walks in sleep. He talks, but he talks in sleep. He does many things, he has become perfectly efficient in doing the ordinary things of life. But watch yourself and watch people. They go on doing the same thing again and again. By and by there is no need to be alert about those things, you can simply do them. You need not be there.When you first start learning to drive you have to be there for a few days. That’s why it is so troublesome to learn anything – because to learn anything you will have to come out of your sleep a little bit at least. Otherwise, how will you learn?Robopaths are never interested in new things. Once they have learned a few things they go on moving in that vicious circle. Every morning is the same, every evening is the same. Every time they eat or they talk or they make love, it is the same. They are not needed there at all. They don’t do anything through consciousness, they go on making empty gestures. That’s why there is so much boredom in life. How can you remain thrilled by constantly repeating the old? This is the first characteristic – sleep.“The second characteristic is dreaming” – part of sleep. A robopath continuously dreams – not only in the night, even in the day. He has daydreams, reveries. Even while he is doing something, deep inside he is dreaming. You can find that any time. Close your eyes any time and look inside and you will find a dream unfolding. It is constantly there. It is like the stars – in the day they don’t disappear, they only become invisible because the light of the sun is too bright. But the stars are there, the full sky is there as it is in the night – exactly as it is in the night. When the sun is gone you will see those stars appearing again. They have not gone anywhere, they were there just waiting for the sun to go.In the night you start seeing dreams. Those dreams don’t disappear in the day; because you become involved in a thousand and one things in daily, routine life, they go on lurking deep in the unconscious. You can find them any moment. Close your eyes, wait a single moment, and the dream is there. Sleep is constantly there. Your eyes are full of sleep and your mind is full of dreaming.And the third characteristic is ritualism. “A robopath remains in rituals,” he never does anything through his heart. He will say “Hello” because he has to say it or because he has always been saying it. His hello will not have any heart in it. He will kiss his wife, but it will be just repeating an empty gesture. There is no kiss in his kiss. He will embrace somebody, but only bones will touch and skin will touch; he will remain as far away as ever. He is not there. You can be certain about one thing – he is not there.But robopaths are great ritualists. They depend on ritual. They do everything as it should be done. Ritualism is by its very nature uncreative. A ritualistic person is never spontaneous, he cannot afford to be spontaneous. If you want to be spontaneous you will have to be alert. Spontaneity needs one necessary ingredient, and that is alertness. If you are not alert you cannot be spontaneous.And of course, how can you be creative? You are repetitive, how can you be creative? Even great creators are rarely creative. Even great painters go on repeating their own painting, and great poets go on repeating the same poem again and again.Only very rarely does a person sometimes create something – and those moments when creativity is there are moments of spiritual joy. That’s why creativity brings so much joy. A creative person is a happy person; an uncreative person is a miserable person.Many people come to me and they ask how to be happy, where to find happiness. They cannot find it unless they become creative. Happiness cannot happen to them, it happens only to creative souls. Create something, become more spontaneous, drop repetitions. Let every morning be a new morning and let every experience be a new experience. Don’t think that all is old. Robopaths say there is nothing new under the sun – it is all the same so why bother?“A robopath, rather than living life, creates a ritual.” For example, if he prays he prays as a ritual. He has learned a certain prayer, he goes and repeats it – he goes to the church; he has learned a ritual. There may be a temple by the side of the church, but he will not go to the temple – and the temple may be more silent. Or there may be a mosque and the mosque may be more silent. It is Sunday, all the Christians are in the church. If you really want to pray, the church is the last place. If you want to pray you should find a temple or a mosque where there will be silence and more of God. But a Christian cannot go there. He is not interested in prayer and he is not interested in God, he is only interested in a certain kind of ritual. That makes him feel that he is a Christian.These ritualists create great problems in the world. They go on fighting, they go on debating whose ritual is the best. All rituals are just rituals; there is no question of there being a good ritual or a bad ritual. A ritual as such is bad, ugly. Spontaneity is good, ritualism is bad.Just the other day I was reading a story:Sedgewick, the eldest son of a respectable Boston family, walked into his father’s study one evening and made a shocking announcement. He intended to live openly with his boyfriend on Beacon Hill.“Damn it!” exclaimed the parent. “Our family came here with the pilgrims and we have never had a scandal such as this.”“I can’t help it,” said Sedgewick, “I love him.”“But for God’s sake son!” shouted his father. “He’s a Catholic!”Now that is the real problem. That is the scandal. That’s what is heavy on the parent.The ritualistic mind is always like that. It goes on missing the real problem. It never faces a real problem, it creates an unreal problem because it is easy to solve an unreal problem – remember it. It gives you a good feeling that you have solved it.That’s why people love to solve puzzles, crossword puzzles, and things like that. It gives you a feeling that you are solving something. It is stupid. Nothing is solved by solving a crossword puzzle. Your life remains as unsolved and as complicated and confused as ever, but it gives you a feeling that at least you have been able to solve something. Otherwise, there is no need. Life is such a great puzzle, if you want to solve it, solve it. Why create small, tiny, petty troubles and puzzles and then solve them? They give you a good feeling. They make you avoid life itself. Life is too big and dangerous – solving a crossword puzzle has no danger in it. If you solve it, good; if you don’t solve it, nothing is wrong in it.People go on watching other people live. They go to the movies to see other people love; they go to see a dance, other people dancing; they go to see wrestling, other people wrestling. People have become spectators. It gives them a false feeling, as if they are part of the dance or part of the love affair that is going on. And they go on just watching; spectators, dead and dull. Their life is nil. And if you look into their life you will find them repeating the same motions again and again.I have heard…Rabbi Greenberg died and went to heaven. He saw only three people there reading by a dim light. One of them was reading Playboy, another Gallery and the other Genesis.Then he decided to see what hell was like. He arrived at the Devil’s domain and it turned out to be a big night club with every kind of music being played. There was an eight-piece Dixieland band, a thirty-piece swing band, and all the people were dancing.Rabbi Greenberg went back into heaven and asked for an audience with God. “I don’t understand it, Lord,” he said. “There are only three people here in heaven and they are all reading. Down in hell everybody is dancing and having a good time. Why can’t we have that in heaven?”The Lord said, “I cannot hire a band for just three people.”If your so-called saints are going to heaven, heaven is going to be a really dull kind of place, avoid it. If by chance you enter it, escape from there! If your mahatmas are all going to heaven, then it is better to choose hell. There you will find people who are a little more alive – dancing, singing, living. If you want to read Playboy you can do it here; what is the point of going to heaven and reading Playboy?But that Playboy is also significant – significant of the robopath. He is not interested in real women; real women are dangerous. He is interested in pornography. Even while making love to his woman he will be thinking of other women – actresses, Playboy playmates, unreal things, false things, plastic things. Even while making love to a real woman he avoids. People go on avoiding the real.The pornographers and the people who are obsessed with pornography are not different from the churchgoers. It is the same thing. If a real Jesus is there you will kill him. If a dead Jesus is there you will worship him. This is pornography, spiritual pornography.People worship the dead and avoid the alive – because with the alive you have to become alive, that is the problem. With the dead you are perfectly happy; you are also dead, there is a communion between the dead and the dead. With the alive you start feeling guilty, with the alive you start feeling you are missing, with the alive you start feeling jealous. With the alive you start feeling that now you have to do something – and you don’t want to do it. You want to somehow kill time, to pass time. People are passing time.And people are very interested in rituals. A real prayer is going inward; a ritualistic prayer is just lip service. To face a real master is to face death and to face life – they are both together, always together. To worship a dead master – a Jesus, a Buddha – requires nothing from you. You can bow down at the feet of an image and you remain the same. Bowing down at the feet of a real master, your ego has to be put aside.Your ego will create a thousand and one difficulties for you to bow down and surrender. That’s why people become Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans – these are all rituals.“Robopaths live a life of formality. Even their so-called intimate and emotional behavior is ritualistic and programmed. Their activities are all prepackaged.” They never do anything on the spur of the moment. Coming home they think about what they are going to say to their wife. Going to the office they prepare what they are going to say to the boss. They are always rehearsing. It is always a rehearsal. They are always getting ready. And naturally, when you are too prepared, you miss the moment. You don’t hear what is being said, you don’t see what is present. You go on seeing things in the light of what you have prepared.I was a teacher in a university for many years. I was surprised that students used to answer a question that had not been asked at all. Something had been asked, but they had prepared something else, they were expecting something else, and they would answer whatever they had prepared.It was not that they were doing it knowingly, no. Because their answer was ready, they would read the question in such a way that the answer fitted with it. They would interpret the question in such a way that it fitted with the answer. They could not afford to read the question as it was – that would be dangerous, it might not fit and they knew only a certain answer for which they were ready. They would immediately start writing the answer; they would not even bother to go into the question. Just a slight change in the question and their whole answer would be wrong, but they would not see that slight change. And that’s how it goes on in your whole life.“A robopath is very dogmatic. He is always pretending to be certain about everything.” He cannot allow doubt; doubt creates trembling. He believes, he never suspects. Because if you doubt, then you have to inquire, and who knows where your doubt will lead? That’s why you see so many believers on the earth and no religion at all. So many believers? Everybody seems to be a believer – believing in Christianity, somebody in Mohammedanism, somebody in Hinduism; everybody is a believer.And the world is so utterly irreligious. What is the matter? With so many believers the world should be blooming in religion. But this belief is not trust, not faith; it is pure dogmatism. It is just an effort to crush the doubt, it is just an effort to repress the doubt. If you talk to a robopath you have to be very alert; you must not touch his belief otherwise he gets mad. He is not getting mad at you, he simply becomes afraid – you are taking the ground from underneath his feet. He has been believing that he knows and now you are here to disturb him. People don’t like being disturbed, it creates anxiety.People are very fixed in their ideas. Life goes on changing, but their ideas never change. Just look… You are still carrying the ideas that were given to you in your childhood – and that life is no longer there. Life has moved, the Ganges has flowed and much water has passed, and you still go on believing in your childhood beliefs – childish, juvenile concepts. You carry them. That’s why people don’t grow.“A robopath is always past-oriented or future-oriented.” He is never in the present. The past is good because you cannot do anything with it. The past is finished and complete. The robopath feels very at ease with the past. The past is dead, things have happened, now there is no way to change and alter them.With the past the robopath feels in tune, with the future he can desire and hope – but with the present he is very uneasy, with the present he is very restless. The present brings problems. The past is finished, there is no problem about it – it is settled. And with the future you can hope and you can settle according to the hopes in your mind. The future will not create any trouble for you. The future will not say, “This is not possible.” You can dream about it.But the present is the most dangerous space to be. You want one thing and life gives something else. There is always a clash. You wanted somebody to welcome you and he didn’t welcome you. If you had been hoping about the future there would have been no problem. The future cannot come and say no. The past is settled, you know it is settled. Everything has happened; it is no longer relevant. The past can be classified easily, the future can be projected easily, the only problem arises with the present.The present does not listen to you, it has its own being; that’s why the robopath goes on avoiding the present. And the best way to avoid the present is either to remain past-oriented or to become future-oriented.“There are two kinds of robopaths – the older type remains with the past and the newer type remains with the future”; the Catholic remains with the past and the communist remains with the future. The so-called orthodox religious people think that the golden age was in the past – somewhere far away, pre-history. And the communists and the fascists think that the future is going to bring the utopia – those golden peaks are somewhere far away. But they are not very different.These are two aspects of the same robopathology. One thing is similar – both want to avoid the present. Nobody wants to deal with it, nobody is ready to encounter it.Life happens only when you start encountering the present. You become aware. Your life starts being new when you respond to the present. And the response has to be completely pure of past and future.The robopath lives out of the past, the present does not exist for him. There is nothing new. The response of the robopath is never adequate, cannot be. It is not a response to the present situation so how can it be adequate? It is always inadequate. He reacts on cue. He suffers from a cultural lag – he is never contemporary.Remember well, if one thousand people are sitting here, don’t think they are all living in the same moment, don’t think they are contemporary. A few may be still struggling in the caves ten thousand years back – cultural lag. Or a few may be dreaming of the future. Either you lag behind or you jump ahead and both are wrong.The only way to be authentic and alive is to be herenow. This is the only moment and this is the only space. All else is the mind. Reality is herenow.The mind lives in the memory or in the imagination. The robopath lives in memory, lives in imagination, but never lives reality.“The robopath is a conformist; conformity is a virtue for the robopath, the highest value.” His whole idea is how to conform with people, how to become part of the mob and the crowd. And whatever value the crowd gives, he follows it. He is a follower, he is an imitator. He never asserts his individuality, he is never a rebel. He is orthodox in his very blood. He trusts the crowd, he does not trust his consciousness – he has none. When you have consciousness you trust your consciousness, then you are not a blind follower of the crowd.The crowd is the lowest consciousness. To follow the crowd simply means a blind man following other blind men who are far blinder than you are. An individual has some possibility of awakening, the crowd has none. Sometimes an individual has become awakened – a Buddha, a Krishna, a Christ, a Mohammed, a Mansoor – have you ever heard of a crowd becoming enlightened? It has not happened and it is not going to happen. The crowd has no soul. The crowd is absolutely dead.Only individuals live, but the conformist puts his individuality below the crowd. The conformist has only one idea – how to convince people that he is living according to their ideas and ideals, how to have people have a good opinion of him. The good opinion of others is his whole virtue, his whole morality.“New or different behavior is viewed by the robopath as strange and bizarre. Freaks are feared; originality is suspect. Tradition is truth. Obeying is his religion.” To be part of the crowd is his goal. He wants to be anonymous in the crowd.He does not want the responsibility of being an individual because to have responsibility you will have to have consciousness. It is very easy to drop all responsibilities when you become part of a crowd. A Mohammedan crowd burning a temple, or a Hindu crowd killing Mohammedans, or a Catholic crowd murdering – if you become part of the crowd you don’t have any responsibility. You can always say, “I am not responsible. Hindus were going there to destroy the mosque and I followed them because I am a Hindu. But I have no individual responsibility. I did not decide to do it. It was already happening. I was just there and I became part of it.”When so many people are burning a mosque or murdering people, you can always say, “They are doing it. Even if I am not doing it, it is going to happen – so what, I can be with them.” And you don’t feel any prick in your conscience.Just think… Can you do the same thing individually, all alone, on your own? You will think a thousand times before you decide to do such a stupid act as burning a mosque, or killing a person. But crowds are known to do any kind of thing. It has been one of the observations down the centuries that only rarely do individuals go mad; crowds are always mad. For individuals, madness is a rare phenomenon, it is accidental. But for mobs, madness is the rule. The crimes that have been committed by the crowd are many; individuals have committed only a few crimes here and there.Remember, a robopath lives through the crowd so that he cannot be bothered by any responsibility. He can always say “they.” He can drop his I into the “they.” He can lose himself in the crowd, become faceless, anonymous. Nobody can catch hold of him.But you are responsible.“The robopath lives in image involvement”: he is always concerned about how his image is, what people are thinking about him – whether they think him good, saintly, this and that. He is not really worried about transforming his life. If people believe in stupid things he will follow them. You can go and see. If people believe that fasting is good, you will find a few stupid people fasting – because only through fasting will they become saints. If people believe that killing oneself is spiritual, you will find people killing themselves.Suicide is permitted in Jainism. If somebody wants to kill himself he is allowed to, and he becomes a great saint. Why? Because they say the world is just sin. The man who wants to get out of this world fast and soon is a great saint. Many people have committed suicide.You can look into religious traditions and you will find a great Christian sect in Russia before the revolution. They used to cut off their genital organs – that was a religious thing. Thousands of people would do that. Women would cut off their breasts. And it was thought to be a great virtue.There have been many sects whose members used to whip themselves; the idea was that one who whips himself every morning is a great saint. And he who was the greater was decided by how many times he whipped himself in a day. Stupid, neurotic things, but they have happened. They still go on happening.I have heard…A disciple died and went to purgatory. There he ran into his guru, who was accompanied by a luscious young blonde.“I’m happy for you master,” said the new arrival. “At least you’re getting a partial reward in this place while you expiate your sins.”“She isn’t my reward,” sighed the guru. “I’m her punishment.”Your so-called saints can only be used for that, for a punishment. They are ugly people, destructive people, stupid people – either masochists or sadists, but pathological in every way. Their whole idea is how to have a good image in the eyes of others, that’s all. If they think that a man standing on his head is a great saint, they will stand on their head. They live through public opinion. They live through the ideal, they live for the image, they don’t have any inner direction.“They have no interior definition of their behavior. They are decided by others. Public opinion is the ultimate deciding factor. Their behavior is thus dominated by image or status requirements set by the surrounding society.”Watch these characteristics in you and in others. Robopaths are idealists, they are never realists. They avoid reality. They have great ideas in their minds about how man should be. They never listen to the fact of how man is; “should” is far more important for them than “is.” And “is” is real, and “should” is just imagination. They live in the “ought” and they have impossible ideals in their minds that cannot be fulfilled, that are inhuman – but they try to fulfill them. And in that very effort they start becoming more and more hard, more and more dead.A robopath is always a perfectionist. He is never satisfied. He will always be finding fault. He will try to be as faultless as possible and he will always look at others’ faults. Now, if you want to be faultless you cannot be original. With the original comes the error. If you want to do something new, you have to accept that sometimes you may commit mistakes. If you want to be faultless, you have to have a very small routine repeated so many times that it has become absolutely rigid and you can do it perfectly.That’s why many people live at the minimum, they cannot go to the maximum. With the minimum they can remain perfect, but the maximum is a danger – error may enter. People live a very limited kind of life. They choose a small life and life has to be multidimensional, only then is it rich.A robopath is really poor. He may have as much wealth as one can have, but he is poor. His life is one-dimensional. He always lives to the minimum, close to the minimum. Do as few things as possible because then you remain more perfect. If you do many more things, naturally you can’t be perfect.A real man is rich. He commits many errors – of course, he never commits the same error twice – but he always goes on new adventures, seeking and searching for the new. He is ready to go astray. The perfectionist is not ready to go astray. He cannot learn because learning creates trouble – that’s why you see that children can learn so much, grown-ups cannot. Grown-ups become perfectionists, they become robopaths. Children are still not trained for it; they are ready to learn.And children learn fast. Psychologists have come to observe that a child learns as much in seven years as he will learn in the rest of his life. Fifty percent of his whole life is learned by the age of seven. If you are going to live for seventy years more, you will learn only fifty percent more. This seems to be a sheer wastage of life. But why is the child so ready to learn? He is ready to commit mistakes, he is not worried about his image. He can try. If he fails he is ready to fail. A person who is not ready to fail will never try.“A robopath is necessarily anti-joy, anti-life.” Not only is he anti-joy, he is a joy-killer. If somebody else is celebrating he will look with eyes of condemnation. If somebody is singing and dancing he will look as if somebody is committing a sin, a grave sin. He cannot accept laughter; laughter looks to him like a sacrilege. He wants everybody to be serious and have long faces, he wants everybody to be miserably serious. That is his idea of a grown-up man. This is not a grown-up man; this is really a pathological state, ill.A real man has the capacity to laugh as much as the capacity to cry. The real man has the capacity to be happy and to be miserable. His misery also has a certain life. These robopaths are miserable, but even their misery is dull and dead and mechanical. Even in their misery there is no throb.Remember this, and avoid any ideas that make you anti-life.Father Sullivan was terribly overworked and confided to a psychiatrist that he felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown.“What you need,” said the doctor, “is to break completely with your everyday life. Put on a business suit and spend an evening in…well…a topless nightclub.”That night, with some misgiving, the priest followed this advice. He sat in the darkest comer of the club until a passing waitress stopped at his table. “Why hello, Father!” she said.“How…how did you know I was a priest?” asked the clergyman.“Don’t you recognize me, Father?” smiled the girl. “I’m Sister Natalie. How’s our shrink?”The same psychoanalyst has sent them both. She says, “How is our shrink?”One of the greatest problems before therapists is how to help people to become more life-loving, life-affirmative again – because when you affirm life you are relaxed, when you start enjoying life you start becoming alive. Again your feet have a dance and again your heart has a song; again things start happening.People come to me – these anti-life people – they say, “What kind of ashram is this? People dancing, singing, women and men holding hands – what kind of ashram is this?” I can understand their problem. They may have gone to Vinoba’s ashram or to Shivananda’s ashram. Ashrams have existed in India for centuries – life-negative ashrams where only dull and dead people gather together; old, on the verge of death, tired, bored, finished, just somehow pulling themselves along, against life, against every kind of celebration. So they have a certain idea about an ashram – that an ashram has to look serious. They have a certain idea about an ashram – that an ashram has to look like a hospital.This is not a hospital, this is not for dull and dead people. This is not a cemetery, this is not a graveyard. This is a temple where we celebrate – and through celebration we grow tremendously. Where we celebrate the very fact that existence has given us birth, where we are grateful for these few utterly precious moments that existence has given to us, for this baraka, for this prasad. What can we do except thank existence through dance, through singing, through being more loving? Existence has showered so much love on us what can we do in return? How can we pay the debt? We can shower this love on other human beings, on trees, on birds, on animals, on the world. Whatever existence has given to us we have to give and share.The robopath has no compassion. He is hard. He is hard on himself, he is hard on others. And sometimes, when robopathology goes to its very extreme, it is not only that he has no compassion, it is not only that he lacks compassion, he becomes acompassionate. That value simply disappears. They are neither compassionate nor not compassionate – that value simply does not exist for them. They only do their role – properly, of course. They follow orders – blindly, of course. Their great value is efficiency.“Their enactments are generally neither against other people nor for other people in terms of a sense of personal moral values or principles. They act essentially in terms of what is the most expedient behavior to further or confirm with their expected status or image in the social system.”That’s what the people who served Adolf Hitler said in the courts – that they were simply following orders; they were not responsible. Their only duty was to obey and they did their work as efficiently as possible. They were not concerned with what the work was.The man who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima was asked the next morning by a journalist how he felt. He said, “There was nothing to feel. I dropped the bomb, I fulfilled my duty. Then I ate my dinner and I went to sleep. And I had a perfect sleep.” Now what kind of man is this? One hundred thousand people have died by his bomb, by his act – one hundred thousand people, and he could sleep the whole night perfectly well without even a nightmare disturbing him? What kind of man is he? And he could eat his dinner that night?But try to understand. He is the perfect robopath. He says, “I did my duty” – as you do your duty. You go to the office and you do your duty. You are a clerk and you have to issue an order for somebody to be crucified, sentenced to death – you don’t feel anything. You simply type the order, you send it to the right person to sign, you come back home, you take your dinner, you love your wife, you talk to your children, you watch the TV, and you go to sleep. It is none of your concern.The answers were the same from the German officials, who followed such orders that it seems impossible that a human mind could do that, that a human being could do that. Burning thousands of Jews… But they did it perfectly and they did it efficiently.Just the other day I was saying in darshan…An Indian died. He used to live in Germany. When he died he went to hell and the Devil asked him, “What hell would you like to choose? You can have either Indian or German because you were born an Indian and you lived in Germany, so this alternative is possible. You can choose either.”The Indian was surprised. He said, “I never thought that there were different kinds of hell. But what is the difference? Are the punishments different?”The Devil laughed. He said, “No, the punishments are exactly the same. The same fire is waiting for you, and every torture.”Then the Indian was even more puzzled. He said, “Then what is the difference?”And the Devil said, “Of course, there is a difference. Things are done with German efficiency in the German hell, with German accuracy, precision, perfection. And, of course, an Indian hell is an Indian hell.”The Indian jumped. He said, “I want to go to the Indian hell – because sometimes the fire may not burn, sometimes the man who puts the fire on may not turn up.”An Indian hell is going to be Indian so if you have any choice, choose the Indian.The robopath has no compassion, he has no feeling, he has no heart. The robopath lives in constant hostility because he goes on repressing anger, hatred; he goes on repressing every kind of emotion. He goes on repressing all the negative kinds of emotions, then by and by a moment comes of such accumulated anger that he is simply angry – not at anyone in particular, he is just angry. He becomes antagonistic to everybody and he has no reason, just antagonism. It seeps into his blood and bones, it becomes part of his marrow.“People unable to act out their spontaneity and creativity develop repressed venomous pockets of hostility. They become hard, thick and dense.” Never repress, otherwise you are on the way to becoming a robopath.Robopaths are self-righteous, they always feel holier than thou. Their whole effort is how to look holier than others, how to be at the top. Their egos are very subtle. These people become saints, mahatmas, and all kinds of neuroses are born in them. These people become politicians, puritans, moralists. They are ready to throw the whole world into hell. These are the people who have invented hell.And the last thing that a robopath is, is alienated. “The robopath is alienated from self, from other selves, and from nature. He is alienated from self in the sense that his ego is only a function of ritualistic demands. It has no intrinsic self-definition.”He does not know who he is, he knows only what others say about him. So he is alienated from himself; he has never encountered his own self. He has never looked into his own being. He has always been looking into other people’s eyes and looking for his image, for how he looks in other people’s eyes. He has never come home. He is alienated from his self.He is alienated from other selves because others don’t exist for him as people, others exist as things. His world is the world of “I-it,” it is not the world of “I-thou.” He never calls anybody thou, he never falls in love, he never melts his ego into somebody else’s being, he never comes close enough to overlap anybody. He remains aloof, distant. He remains higher than others.And in small things – he will not smoke, he will not drink, he will not eat this and that – in these small things he will pose as a saint. Can you become a saint just by not smoking? So cheap? Just by not smoking? Can you become a saint just by not drinking? Can you become a saint just by becoming a vegetarian? I am not saying don’t be vegetarians and I am not saying go on smoking and drinking, what I am saying is that these things don’t make a saint. People who go on smoking and drinking and eating – anything whatever – with no compassion in their hearts, are just stupid people. Those who don’t do such stupid things are intelligent people, but not saints. To smoke, to drink may be a mistake against your body, but it is not a sin.But those robopaths will make it a sin because this makes it very, very easy to become saints. They can always say, “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t eat meat, I don’t do this and I don’t do that,” and immediately they are on a higher pedestal.And naturally, when you are not in tune with yourself and with other people, how can you be in tune with nature? These robopaths have been destroying nature. They are the enemies of ecology. They go on destroying nature. They have wiped almost half of nature off the earth. They are very destructive people. They are destructive to themselves, of others, of nature – how can they know God? How can they feel God? They have not even felt a roseflower, they have not even felt the cry of the cuckoo, they have not even felt the river passing by, they have not even felt a child smiling, and they have not seen a woman’s tears. They have not even felt their own existence.This creates alienation. “They are alienated from other people because their interaction is usually in terms of others as objects, not as human beings. They are role objects, like servants, bosses, employees, employers, doctors, patients etc.”When a doctor comes to see a patient he is not interested in the patient as a person, just in their role as a patient. And the patient is not interested in the doctor as a person, just in his role as a doctor. The wife, the husband, the son, the father, the mother – they are all roles. People are not interested in each other’s person, in each other’s living reality. This is the robopathology that man has lived up to now, and man can go on living in it.You can jump out of it. That jump makes you religious. That jump brings you to understanding, that jump makes you wise, that jump makes you enlightened.Now this small story.Najrani said, “If you say that you can ‘nearly understand,’ you are talking nonsense.”A theologian who liked this phrase asked, “Can you give us an equivalent of this in ordinary life?”“Certainly,” said Najrani. “It is equivalent to saying thatsomething is ‘almost a circle.’”There are people who think they can understand – maybe not perfectly, but they can understand approximately. This is not possible. Understanding is not gradual, understanding is a sudden flash. Understanding is always total, it is never partial. It is not that you can have it in little chunks, in little bits and pieces. No, understanding is not cumulative.Understanding cannot be divided into parts. When it comes, it comes as a totality. Either it is or it is not. Either you are awake or you are asleep. Either you are enlightened or you are a robopath. From robopathology to enlightenment there is a quantum leap, a jump.But the robopath believes that although he may not be as enlightened as Buddha, he is also a little bit enlightened. That belief helps him to go on sleeping. Yes, he may not be such a great meditator, but he is doing a little bit of meditation. He may not have known God, but he has had a few glimpses.This is not possible. Najrani’s statement is of tremendous importance: “If you say that you can ‘nearly understand,’ you are talking nonsense.” There is no way to have a “nearly understanding” state of mind. Nobody can know truth approximately. An approximate truth is still a lie. It is as if you are heating water – at ninety degrees it is still water, at ninety-five degrees it is still water, at ninety-nine degrees it is still water. You cannot say that it is less water now. It is still the same water – heated, but the same water. Then at a hundred degrees, suddenly there is a jump. The water evaporates. It is a quantum leap, discontinuous.It is not that at first the water becomes a little bit of vapor and then a little bit more and then a little bit more, no. At one point it is still water, coming closer and closer to a hundred degrees. At ninety-nine point nine it is still water, and then in a split second it is no longer water, it has become vapor. In fact, to say in a split second is not right – it happens in no time. That moment is almost timeless. When I say timeless, I mean it exactly. No time passes, it is sudden. That is the meaning of a quantum leap.Either you understand or you don’t. So be clear about it. Understanding is indivisible, it is not possible to divide it; you cannot have little or more of it. Preparation for it is gradual, but the happening is a sudden happening, like lightning. One moment all was dark, another moment all is light – like that. Understanding has no continuity with understanding, it is discontinuous.That’s why I say to you that by accumulating knowledge you will not become wise. Knowledge can be accumulated; you can be less of a knower or more of a knower. You can go on accumulating knowledge; you can become more and more of a knower. But wisdom is noncumulative. It is radical. It is a revolution. It is an explosion from the known into the unknown, from the visible into the invisible, from the material into the spiritual, from the temporary into the nontemporal, from time into eternity, from robopathology into enlightenment. It is a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn without taking any time – because time brings degrees, gradualness.The moment of enlightenment is a timeless moment – we should not even call it a moment because it is not. But we have to because of linguistic limitations.Knowledge is one thing, understanding is totally another. Understanding is as free of knowledge as ignorance is – it is more like ignorance than knowledge. It is as empty as ignorance. But in ignorance there is a hankering for knowledge; in enlightenment there is no hankering anymore – that is the only difference. The ignorant person will become knowledgeable sooner or later because there is a hankering. He wants to have knowledge. He suffers because of his ignorance. He feels hurt that he does not know. He wants to know.The man of enlightenment has come to know that there is no way to know, that the mystery is absolute, that the desire to know is meaningless. Nothing can be known. Not a thing is ever known. In that moment he becomes innocent. Ignorance is no longer there because ignorance can only be there if you hanker for knowledge. Only the desire for knowledge creates the idea of ignorance. When the desire for knowledge has disappeared, ignorance has disappeared too – one is absolutely empty of both ignorance and knowledge. One is in utter silence, awe. All has stopped, all has disappeared, and for the first time there is consciousness, total consciousness.That total consciousness is what Najrani means by understanding. That’s why he says you cannot have approximate understanding.“A theologian who liked this phrase asked…” Theologians are people who are always hankering for more knowledge. He said: “Can you give us an equivalent of this in ordinary life?” “Certainly,” said Najrani. “It is equivalent to saying that something is ‘almost a circle.’”A circle is either a circle or is not a circle. You cannot have a half-circle. A half-circle is not a circle at all. It is only an arc, it is only a curve; it is not circle. A circle is a circle only when it is complete. The very idea of a circle has completion intrinsic to it. Only a complete circle is a circle and only absolute understanding is understanding.That’s why there is no way to compare Buddha, Mohammed, Mansoor, Christ, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra – there is no way. You cannot compare; they are all circles and all are complete. You cannot say that Buddha is more of a circle than Zarathustra, or Zarathustra is more of a circle than Lao Tzu. You cannot use the words more and less as far as enlightenment is concerned. Enlightenment is never more or less.People come to me sometimes and they ask who is more enlightened, Buddha or Mahavira? They are asking an absolutely stupid question. Nobody is more enlightened. One is enlightened when more and less have disappeared. One is enlightened when all comparisons have disappeared. One is enlightened when one has disappeared.How can two absences be more or less? When I am not in the room and when you are not in the room, can my absence be more than your absence? When I am not in the room, the room is as empty as when you are not in the room. It can’t be that when I am not in the room it is more empty, and when you are not in the room it is less empty. Absences cannot be more or less.Egos can be more or less; egolessness cannot be more or less. Remember this, it is a tremendously important statement.Understanding is a lightning flash. You can prepare for it, but while you are preparing you remain ignorant. You go on remaining ignorant to the very last moment. And then suddenly all has disappeared. And it happens without any process, without any time passing by. It is utterly timeless.So the last thing… Remember, there have been two schools all over the world: one school teaches gradual growth, another school teaches sudden enlightenment. And both are right because those who teach gradual growth are talking only about the preparation – heating the water; and those who are talking about sudden enlightenment are talking about the last thing when the water has come to a hundred degrees.Both are right, and there is no conflict and there is no need to create any conflict. They are absolutely right, and both are right and both are right together. One’s emphasis is on the preparation – it is true because what is the point of talking about sudden enlightenment if you are not prepared? If you are cold, below zero degrees, what is the point of talking about evaporation?First get heated, become at least warm, start moving toward the hundred-degree point. Those who talk about gradual growth simply mean that the preparation will have to be gradual.Those who talk about sudden enlightenment are talking about the ultimate thing. They say, “Why talk about the gradual growth? That’s okay. That is accepted, taken for granted. The real thing to talk about is the ultimate – when it happens, it happens in a total way. It simply wipes you out completely. You disappear, and then there is understanding.”Najrani said this to the theologian because theologians are the people who belong to the world of knowledge, who always think of accumulation, of having more knowledge, of having more virtue, of having more this and that – their minds are always greedy. They think in terms of degrees. The mind functions in terms of degrees, and understanding is a state of no-mind.I talked to you about robopathology for a long time for a certain reason – because that is where you are. And unless you get out of your robopathology you will never know that benediction called understanding, enlightenment, nirvana.Enough for today.

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

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-1-08/

The first question:Osho,Why do you give sannyas to babies and children?Sannyas can be only given to babies and children. The very idea of being an adult is a barrier. The adult mind is an adulterated mind; it is already corrupt.The physical age is irrelevant. Somebody may be seventy years old and yet a baby, and somebody may be young and may not be innocent.To receive sannyas needs a very, very innocent mind – one that knows nothing. Then the contact is immediate and the contact is from being to being, from heart to heart. Otherwise the contact remains from mind to mind – and from mind to mind there is no contact really, it is a deception. It only appears as if there is a contact. There is a constant conflict between two minds.Listen to this small story:One evening, Katz, a black cat who lived at Master Soen-sa’s ashram, died. The seven-year-old daughter of one of Soen-sa’s disciples was very troubled by the death. After the burial and chanting to Amida Buddha, she went to Soen-sa for an interview.Soen-sa said, “Do you have any questions?”She said, “Yes. What happened to Katzie? Where did he go?”Soen-sa said, “Where do you come from?”“From my mother’s belly.”“Where does your mother come from?”She was silent.Soen-sa said, “Everything in the world comes from the same one thing. It is like in a cookie factory. Many different kinds of cookies are made: lions, tigers, elephants, houses, people. They all have different shapes and different names, but they are all made from the same dough and they all taste the same. So all the different things that you see – a cat, a person, a tree, the sun, this floor – all these things are really the same.”“What are they?”“People give them many different names. When you are thinking, all things have different names and different shapes. But when you are not thinking, all things are the same. There are no words for them. People make the words. A cat doesn’t say, ‘"I am a cat.’" People say, ‘This is a cat.’ The sun doesn’t say, ‘My name is sun.’ People say, ‘This is the sun.’ So when someone asks you, ‘What is this?’ how should you answer?”“I shouldn’t use words.”Soen-sa said, “Very good! You shouldn’t use words. So if someone asks you, ‘What is Buddha?’ what would be a good answer?”She was silent.Soen-sa said, “Now you ask me.”“What is Buddha?”Soen-sa hit the floor.She laughed.Soen-sa said, “Now I ask you, ‘What is Buddha?’”She hit the floor.“What is God?”She hit the floor.“What is your mother?”She hit the floor.“What are you?”She hit the floor.“Very good! This is what all things in the world are made of. You and Buddha and God and your mother and the whole world are the same.”She smiled.Soen-sa said, “Do you have any more questions?”“You still haven’t told me where Katz went.”Soen-sa leaned over, looked into her eyes and said, “You already understand.”She said, “Oh!” and hit the floor very hard. Then she laughed.Soen-sa said, “Very, very good! That is how you should answer any question. That is the truth.”She bowed and left. As she was opening the door, she turned to Soen-sa and said, “Master, but I’m not going to answer that way when I’m in school. I’m going to give regular answers!”Soen-sa laughed.This is a deeper communion than can be possible between two minds.The child understands in a very different way. First, the child has no knowledge. When there is no knowledge, when you know that you don’t know, there is opening. When you know that you know, you are closed.When a child asks a question it is really out of his ignorance; when a grown-up asks a question it is out of his knowledge. The question may be formulated in the same way, but the quality of the question is utterly different. When a child asks, there is purity. He does not know, that’s why he is asking. When a grown-up asks, he knows, he already knows. The question is out of his knowledge.When the question is out of knowledge it is impossible to answer it. When you already think you know, you are in conflict with anything that is going to be said to you. You have something at stake – your knowledge, your past, your belief, your doctrine, your church.A child has none of these hindrances. That’s why Jesus says, “Unless you are like a child you will not enter the Kingdom of God.”So don’t be worried about why I give children sannyas – rather be worried about yourself. If you are not a child, even if I give you sannyas you will not receive it.I go on giving sannyas to every kind of person. To say no is not my way. I hope even against hope. Even when I see somebody who is just like a rock – when I see him closed completely with no way to enter him – then too I never say no. Who knows, maybe tomorrow he will relax. Maybe just this gesture of his, that he wants to take sannyas, will begin a new chapter in his life. Who knows? Things change, people change. Those who are very, very soft become hard; those who are hard become soft. Life is a constant flux. Maybe in the past things have happened in such a way that the person has become rocklike. The future may be different, may have a different story to tell.Just looking at the past – because a man is just his past. To deny him sannyas because of this past is to deny him a new future, is to deny him any possibility to change. Who am I to deny? So to whoever comes, even a rocklike person, I say yes.To the lowest the highest remains possible. There is no way to go so far away from God that you cannot turn. The farthest point in existence from God is still in God; we cannot go out of him.When a child comes, I accept the child.I understand why you have asked. You have asked because I say that children should not be conditioned. But sannyas is not a conditioning, it is just the opposite. If I don’t give the child sannyas he is going to become a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; he is going to become somebody who will be far worse. By giving him sannyas I allow him entry into a new kind of commune, a new kind of religiousness – which is not religion but just religiousness.I am welcoming him to a new kind of family where we are not going to impose any dogma, we are only going to give him a kind of milieu. This is totally different. To give a dogma gives conditions; to give a milieu is not a conditioning, to give a milieu is just to share.If I have attained something I can do two things. Either I can start conditioning you so you also attain the same thing – but through conditioning nothing is ever attained; or I can start helping to create a milieu, just a climate, where if you want to open you can open.It is just like in the morning as the sun arrives on the horizon. It does not go to each flower, it does not knock at each bird’s nest, it does not order, “Now start singing – the morning has come. Now start opening – the morning has come. Now be awake!” It says nothing. The sun simply stands there. It creates a climate. That warmth, that life-giving warmth, spreads all over the earth. In that warmth trees start opening their eyes, birds start singing again, flowers open their petals.Nothing is being said, nothing is being conditioned – it is just the presence. When I am giving sannyas to you, child or not, what is going to happen in it? It is just that I am allowing you to be in my presence. I am simply allowing you to become friends with me. This is just a friendship in which something is possible if you are ready to move.And a child is more ready to move, a child is more inquiring, a child still has wondering eyes, a child is still clean. Nothing is written on his slate yet. Sannyas is not a kind of imprisonment, it is just an attitude of coming out of all prisons. So why should the children not be allowed to become sannyasins?I have no creed, no dogma, no catechism. I am simply a presence. In this presence you can share something, you can partake of me. Everybody is welcome – a child of three months and an old man of ninety years. Everybody is welcome. Whoever wants to go on the journey of the unknown is welcome.And all that we teach here – if you can call it teaching – is love and meditation. Both are deconditioning, both are dehypnotizing. We don’t teach a philosophy about love, we simply create the milieu where love can grow. And we don’t give a ritualistic, formalistic form of meditation – just the quality of meditativeness. Once you start drinking a little of meditativeness, a little of love, you start growing wings.Sannyas is not the end of the journey, it is just the beginning. It is the first step. When you become a Christian it is the end, when you become a Hindu it is the end, when you become a Mohammedan it is the end. Then you can relax. Then you need not worry. When you become a Christian it is Christ’s duty and responsibility to save you. Now he will do everything; now you can continue in your own way, you can go on doing your things – you have left the burden on Jesus, he will carry your cross. Nobody can carry your cross, no, not even Jesus. Nobody can save you. How can anybody save you? The moment you start thinking that somebody else is going to save you, you are going to become a slave. The very idea that somebody else is going to save you creates slavery.I am not a savior. I don’t deal in that kind of nonsense. I am not going to save you. You can save yourself. I will make available all that is in me, you can choose anything you like and love. And there is no enforced effort here to bring you all into the same mold. You can grow the way it happens to you. My trust is in the individual, I don’t trust the crowd. The crowd is by its very nature ugly. My sannyasins are connected with me individually. My sannyasins are not in fact connected to any organization.If you see any kind of organization, it is just like the post office or the railway management. It is not a church, it is just to make me available to you more easily, more comfortably – otherwise I would be crowded and it would not be possible to work at all. The organization is there, just like the postal department. It is needed. But it is not an institution. Its function is there, its utility is there, but it is not a church. My sannyasins don’t belong to any organization, they belong to me. And each sannyasin belongs directly to me, it is not via the organization. The organization is there only to facilitate things. It is not a party, a sect, a church; it is nothing of the kind.And to each individual my answer is always different, hence you will find so many contradictions. I don’t have anything fixed. Whenever I face an individual I reflect him. I see into him. I don’t have anything in my mind to enforce. I see into him; I respond to him.When a child comes I respond in his way; when an old man comes I respond in his way. And each individual is so unique, so utterly unique, that you cannot give the same answer to everybody.The second question:Osho,Can a disciple transcend form and be in tune with the essence of the creator?Why this hankering to transcend form? Form is also of the creator, form is also God. In the form he also exists. Nothing is wrong with the form.The problem arises only when you start thinking that the form is all. There is no need to transcend the form, there is only a need to understand it. The form is perfectly beautiful, the body is perfectly beautiful – but don’t think that the body is all. There is something more, something more that is not visible to the eyes, something deep. It has to be there.The body is the surface, the soul is its depth. These are not two things. God and the world are not two things: the world is the surface and God is the world’s depth. And the depth cannot exist without the surface, remember, neither can the surface exist without the depth. They are together, they are absolutely together. They are one. It is only in language that the division arises; reality remains indivisible.So first, don’t hanker for transcendence. There is no need – only understanding is necessary. Or, if you love the word transcendence, then you can remember: understanding is transcendence. But transcendence is not of the form, transcendence is of both the surface and the depth – because the moment you see it is all one then you cannot define it as the surface and you cannot define it as the depth. Then all definitions are meaningless. Then you are facing the indefinable. You have transcended duality. But it comes through understanding.The very idea of transcendence can create problems. You can start repressing, you can start condemning – that’s how condemnation entered human consciousness. And it has been the greatest calamity that man has ever suffered.I have heard…A guy went to his dentist. The dentist wanted to give him Novocain.But he said, “No, I want to transcend dental medication.”He must be a transcendental meditation freak. He says, “I want to transcend dental medication.” Why? Why this constant effort to go somewhere else, to be somewhere else, to be someone else? Why can’t you relax into reality as it is? There is nowhere to go, nothing to transcend, and nothing to transcend to. God is herenow.Just understand. Just open your eyes and see. See without any ideas. If you have this idea of transcending something, you are always looking with prejudiced eyes. You know that this is the form and you have to transcend the form. How can you love the form? This is the body and you have to love only the soul! And this is the world and you can love only God!You will be getting into unnecessary anxiety, and the anxiety that you will create is such that you will never be able to solve it – because the form is always there with the formless. The form is of the formless – let me be contradictory, or paradoxical, but it is so. The form is of the formless and the body is of the bodiless and matter is nothing but non-matter in a condensed form; it is the manifestation, matter is the manifestation of the nonmaterial. The word is nothing but the manifestation of silence.Rather than trying to transcend, start thinking of relaxing into that which is. You will reach into the formless sooner – and without any effort on your own. Just relax and be drowned by the form, and when you are drowned by the form you start entering the formless. If you can love a woman or a man, your friend, your wife, your child, your father, your mother, if you can love anybody soon you will see that the form is not there alone. The formless has started coming through the form.When you touch the hand of somebody you love it is not only a touch of the skin, something is touched that is beyond the skin, behind the skin. Some pulse, some vibe, simply jumps from one hand to another; something of the spiritual. Look into the eyes of somebody that you love and you are not only looking into the eyes – something deeper opens, something abysmal opens. By and by the body starts disappearing. You are getting into the spiritual. But the body is the door.It is exactly like a temple. You enter a temple… What do you mean by the word temple? The door, the walls – do you mean that? Of course, the door and the walls are not the temple, the temple is the emptiness inside. That’s where you go. But those doors and those walls protect that emptiness, that shrine. If those walls and the doors disappear, there will be no shrine. Those walls are not against that emptiness; those walls support that emptiness, those walls protect that emptiness. So what is the temple? The walls, the doors, or the emptiness? No, you cannot divide that way, both are the temple. The wall and the doors are the outer form, and the emptiness, the innermost emptiness is the soul.Exactly so is the case with man, with a flower, with a tree. God is there in every form and God is formless. Because God is formless, the idea of how to transcend form arises. But the only way to transcend it is to descend into it. The only way to transcend it is to go into it so totally, so lovingly, that there is no condemnation.Don’t even call it the surface, because even our words have become contaminated. The moment you say that this is just the surface you have already condemned it – it is as if there is something wrong with the surface.You go for a walk on the beach, you see millions of waves in the ocean – on the surface. Yes, this is the surface, but can you take the surface away from the ocean? And can you enter the ocean without entering the surface? The depth and the surface are two polarities of one energy. And the ocean will not be much of an ocean if you take the surface away, nothing will be left. You will go on taking the surface away, away, away, and nothing will be left because whenever something is there, it will become the surface.To see this nonduality is to see. Then one becomes alert, aware, for the first time.The third question:Osho,I want to be creative. What should I do?Become a child again and you will be creative. All children are creative. Creativity needs freedom – freedom from the mind, freedom from knowledge, freedom from prejudices.A creative person is one who can try the new. A creative person is not a robopath; robopaths are never creative, they are repetitive. So become a child again.And you will be surprised that all children are creative; all children, wherever they are born, are creative. But we don’t allow their creativity, we crush and kill their creativity, we jump upon them. We start teaching them the right way to do things.Remember, a creative person always goes on trying the wrong ways. If you always follow the right way to do something you will never be creative because the right way means the way discovered by others. And the right way means that of course you will be able to make something, you will become a producer, a manufacturer, you will be a technician, but you will not be a creator.What is the difference between a producer and a creator? A producer knows the right way of doing a thing, the most economical way of doing a thing; with the least effort he can create more results. He is a producer. A creator fools around. He does not know what the right way is to do something, so he goes on seeking and searching again and again in different directions. Many times he moves in a wrong direction, but wherever he moves he learns. He becomes more and more rich. He does something that nobody has ever done before. If he had followed the right way to do things he would not have been able to do it.Listen to this small story:A Sunday school teacher asked her students to draw a picture of the Holy Family.After the pictures were brought to her, she saw that some of the youngsters had drawn the conventional pictures – the Holy Family in the manger, the Holy Family riding on the mule, and the like.But she called up one little boy to ask him to explain his drawing, that showed an airplane with four heads sticking out of the plane windows.She said, “I can understand why you drew three of the heads to show Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. But who’s the fourth head?”“Oh,” answered the boy, “that’s Pontius the pilot!”Now this is beautiful. This is what creativity is. He has discovered something.But only children can do that. You will be afraid to do it, you will look foolish. A creator has to be able to look foolish. A creator has to risk his so-called respectability. That’s why you always see that poets, painters, dancers, musicians, are not very respectable people. And when they become respectable, when a Nobel Prize is given to them, they are no longer creative. From that moment creativity disappears.What happens? Have you ever seen a Nobel Prize winner writing another thing that is of any value? Have you ever seen any respectable person doing something creative? He becomes afraid. If he does something wrong, or if something goes wrong, what will happen to his prestige? He cannot afford that. So when an artist becomes respectable he becomes dead.Creators are only those who are ready to put their prestige, their pride, their respectability again and again at stake, and can go into something that nobody thinks is worth going into. Creators are always thought to be mad people. The world recognizes them, but very late. It goes on thinking that something is wrong. Creators are eccentric people.And remember again, each child is born with all the capacities to become a creator. Without any exception, all children try to be creators but we don’t allow them. Immediately we start teaching them the right way to do a thing – and once they have learned the right way to do a thing they become robopaths. Then they go on doing the right thing again and again and again, and the more they do it, the more efficient they become. And the more efficient they become, the more respected they are.Somewhere between the age of seven and fourteen a great change happens in a child. Psychologists have been searching into the phenomenon: Why does it happen and what happens?You have two minds, two hemispheres. The left hemisphere of the mind is uncreative. It is technically very capable, but as far as creativity is concerned it is absolutely impotent. It can only do a thing once it has learned it, and it can do it very efficiently, perfectly; it is mechanical. This left hemisphere is the hemisphere of reasoning, logic, mathematics. It is the hemisphere of calculation, cleverness, of discipline, order.The right hemisphere is just the opposite of it. It is the hemisphere of chaos, not of order; it is the hemisphere of poetry, not of prose; it is the hemisphere of love, not of logic. It has a great feeling for beauty, it has a great insight into originality – but it is not efficient, it cannot be efficient. The creator cannot be efficient, he has to go on experimenting.The creator cannot settle anywhere. The creator is a vagabond, he carries his tent on his shoulders. Yes, he can stay for an overnight stay, but by the morning he is gone again – that’s why I call him a vagabond. He is never a householder. He cannot settle; settling means death to him. He is always ready to take a risk. Risk is his love affair.But this is the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is functioning when the child is born; the left hemisphere is not functioning. Then we start teaching the child – unknowingly, unscientifically. Down the ages we have learned the trick of how to shift the energy from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere; how to put a stop to the right hemisphere and how to start the left hemisphere. That’s what our whole schooling is. From kindergarten to university that’s what our whole training and so-called education is. It is an effort to destroy the right hemisphere and to help the left hemisphere. Somewhere between the ages of seven and fourteen we succeed and the child is killed, the child is destroyed.Then the child is no longer wild – he becomes a citizen. Then he learns the ways of discipline, language, logic, prose. He starts competing in school, becomes an egoist; starts learning all the neurotic things that are prevalent in the society, becomes more interested in power, money; starts thinking how to become more educated so he can become more powerful, how to have more money, how to have a big house, and all that. He shifts.Then the right hemisphere functions less and less – or functions only when you are dreaming, fast asleep. Or sometimes when you have taken a drug.The great appeal of drugs in the West is only because the West has succeeded in completely destroying the right hemisphere through compulsory education. The West has become too educated – that means it has gone to the very excess, to one side. It has become extreme. Now there seems to be no possibility. Unless you introduce some ways that can help the right hemisphere to be revived again in the universities and colleges and the schools, drugs are not going to go. There is no possibility of prohibiting drugs by law alone. There is no way to enforce it unless the inner balance is put right again.The appeal of the drug is that it immediately shifts gear – from the left hemisphere your energy moves to the right hemisphere. That’s all the drug can do. Alcohol has been doing it for centuries, but now far better drugs are available – LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, and even better drugs will be available in the future.The criminal is not the drug-taker, the criminal is the politician and the educationalist. It is they who are guilty. They have forced the human mind into one extreme – into such an extreme that now there is a need to revolt. And the need is so great! Poetry has completely disappeared from people’s life, beauty has disappeared, love has disappeared; money, power, prestige, have become the only gods.How can humanity go on living without love and without poetry and without joy and without celebration? Not for long.The new generation all over the world is doing a great service by showing the stupidity of your so-called education. It is not a coincidence that drug-takers almost always become dropouts. They disappear from the universities, colleges. It is not a coincidence – this is part of the same revolt.And once a man has learned the joys of drugs it becomes very difficult for him to drop them. Drugs can be dropped only if better ways can be found that can release your poetry. Meditation is a better way – less destructive, less harmful than any kind of chemical. In fact, it is not harmful at all, it is beneficial. Meditation does the same thing: it shifts your mind from the left hemisphere to the right hemisphere. It releases your inner capacity of creativity.The world can avoid a great calamity that is going to be there through drugs by only one thing – that is meditation. There is no other way. If meditation becomes more and more prevalent and enters peoples’ lives more and more, drugs will disappear. And education must start to be not so absolutely against the right hemisphere and its functioning.If the children are taught that their minds are both left and right hemispheres, and if they are taught how to use both, and if they are taught when to use which… There are situations where only the left brain is needed, when you need to calculate – in the marketplace, in the everyday business of life, and there are times when you need the right hemisphere.And remember always, the right hemisphere is the end and the left hemisphere is the means. The left hemisphere has to serve the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is the master – you earn money only because you want to enjoy and celebrate your life. You want a certain bank balance only so you can love. You work only so you can play – play remains the goal. You work only so you can relax. Relaxation remains the goal, work is not the goal.The work ethic is a hangover from the past. It has to be dropped. And the educational world has to go through a real revolution. People should not be forced, children should not be forced into repetitive patterns.What is your education? Have you ever looked into it? Have you ever pondered over it? It is simply a training in memory. You don’t become intelligent through it, you become more and more unintelligent. You become stupid. Each child enters the school very intelligent, but it is very rare that a person comes out of university and is still intelligent – it is very rare. The university almost always succeeds. Yes, you come with degrees, but you have purchased those degrees at a great cost: you have lost your intelligence, you have lost your joy, you have lost life – because you have lost the functioning of the right side hemisphere.And what have you learned? – information. Your mind is full of memories. You can repeat, you can reproduce – that’s what your examinations are. The person is thought to be very intelligent if he can vomit all that has been thrown into him. First he has to be forced to swallow, go on swallowing, and then in the examination papers, vomit. If you can vomit efficiently you are intelligent. If you can vomit exactly that which has been given to you, you are intelligent.Now remember, this is something to be understood: you can vomit the same thing only if you have not digested it. If you have digested it you cannot vomit the same thing, something else may come. Blood may come, but not the same Vrindavan canteen bread. That will not come. It has disappeared. So you simply have to keep it down there in your stomach without digesting it. Then you are thought to be very, very intelligent. The most stupid are thought to be the most intelligent. It is a very sorry thing, a sorry state of things.The intelligent may not fit. Do you know Albert Einstein could not pass his matriculation examination? Such a creative intelligence – it was difficult for him to behave in the stupid way that everybody else was behaving in.All your so-called gold medalists in the schools, colleges, universities, disappear. They never prove to be of any use. Their glory ends with their gold medals. Then they are never found anywhere. Life owes nothing to them.What happens to these people? You have destroyed them. They have purchased the certificates and they have lost everything. Now they will be carrying their certificates and degrees.This kind of education has to be totally transformed. More joy has to be brought to the schoolroom, more chaos has to be brought to the university – more dance, more song, more poetry, more creativity, more intelligence. Such dependence on memory has to be dropped.People should be watched and people should be helped to be more intelligent. When a person responds in a new way he should be valued. There should be no right answer. There is none. There is only a stupid answer and an intelligent answer. The very categorization of right and wrong is wrong; there is no right answer and there is no wrong answer. Either the answer is stupid, repetitive, or the answer is creative, responsive, intelligent. Even if the repetitive answer seems to be right it should not be valued much because it is repetitive. And even though the intelligent answer may not be perfectly right, may not fit with the old ideas, it has to be praised because it is new. It shows intelligence.You ask me, “I want to be creative. What should I do?” Undo all that the society has done to you; undo all that your parents and your teachers have done to you; undo all that the policeman and the politician and the priest have done to you – and you will again become creative, you will again have that thrill that you had in the very beginning. It is still waiting there, repressed. It can uncoil.And when that creative energy uncoils in you, you are religious. To me a religious person is one who is a creative person. Everybody is born creative, but very few people remain creative.It is for you to come out of the trap – you can. Of course you will need great courage because when you start undoing what the society has done to you, you will lose respect. You will not be thought to be respectable. You will start becoming bizarre; you will look bizarre to people. You will look like a freak. People will think, “Something has gone wrong with the poor man.” This is the greatest courage – to go into a life where people start thinking you are bizarre.There will be difficulties. You can ask Indivar. He has come from Australia. He was a renowned psychoanalyst there for twenty years and now he is in such difficulty. His wife thinks that he has gone mad; his children have become suspicious that “Dad has gone mad”; his colleagues are no longer in sympathy – there is no question of respect, even sympathy is missing. The bosses where he works in the clinic are ready to throw him out at any moment. And for the first time he is happy and for the first time he is doing something that he enjoys – and for the first time something from the right hemisphere is released in him.Just the other night he was there, and when I touched his head I could feel the shift. It is no longer the left hemisphere, it is the right hemisphere where more energy is moving. His poetry is coming back. He is becoming a child again.But naturally you have to risk. If you want to be creative you will have to risk everything. But it is worth it. A little creativity is more worthwhile than this whole world and its kingdom. The joy that comes by creating something new, whatever it is – a small song, a small painting, anything… When you create something new you participate with the creator because existence is the creator. When you create, you are in tune with existence. When you create, really existence creates through you – that’s why great joy arises. When you repeat, you repeat alone. Existence is not there. You are a desert, you are a machine. When you create, existence simply enters your heart. You become a hollow bamboo and it starts playing on you and you become a flute. Great song is possible.Everybody is carrying that song, and unless that song is sung you will never feel fulfilled.My sannyas is nothing but an initiation into creativity, initiation into danger, initiation into a new kind of life that has not been taught to you – in fact, against everything that has been taught to you.My whole struggle is against this so-called neurotic society. I would like you to become uneducated again.The fourth question:Osho,Why is it so difficult to find oneself?Because you have been turned outward. Your eyes have become paralyzed. They can only see the without. You cannot turn back; your neck is no longer flexible. You cannot go into your being; all that you know takes you outside.You are very, very efficient in thinking – thinking takes you outside. To go in, to know oneself, non-thinking is needed. Now that seems impossible. The whole of life’s training in thinking has become such a fixed structure inside you that even when you don’t need to think, you go on thinking. You would like to sit silently, but the mind goes on chattering. You have practiced that chattering too long, it has gone into your blood. That’s why it looks difficult; otherwise it is the easiest thing in the world. It has to be the easiest because you are closer to yourself than anything else. If you want to know somebody else it is a long journey. If you want to know God one never knows where he is hiding and where to find him and what his address is.But if you want to know yourself there should be no problem at all. You are yourself. If you cannot know even this – where you already are, where you exist – then what else can you do and what else can you know? Self-knowledge should be the easiest thing.But it has become difficult because you have been trained to focus your eyes on the outside.I have heard…Sherlock Holmes arrived in heaven. The angels turned out en masse to meet him. The Lord himself descended from his throne to bid him welcome.“Holmes,” he said, “we have a little mystery up here that you may be able to help us solve. Adam and Eve seem to have disappeared. Nobody has been able to locate them for eons. If you could possibly uncover them for us…”Holmes darted to the fringe of the assemblage and hauled two frightened and surprised angels before the Lord. “Here they are,” he said.Adam and Eve admitted their identities. “We became tired of being stared at and asked for autographs by every damn new angel who came up here,” they explained. “We assumed aliases and these simple disguises, and got away with them for centuries until this smarty-pants ferreted us out.”“How did you do it?” marveled the Lord.“Elementary, my dear lord,” said Holmes. “They were the only two who had no navels.”Yes, to know oneself is elementary. It is not difficult – it can’t be difficult. You just have to unlearn the ways. You need not learn anything to know who you are, you only have to unlearn a few things.First, you have to unlearn being concerned with things; second, you have to unlearn being concerned with thoughts; and the third thing happens on its own accord – witnessing.Let me tell you in this way… These are the three things in your life. On the outermost fringe are things, the world; what Zen people call “The world of ten thousand things.” On the outermost fringe – the periphery, the circumference – are things, millions of things. Then between the center and the circumference there are thoughts, desires, dreams, memories, imaginations – the mind. If the world is called “The world of ten thousand things,” the mind should be called “The world of ten million thoughts.”And the key is, one: first start watching things. Sitting silently, look at a tree; just be watchful, don’t think about it. Don’t say, “What kind of tree is this?” Don’t say whether it is beautiful or ugly. Don’t say, “It is green or dry.” Don’t make any thoughts ripple about it, just go on looking at the tree – that’s what meditators have been doing down the centuries. They would choose one thing – maybe the small flame of a lamp – and they would sit silently looking at it. What were they doing? The flame has nothing to do with meditation, it is just a device. They were trying one thing: to go on looking at the flame and to come to a point where no thought arises about the flame. The flame is there, you are here, and no thought arises.You can do it anywhere, watching anything. Just remember one thing: when the thought comes, put it aside, shove it aside. Again go on looking at the thing. In the beginning it will be difficult but, after a period, intervals start happening. There will come moments when you will be looking at the tree and there will be no thought – and you will find great joy arising out of that simple experience. Nothing has happened – just thoughts are not there and the tree is there and you are there and between the two there is space. The space is not cluttered with thoughts. Suddenly there is great joy for no visible reason, for no reason at all. You have learned the first secret.Then this has to be used in a subtler way. Things are gross, that’s why I say start with a thing. You can sit in your room, you can go on looking at a photograph – the only thing to remember is not to think about it. Just look without thinking. Slowly, slowly it happens. Look at the table without thinking and by and by the table is there, you are there, and there is no thought between you two. And suddenly – joy.Joy is a function of thoughtlessness. Joy is already there; it is repressed behind so many thoughts. When thoughts are not there it starts surfacing.Start with the gross. Then, when you have become attuned and you have started to feel moments when thoughts disappear and only things are there, start doing the second thing. Now close your eyes and look at any thought that comes by – without thinking about the thought. Some face arises on the screen of your mind, or a cloud moves, or anything. Just look at it without thinking.This will be a little harder than the first because things are more gross, thoughts are very subtle. But if the first has happened, the second will happen – only time will be needed. Go on looking at the thought. After a while… It depends on you – it can happen within weeks, it can happen within months, it can take years. It depends on you how intently, how wholeheartedly you are doing it. Then one day, suddenly, the thought is not there. You are alone.With the thing, thoughts disappeared: you were there and the thing was there; subjective and objective were both there, duality was there. When the thought disappears, you are simply left alone, only subjectivity is left alone. And great joy will arise – a thousandfold greater than the first joy that happened when the tree was there and the thought had disappeared. A thousandfold. It will be so immense that you will be flooded with joy.This is the second step. When this has started happening, then do the third thing – watch the watcher. Now there is no object. Things have been dropped, thoughts have been dropped, now you are alone. Now simply be watchful of this watcher, be a witness to this witnessing. In the beginning it will be difficult again because we know only how to watch things. Even a thought is at least something to watch. Now there is nothing, it is absolute emptiness. Only the watcher is left alone. You have to turn upon yourself.This is what Jesus means when he says conversion – turning upon oneself. This is what Mahavira means when he says pratikraman – turning upon oneself. This is what Patanjali means by pratyahara – turning upon oneself. And this is what Sufis mean when they use the word shahadah – witnessing the witness. This is the secret-most key. Just go on being there alone. Rest in this aloneness, and a moment comes when this happens. It is bound to happen. If the first two things have happened, the third is bound to happen – you need not worry about it.When this happens, then for the first time you know what joy is. All those joys that you had known before – the joy that happened when the tree was there and the thought had disappeared; and the joy that happened when the thoughts disappeared and you were left alone… Yes, the second joy was a thousandfold greater than the first, but now something happens that is not only quantitatively different but qualitatively different. Now for the first time you know what Hindus call ananda – the real joy. All joys known before are now simply pale, simply don’t mean anything anymore. Those joys were something that were happening to you, now this joy is utterly different. This is you yourself; this is swabhav, this is your innermost nature.It is not something happening to you, so it cannot be taken away. It is you in your authentic being, it is your very being. Now it cannot be taken away. Now there is no way to lose it. You have come home.So you have to unlearn things, thoughts. First watch the gross, then watch the subtle, and then watch the beyond that is beyond the gross and the subtle.The fifth question:Osho,Do you find your jokes funny or are you catering to our sense of humor?P.S. We love them!To me the whole of life is a joke and I find everything funny. It is all so ridiculous.But remember, I am not catering for your sense of humor. I never cater for you in any way. If I tell a joke it is simply a trick because it is only during the moment when you open your mouth that I can help you swallow something. It is just a device. Your mouth is open and you are unaware. I can throw in something! It really goes in. Your mind is no longer functioning, your thoughts are no longer there.When you laugh, the mind disappears. In laughter, the mind cannot exist – for a moment there is a gap, and I seek that gap. That gap is of tremendous importance because only through that gap can I make contact with you.The last question:Osho,I want to surrender and yet…This is how the human mind functions. It is always contradictory. It wants one thing and at the same time it is afraid. The mind can never be total. The mind’s existence is in division.So if you are waiting to surrender only when your mind totally says yes, then it is not going to happen. At the most you can hope for only one thing: if the major part of your mind is saying go ahead, then go ahead; listen to the major and don’t be bothered by the minor. Sometimes just the contrary happens – people go on being bothered by the minor part of their mind.One day somebody was saying to me, “I am ninety percent ready to take sannyas. Ninety percent!”I said, “Man, this is a miracle! Ninety percent? Don’t wait a single moment because who knows? Just take sannyas!”He said, “But what am I to do about that ten percent of the mind? It goes on saying no, so I will have to wait.”But that man is not aware that even to decide to wait is a choice. To take sannyas is a choice; not to take it is also a choice. You cannot choose not to choose – that freedom is not given. You cannot choose not to choose. You are choosing every moment. You have to remain a chooser.Man is not free not to choose, remember. But you can create an illusion… That man is thinking that he is not choosing yet because ten percent of the mind is saying no. But he is choosing in favor of the ten percent – he is not taking sannyas. He is going against the ninety percent for the ten percent. This is stupid. At least be a little democratic.Don’t wait for totality. The mind is never total. When there is totality, the mind disappears. In fact, you are trying to surrender so you can be total. Now if you demand totality as a requirement to surrender, then you are just being absolutely absurd.I have heard about an old church. The church was very ancient and the building was falling. A small wind would come and the building would start shaking. People stopped coming to it, they were afraid.Then the committee, the board of directors, met. Even they didn’t meet inside the church. It was dangerous to go in so they met outside. And they decided that now something had to be done: “People have stopped coming, even the priest won’t go in. And it can fall any moment; it is a miracle that it has not fallen up to now. What should we do?”But the orthodox mind… The old people were there who said, “This is an ancient church and we cannot demolish it.” And there were other new people who said, “We have to demolish it otherwise it will kill somebody one day. We have to make a new church.” And there was great conflict. What to do?Then they decided on a compromise. They passed a resolution: “First, we decide that the new church has to be built. Second, we decide that the old church has to be demolished. Third, we decide that the new church should be made exactly like the old, on exactly the same spot, and all the material from the old church should be used in the new church. Nothing new will be used so it remains ancient. And fourth, till the new is ready, we will go on using the old.”Now, how is it going to happen? Compromises don’t help.If you want to surrender, just watch inside yourself. If the major part of your mind is ready, then take the jump.A Russian commissar was so discouraged with life in Moscow that he decided to commit suicide. One evening, he walked out into the country with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm. When he came to a train junction, he lay down on the railroad tracks. A peasant passing by was amazed by the strange sight.“What are you doing,” he asked, “lying on these tracks?”Said the commissar, “I’m going to commit suicide.”“What do you need the bread for?” asked the peasant.The commissar answered, “In this country, by the time the train gets here a man could starve to death.”But this is how the mind functions. You are ready to commit suicide!I used to live in a house next to a professor. We were colleagues in the same university. I was very new, and the first night I became a little worried because the professor and his wife started fighting. The fight continued and I could hear everything that was going on. As I had not even been introduced to them it would have been an interference, trespassing, to go to their house in the middle of the night, so I had to wait and see what was happening.Finally, the professor threatened that he would go and commit suicide. Then I became a little worried. I came out. The professor had left and the wife was standing there closing the door. I said to the woman, “What is the matter? Can I be of any help?”She said, “Don’t be worried. This must be the hundredth time. He will take a good walk and come back. He never commits suicide. And he threatens every time.”And within just five or seven minutes he was back. I asked him, “So soon? Have you committed suicide?”He said, “The railroad is so far away and it is raining, can’t you see? And I don’t have an umbrella.”The mind is like that. It goes on thinking in contradictions.The young man poured out his heart’s devotion on paper, as he wrote to the girl of his dreams:“Darling, I would climb the highest mountain, swim the widest stream, cross the burning desert, die at the stake for you.P.S. I will see you on Saturday – if it doesn’t rain.”Now drop that “yet.” If you really want to surrender, surrender. If you feel the “yet” is stronger, then forget about it. Then this is not the right moment for you.The mind continues to be contradictory because that is its trick to survive, and that is its way to keep you always discontented. You want to do something – one part of your mind says, “Do”, another part says, “Don’t do.” If you do it, the part that was not in favor will go on condemning it and will go on saying, “It was worthless and I was telling you so from the very beginning” – and you will become frustrated. If you don’t do it, the part that wanted to do it will go on chattering to you, “Do it. You are missing something great. Why don’t you do it?” Either way, you remain frustrated.And the mind is always happy if you go on only thinking. Do anything, and the mind becomes afraid – because when you do something you are committed, you get involved. The mind wants utter freedom to dream, desire, long for. Have you watched this phenomenon in you? If not, then watch it. Whenever you are thinking of doing something there are a thousand and one alternatives. The mind has great freedom.For example, if you want to purchase a car you can go to a showroom. You have many alternatives; many kinds of cars are available. You can purchase this or that car, or you can dream about them all, but you can only purchase one. The moment you purchase it, the fact that out of a hundred cars you have missed ninety-nine is going to make you miserable. Now your mind has only one car and it will start finding all kinds of faults with it. And the remaining parts of the mind that wanted to have other cars will start telling you, “I was saying so from the very beginning.”So a man remains continuously frustrated. Whatever you do brings frustration because doing always closes your freedom; it becomes a commitment. Without doing anything you are free to choose because you choose only in the mind. You can change and alter and do this and that: this morning you are going to purchase this, by the evening another thing – and you can go on playing. That’s why thinkers are not known to do many things. They don’t do at all. They only think.Without doing anything you cannot attain. You will have to do something. You will have to have the courage to commit, to get involved somewhere, otherwise you can sit and go on thinking and dreaming. That is all futile, meaningless – a sheer wastage of energy.So either decide to do it or decide not to do it, but don’t hang in between. Be decisive. Decisiveness is always good. It creates integration, it brings integration. It makes you more crystallized.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Hassan came upon Rabiya one day when she was sitting amongst a number of contemplators, and said, “I have the capacity of walking on water. Come, let us both go onto that water yonder, and sitting upon it, carry out a spiritual discussion.”Rabiya said, “If you wish to separate yourself from this august company, why do you not come with me so that we may fly into the air and sit there talking?”Hassan said, “I cannot do that, for the power which you mention is not one which I possess.”Rabiya said, “Your power of remaining still in the water is one which is possessed by fish. My capacity of flying in the air can be done by a fly. These abilities are no part of real truth – they may become the foundation of self-esteem and competitiveness, not spirituality.”The games of the ego are very subtle, and if one is trying to drop the ego they become more and more subtle. If one has really decided to drop it anyhow, the ultimate strategy that the ego can use to protect itself is to become egoless: is to pretend humility, humbleness; is to show, “Now there is no need to fight with me, I am not at all.”The ego is one of the most fundamental problems that man has to face. The ways of the ego have to be understood rightly, otherwise you will never be able to get rid of it. And until you get rid of the ego there is no possibility of meeting the divine. It is the ego that functions as a barrier between you and reality.The ego functions as a barrier because it is one of the most unreal things possible. The ego is a fiction, it is not a fact. It is maintained by conditioning, by hypnosis; it is maintained by a thousand and one props. It is a fiction because existence is one – it can have only one center, it cannot have millions of centers.What is the ego? The ego is the idea that “I am the center of the universe.” That is what the ego is – reduced to the basic – the idea that “I am the center of the universe.” “I” cannot be the center of the universe, but everybody has the idea that “I am the center of the universe.”And the second part of the ego is that it is separative, it is a fiction that separates you from the totality. It gives you the idea that you are independent, that you are an island – and you are not. Existence is a vast infinite continent, there are no islands. You are not separate and you are not independent.Remember, when I say you are not independent, I don’t mean that you are dependent – because the very idea of dependence will again presuppose the ego. There is nobody to be independent and there is nobody to be dependent. We live in interdependence, in mutual existence, in mutuality. We are parts of each other, members of one another. The trees are penetrating you and the rocks are penetrating you and the rivers are penetrating you – and you are penetrating the rivers and the trees and the rocks. The furthest star is connected with you. And when you blink your eyes you change the quality of the total existence. All is infinitely interconnected, interwoven. Nobody is separate.So nobody can be independent and nobody can be dependent. Independence and dependence are both aspects of the same coin called ego. A real person is neither. A real person simply does not exist as a person, he has no boundaries. He exists as God, not as a person.Just the other day somebody asked a question: “What does bhagwan mean?” It means this experience of interdependence. It means this experience of infinite mutuality. It means this oneness with the whole. It means, “I am no longer separate.” And if I am no longer separate, I am not – because I can be only when I am separate. There is no way to be without being separate.Hence on one hand the ego creates separation, on the other hand it creates anxiety, fear – fear of death. The fear of death comes out of the ego, otherwise there is no death, there has never been death. Death exists not. If I am one with the whole, then how can death exist? The whole has never died, the whole has always been there, and the whole is going to remain there always.The ocean never dies. Only ripples and waves come and go. Once the wave thinks, “I am separate from the ocean,” then it will have great anxiety. Then death is coming – sooner or later. It is on the way; it is coming. And the fear, and the anxiety… But if the wave knows, “I am not separate, how can I die? To die you have to be separate. If I am one with the ocean, whether I am like a wave or not like a wave does not matter. That which exists in me is the ocean. It has been there before me, it will be there after I am gone. In fact, I never came and I never went, it was just a manifestation of the universe” – then death disappears and birth disappears. Otherwise the ego creates the fear that “I am going to die” and there is a constant trembling in the heart.You can never be at ease with the ego. Your anguish is your ego and nothing else. Bhagwan does not mean the English word God – which has become very dirty with wrong associations – bhagwan means the experience of oneness, the experience that “there is no wall between me and the whole,” that “I don’t have a boundary,” that “I am not and the whole is.” If you feel a boundary you are limited, small. Then your limitation gives pain, hurts – so limited, so small. Then you want to become big.Just see the mechanism of the ego. First the ego makes you feel small; it creates a sort of inferiority: “I am so tiny against such a big world, I have to be big – big in money, big in power. I have to be the president or the prime minister or the richest man of the world, or I have to become Alexander the Great, or something.” Because the ego makes you feel limited and nobody likes limitation. Then the desire to become bigger arises. And you go on becoming bigger, but the bigger you become the more egoistic you become – because you carry the ego.See the absurdity of it. The bigger you become, the more egoistic you become – you start thinking, “Now I am somebody.” And the more egoistic you become, the smaller you feel. It looks paradoxical: the bigger you become, the smaller you feel. And again and again the desire arises to become big. With the ego, nobody can become big. It is impossible.Only by dropping the ego does one suddenly become big – not big, one really becomes infinite because then you don’t have any boundaries. Then if there are any boundaries to existence those are your boundaries – and there are none. Existence is unbounded. It has no possibility of ending anywhere, neither in time nor in space. In both dimensions it is infinite, it is infinitely infinite.But don’t start dropping the ego. You cannot drop it because it is a fiction, not a fact. If you start dropping it you will create another fiction – that “I have become egoless.” If you start dropping it, if you start becoming humble, if you practice humility, you will become egoistic again in a new way. You will start thinking, “I am the most humble man in the world, the humblest.”Three monks were talking. One was a Trappist monk. He said, “Nobody can compete with us as far as asceticism is concerned.” Trappist monks are really very ascetic; the most neurotic of all the kinds of Christian monks.The second was a Catholic monk. He said, “That’s right. But nobody can compete with us as far as knowledge of the scripture is concerned.”And they both looked at the third, a Baptist monk. They wanted him to declare what goods he had. The monk said, “We are nobodies as far as asceticism goes, we are nobodies as far as knowledge goes, but as far as humbleness is concerned, we are the top.”Humbleness and, “We are the top!”This is how the human ego functions. You cannot drop it because it is not. How can you drop it? You can drop something if it is. You cannot fight with it, how can you fight with something that is not? You cannot kill it, how can you kill it when it is not?Then what can one do? One can only understand. One can look into the mechanism of it – how this whole fiction functions. Once you have looked into the fiction through and through, from one corner to another, from A to Z, it is not that you drop the ego – in that very insight the ego disappears. In fact, to say that it disappears is not right, it was never there. You come to realize that you were believing in a nonentity. It was not there from the very beginning.It is just as if you stay in a room and somebody has told you that there is a ghost in the room. Now you cannot sleep. It is not that the ghost is there, it is the idea that there is a ghost and if you fall asleep there may be some danger – the ghost may jump upon you, may sit upon you, may drink your blood or something. Ghosts are unreliable people. One never knows what the ghost will do. You cannot sleep, you cannot afford to sleep.And the more sleepless and tired you become, the more and more you will believe in the ghost because the weaker you become, the stronger the ghost becomes. In the middle of the night, when the whole world has fallen asleep and everything is silent, you will become more afraid – now you are absolutely alone. Everybody has fallen asleep. Even the traffic has stopped. Now there is nobody. If the ghost comes you are left alone. Even if you scream now nobody is going to hear. Now you will be more troubled. And a small rat passing by, or just a bird fluttering outside in a tree, or a dry leaf moving on the road in the wind – that is enough! You can lose all your consciousness.There was nothing from the very beginning. You created the whole thing. You had an idea and the idea became a reality. Now, you cannot fight with this ghost, you only have to see whether the ghost is or is not. You only have to understand. You have to see the mechanism of how the idea of the ghost is manipulating you. It is just an idea – and your idea.The case with the ego is exactly the same. The ego is a ghost. It is unreal, it is utterly unreal. But it has been deeply rooted in you for certain reasons. First, the society needs it. Without creating a kind of ego in you, you will be dangerous. Through the ego you can be manipulated. Just think: if you don’t have any ego nobody can frighten you – impossible – because you don’t have any death. Only you with your ego can be frightened through death.That is the reason why Jesus was not frightened, why Mansoor was not frightened. Many Sufis have been killed. When Mansoor was being crucified, one hundred thousand people had gathered to see. Somebody asked – because he was laughing, laughing like crazy – somebody asked, “Mansoor, have you really gone mad? You are being crucified, why are you laughing? This is death. Are you alert of the fact?”Mansoor said, “That’s why I am laughing. They are killing somebody who is not. That is the whole ridiculousness of it, that’s why I am laughing!”It is as if somebody is killing a wave. Maybe the wave disappears, but how can you kill a wave? It will be there in the ocean, it will still be there, it will be absolutely as it was before. Only the form is not there, but form does not matter. Mansoor says, “They are trying to kill somebody who is not there in the first place, that’s why I am laughing.”Many Sufis have been killed and they accepted death with such joy. From where do that joy and that courage come?It is not the courage of a soldier. No, not at all. It is the courage of a man who has come to realize that there is no ego, that “I am not, so how can you kill me?” The courage of the soldier is different from the courage of a saint. The courage of the soldier is a well-maintained courage; deep down he is afraid, deep down he is trembling like a small child. But he has been trained for years to be brave. In the army he has been trained to be brave – bravery is a trained attitude. It is his habit to be brave. But deep down is the suspicion, deep down is the fear. Even the greatest soldiers feel fear. It is natural.The difference between a brave soldier and a cowardly soldier is not one of fear; the difference is only that the brave soldier goes to the war, to the front, into death, into fire, in spite of the fear. The coward cannot go, he escapes. But the fear is there in both. The brave man just has an idea of bravery; he has been conditioned. His ego has been strengthened in such a way that he has to remain brave. It is against his ego to escape; it is against his ego to run away – that’s all. Otherwise, he is shaking like a leaf in a strong wind, trembling.The courage of a saint is totally different. It has nothing to do with the courage of a soldier. He knows he is not, so how can you kill him? He knows there is no death because there has never been any birth. He has dropped the fallacy of birth, so the fallacy of death disappears. He has dropped the fallacy of the ego, so all other fallacies disappear. All other fallacies hang around the basic fallacy of the ego.And how does one drop it? – just by seeing into the ways of it, how it comes. You pull it out from one side, you push it out from one door and it comes in from another door, from the back door, in a subtler form so you cannot recognize it.The society needs the ego, otherwise people will be uncontrollable. The state needs it, otherwise people will be so rebellious, people will be so authentically themselves, that it will be next to impossible to create slavery, to create robopathology, to create these automatons you see walking on the roads, working in the offices, factories, this and that. Exploitation will be impossible without the ego. The society needs it.It is a political stratagem and it is utilitarian too. You have to refer to yourself in some way. It will be confusing if you start using your name to refer to yourself.Swami Ramateerth, a Hindu mystic, used to do that. He never used to use the word I, he would use Ram – that was his name. If he was feeling hungry, he would say, “Ram is very hungry.”But it creates trouble. Then they would start saying, “Who is Ram? Who is he talking about?”He was in New York and some people insulted him. He must have looked a little bizarre in orange clothes in New York – this happened sixty or seventy years ago, when the orange people were not known at all. He was the first sannyasin to reach America. People laughed at him, ridiculed him. He laughed, came back home.The host asked, “What is the matter. Why are you laughing so much? What has happened?”He said, “Ram was insulted and people were ridiculing Ram and Ram enjoyed it.”“Ram?” the host asked. “What do you mean by Ram? Isn’t this your name?”He laughed again. He said, “I don’t have any name. I can’t have any name. I don’t even use ‘I.’ I use ‘Ram,’ the third person. I am as far away from Ram as you are. I am as much a witness of Ram as you are.”But this will create many problems. It will not be feasible if everybody starts using his name instead of I; it will create confusion. The I is significant, linguistically utilitarian. Nothing is wrong in using it. I will not tell you to stop using it – just know perfectly well that it is just a word, utilitarian, but it has no reality behind it.In fact, if I had met Swami Ram I would have told him, “You are giving too much importance to the word I in avoiding it. You are making it too significant. It is not. There is no need to be so afraid of it. One just has to see the point, one just has to look into it and see that it is only a word, a label – perfectly useful, but with no reality behind it, with no substance behind it. Why do you go on avoiding it? The very fact of avoiding it so much seems to mean that you are still afraid, a little bit afraid that if you use the word I, maybe the ego will come back. So you are putting the ego away just by not using the I? That won’t help. It can come in the third person, Ram, too. It is so subtle.”First the society needs to create an ego in you because then it can manipulate you, manage you, very easily. How does it happen? Once the ego is created, it becomes possible to manipulate the child. Then you can tell him that he has to come first in the class. If he has no ego, you cannot create ambition in him. He will laugh at the whole idea. “Why first? Why me first, why not others? What is wrong if somebody else comes first?”Small children don’t see the point because they still don’t have a crystallized idea of the ego. A small child can come from the school and happily declare to the house, “I have failed again.” He has not yet been poisoned. But sooner or later… How long can he survive without being poisoned? The whole system of education is a subtle trick to create the ego, hence so much competition, ambition – be the first, come at the top of the list, become a gold medalist.And that goes on and on. It doesn’t end with school, it goes on. Even old people are hankering for rewards, awards, Nobel Prizes, and things like that. They are still childish.Once the idea has entered your bloodstream that “I am,” then everything is possible. You can be made afraid that if you don’t do this you will lose, if you do this you will profit. If you do this you will succeed, if you do this you will fail. With the idea of the ego, fear of punishment and greed for profit become possible. The whole of society exists in greed and fear.Once a child has learned the ways of greed, then for his whole life he will be rushing after money or power or prestige. He will be losing his whole life in something absolutely nonessential. Money is not important, remember, money is important because you have the idea of the ego.Many people drop money, they renounce money. In India it happens that people renounce their money and they think they have renounced something really essential. It is nothing – because money is secondary. One never loves money for money’s sake, one loves money for the ego’s sake. You have one million dollars, your ego feels puffed up. You can renounce one million dollars and you can go to the Himalayas and you can still feel puffed up with the idea, “I have renounced a million dollars. Many people have a million dollars, but how many renounce it?” Now you are getting still higher. The very idea that very few people can renounce such a lot of money with such ease will make your ego a little bigger. So those who renounce have very subtle egos.If you are a president of a country and you renounce it and you say, “Now I am going to become a sannyasin and I will go to the Himalayas and meditate,” sitting there in a Himalayan cave you will still enjoy the idea that nobody has ever done that before. You renounced being president of a country – you are the greatest monk in the world. The ego has come, following you like a shadow. It will be there in your Himalayan cave too. You cannot escape from it so easily.It is a subtle phenomenon. It needs much awareness to drop it. Just by running away you cannot drop it. How can you run away from yourself? And this mechanism is inside you, it is not outside. If it were outside, you could drop it, but it is inside you, it has become part of you. It is your very style. You have lived with it for so long that you don’t know how to live without it. So whatever way you choose to live, the ego will remain there hiding behind it.The society needs it, the state needs it, the parents need it, the leaders, the politicians need it, the priest needs it – everybody needs the ego. Only you don’t need it. Only you become miserable because of it. Only because of it do you miss the Kingdom of God.So you have to be very, very alert because the whole of society and the state and everybody is conspiring. They want you to have an ego.You have to decide whether you want to go into this trip or you don’t want to go into this trip. You have to see what you have gained up to now by going into this trip. What is your gain? What joy has arrived? What bliss has happened?You can change. You can become an otherworldly person – who is not really so otherworldly. You can say, “In this world there is nothing, this world is all nonsense. Death comes and everything is taken away. I will seek some eternal power.” But it is still power. “This world’s money is not very significant. I will seek some other kind of treasure that is eternal, that will remain with me.” Then again you become an egoist with new names – spiritual power, miraculous power.There are three ways that the so-called spiritual man can fall into the same trap again. Either he becomes very knowledgeable – then he has the ego: “I know, and I know much more than anybody else.” Or he can become an ascetic. He can torture himself, he can be masochistic with himself. He can fast, he can start committing a slow suicide and he can tell the world, “I am the greatest mahatma. Look, I have renounced all, even my body.”Or the third way is that he can start using psychic energy as power. He can become a miracle-monger. There are great energies in the psyche. They can all unfold. And when you start moving into deep meditation they start unfolding. The real spiritual man will not use them at all because he knows that it will be a trap that will bring you back into the mire of the world. A real spiritual man never uses any power. If miracles sometimes happen around a real religious man they happen on their own. He is not the doer.A man came to Jesus, touched his garments, and was healed. He wanted to thank Jesus. He was thankful, he had been ill for years and the doctors had said that there was no remedy for him – and now he was in perfect health. He could not believe his own eyes.He fell at the feet of Jesus to thank him and Jesus said, “Man, you need not thank me at all. Thank God. In fact, thank yourself – it is your own faith that has healed you. I have nothing to do with it.”This is the quality of the real spiritual man – if something happens he is not the doer. Yes, miracles happen, but they are not done. And when a person starts doing them – like Satya Sai Baba and other people – when a person starts doing them he is no longer spiritual, not at all. He has fallen to the status of a magician. Now there is nothing of spirituality left. Just as people want to show their money, he wants to show his psychic powers. But the showman is there – so he is as much a part of show business as anybody else.Miracles happen around a spiritual man, real miracles. These are not real miracles – that you can produce ash or you can produce a Swiss-made watch – these are not miracles, these are simple tricks. Around a really spiritual person real miracles happen. People transform, people change, people start attaining new spaces of being. People start moving into new dimensions of joy and life and eternity. People start being more loving and more compassionate. People start blooming. Fragrance arises. People start dancing; their hearts for the first time pulsate with celebration. These are real miracles. People start feeling that God is, people start trusting that God is. People start becoming aware of who they are. People start losing their sleepiness. Their eyes start opening. People become whole, no longer fragmentary, integrated. These are real miracles. These happen.But they are not done; nobody is doing them. If somebody is there to do them, the ego still exists. And with the ego, the world; with the ego, all the darkness.So you have to be alert. Nobody will be in favor of you dropping your ego. Your wife will not be in favor, your husband will not be in favor, your children will not be in favor – because once the husband drops the ego he has no ambition, so the wife will not feel good. The wife wants you to go on and on earning money, purchasing bigger and bigger houses, having more diamonds, more gold, more money in the bank, bigger insurance policies, and all that.If you lose the ego your ambition disappears. Then you are no longer concerned with ambition, then you are no longer driving yourself mad. Of course you will be healthy, but who bothers about a healthy husband? You will not have ulcers, that’s right, but wives are not interested in whether you have ulcers or not. They are interested in having a bigger house, two houses – one in the country, one in the city. They are more interested in you having a yacht, they are more interested in you having power and prestige and pull. If you have ulcers, that is your business.You will not have ulcers once the ego disappears. The ulcers will disappear. Ulcers are the footprints of ambition. You may not have cancer anymore, the cancer may not be possible at all because cancer is chronic anxiety. When anxiety becomes too much for the body to tolerate, the body starts moving toward death. The body starts creating situations where it can die easily. Cancer is an effort to die – things have become unbearable, now there is no point in living. You want to die. Cancer simply shows your will to death. You may not be courageous enough to recognize it, but your unconscious is helping you to die easily – that’s why there is no cure for cancer. The man has really lost his joy of life. He has lost his joy of life in futile things.But wives are interested in having bigger houses, their own airplane – you can have cancer, that is okay, that you can afford. Children are also interested. They will drive the father mad.And the husband is also interested that his wife should be beautiful – not that he loves his wife, she is a showpiece, he takes her around. He can brag around that he has the most beautiful wife in the world. He does not care for her a bit. He may not have seen her face for many years. While making love to her he may be thinking of other women or he may be lost in a thousand and one thoughts. He wants the woman to remain young, he wants the woman to remain beautiful, he wants the woman to remain attractive so he can take her around society. She is something that helps his ego.The ego feels very hurt when you start moving with an ugly woman, naturally. “So this is what you have?” There is no other interest; not at all in the person of the woman, only in the personality – and that too for worldly ends.This is how things are. So if you start dropping your ego nobody is going to support you, nobody at all. Everybody will be against it because everybody’s interest is that you remain egoistic. Even people who teach you to be egoless – if you really drop the ego they will not feel very good, because then who are they going to teach to be egoless? Even the priest who goes on teaching you to be egoless will be disturbed if you really become egoless. He will not like the idea at all.I have heard about a dog who was a kind of preacher. He used to preach to other dogs of the town that God has made the dog in his own image. “Look,” he used to say, “even the word dog is just made of the same letters as God. Just see – it is God in reverse. Just a question of changing the direction and the dog can become God.”It appealed to other dogs. Only one thing was difficult: he was very against barking. The priests are always against something that is impossible to stop. Now, it is impossible for dogs to stop barking; that would be too much against their dog nature. They enjoy barking, that is their joy, that is their poetry, their dance, their celebration. When they feel happy, what else can they do? They bark. When it is the night of the full moon, they bark. The full-moon night is a great celebration for dogs. They go almost mad. It is so beautiful – what else can they do?He was against barking. The priests are very, very cunning in finding things that you cannot drop. They have found sex – you cannot drop it. They are against it. They have found taste – you cannot drop it. They are against it. They have found all those things that are difficult for you to drop. They are against them. You are not going to drop them and they will go on preaching to you, “Drop them!”He preached day and night. Wherever he found a dog barking he would immediately go and start preaching. The dogs were tired of it although they knew that he was right – it is useless to bark. They also knew it, there was no need to convince them. And he was very logical.But one day they decided, “Our leader has grown so old and we have never given him any joy; at least for one night we should not bark.” It was the great leader’s birthday so they thought, “This will be a good present. Let him be happy at least once. Tonight we are not going to bark at all.” They decided.It was a full-moon night and it was very difficult. It was almost impossible. They were just lying down in dark holes, holding themselves somehow – in yoga postures. Repressing, repressing – and the more they were repressing, the more the bark came to their throats.The leader went around and he looked, and not a single dog was barking. He became puzzled. What has happened? It was going to be a surprise gift, so nobody had told him. What has happened? Have dogs really changed? Then he became worried, “Then what will I do? If they have really stopped then my whole business has gone. Then what am I going to do?” He went around. He trusted dogs’ natures; they would bark. He knew them very well. His whole life he had been teaching and nobody had stopped barking. Sometimes he would find a few disciples who would stop for one or two days and then they would escape. They would say, “This is too much. We don’t want to go to God. Please let us remain dogs.”But what has happened? A miracle? He went around and around and he saw that dogs were not even visible and nobody was barking, and he could not teach. It was getting late, it was the middle of the night, and for the first time he himself felt a great urge to bark. In fact, it had not been felt before because he had to talk so much – morning, evening, night – that there was no energy left to bark. For the first time he had not found a single disciple to teach.The energy accumulated and a great urge to bark arose. He was surprised because he had not barked for many years. He had almost forgotten how to bark. A great thrill came to him. He said, “There are no dogs here, why should I not try? What is wrong in it?” And all those kinds of thoughts that come to everybody: “Once it is okay. It can’t be such a sin. Not all dogs are going to hell.” He knew that it was natural, but he had lived such an unnatural life, the life of a priest.So he went into a dark corner in a street and started barking. The moment he started barking, suddenly there was a great explosion all over the town. All the dogs started barking. Everybody was boiling within. When they saw that one had broken the vow, they thought that it was somebody from amongst themselves – they could not think that the priest would do this, that was impossible. They had known him for years. Somebody had broken the vow so there was no need to repress anymore. The whole town exploded into barking. It had never been like that!Then out came the leader and started teaching them again that this was not good: “It is only because of barking that we are not kings of the world, otherwise we would be the kings of the world. Just this one thing is destroying our potential.”The priests who go on telling you to drop your egos won’t be very happy if you drop them because the moment you drop your egos, you will be beyond the control of the priest.So you will have to move into this direction alone, all alone. Nobody will be helping you and everybody will be against you. But unless you understand that the ego is your hell, you cannot be blissful.Now this beautiful story:Hassan came upon Rabiya one day when she was sitting amongst a number of contemplators, and said…Rabiya al-Adabiya is one of the rarest women in the whole of human history. There are only a few names that can be compared to Rabiya, but still she remains rare, even amongst these few names – Meera, Theresa, Laila. These are the few names. But Rabiya still remains rare. She is a Kohinoor, the most precious woman ever born. Her insight is immense.Hassan is also a famous mystic, but at a very much lower stage. And there are many stories about Hassan and Rabiya.One day Rabiya is sitting inside her hut. It is early morning, and Hassan comes to see her. The sun is rising and the birds are singing and the trees are dancing. It is a really beautiful morning.And from the outside he calls her forth, “Rabiya, what are you doing inside? Come out! God has given birth to such a beautiful morning. What are you doing inside?”And Rabiya laughs and she says, “Hassan, outside is only God’s creation, inside is God himself. Why don’t you come in? Yes, the morning is beautiful, but it is nothing compared with the creator who creates all the mornings. Yes, those birds are singing beautifully, but they are nothing compared with the song of God. That happens only when you are in. Why don’t you come in? Are you not yet finished with the outer, with the without, with the outside? When will you be able to come in?”Such stories, small, but of tremendous significance…One evening people saw her searching for something on the street in front of her hut. They gathered together – the poor old woman was searching for something. They asked, “What is the matter? What are you searching for?”She said, “I have lost my needle.” So they also started helping.Then somebody asked, “Rabiya, the street is big and night is just descending and soon there will be no light and a needle is such a small thing – unless you tell us exactly where it has fallen it will be difficult to find.”Rabiya said, “Don’t ask that. Don’t bring that question up at all. If you want to help me, help, otherwise don’t help, but don’t bring up that question.”They all stopped – all those who were searching – and they asked, “What is the matter? Why can’t we ask this? If you don’t say where it has fallen, how can we be of any help to you?”She said, “The needle has fallen inside my house.”They said, “Then have you gone mad? If the needle has fallen inside the house, why are you searching here?”She said, “Because the light is here. Inside the house there is no light.”Somebody said, “Even if the light is here, how can we find the needle if it has not been lost here? The right way would be to bring light inside the house so you can find the needle.”And Rabiya laughed, “You are such clever people about small things. When are you going to use your intelligence for your inner life? I have seen you all searching outside and I know perfectly well, I know from my own experience, that what you are searching for is lost within. The bliss that you are searching for, you have lost within.“And you are searching outside. Your logic is that because your eyes can see easily outside, and your hands can grope easily outside – because the light is outside – that’s why you are searching outside.“If you are really intelligent,” Rabiya said, “then use your intelligence. Why are you searching for bliss in the outside world? Have you lost it there?”They stood dumbfounded and Rabiya disappeared into her house.So many stories like that – of immense insight.This story is also beautiful. Hassan came upon Rabiya one day when she was sitting amongst a number of contemplators… Contemplation in Sufism is zikr; it means people sitting in deep remembrance of God – not repeating any name, not saying anything verbally, not even using a mantra, just sitting silently, absorbing. And when you are around a mystic saint like Rabiya, what else can you do? The fountain is flowing, you can drink as much as you want. They must have been drinking the energy that Rabiya was, they must have been drinking the light, they must have been drinking the silence, the presence. That’s what contemplation is in Sufism.The English word does not connote the right meaning. Contemplation in English means thinking, contemplating. In Sufism it does not mean thinking at all. Those people were not sitting there thinking about something. They were not thinking at all, they were simply being there – which in India we call satsang, just being in the presence of the master. One is not doing anything in particular, one is just in the presence – open, ready to receive, with no idea of what is going to happen, with no expectation either, just open. If something comes from the master, one is ready to receive it.The baraka, the grace, is always flowing from the master. If you are ready you will receive it. If you are open you will be filled by it. If you are closed you will miss it. The master’s very existence is baraka, grace. Vibrations are constantly spreading around his being. And it is not only that you have to be in the physical presence of the master. If you love, then you can be on another planet and it will not make any difference. You can drink from your master’s fountain wherever you are.This is the fountain Jesus talks about.One day Jesus comes upon a well. He is tired. And he asks a woman who is drawing water from the well, “I am thirsty, give me some water to drink.”The woman looks at him and she says, “But I come from a very low strata of the society and I think people like you don’t even like to touch us. And my pots and my hands have already touched the water.”Jesus laughs and he says, “Don’t be worried. Give me your water. If you give me your water I will also give you some water. I will give you some water – water of such quality that your thirst will be quenched forever.”The woman looked at Jesus. This statement was so sudden, she was taken aback. The statement was so sudden, so absurd, that it must have broken her sleep a little. And when a Jesus, a man like Jesus, asks a woman at the well to give him a little water, it is not really that he asks for some water for himself – he simply wants to make a contact with this woman.In fact, a man like Jesus needs nothing from you. Even if sometimes he asks for something from you it is just in order to give to you, it is just in order to give you something, something immensely valuable.And the woman understood it. She bowed down and touched the feet of Jesus and she ran into the town and she called to everybody in the town, “Come, I have been drawing water from the well for my whole life and I have come across a man who has quenched my thirst forever. Just looking into his eyes it has happened. Come and see this man!”The woman became an apostle, she became a messenger. The very presence of Jesus, just a look into his eyes, transformed the quality of the woman. She became awakened.In Zen this kind of awakening is called satori.When Rabiya is sitting with a few meditators… It would be better to call them meditators rather than contemplators. Even the word meditation is not very good because again, in English that means thinking – to meditate upon. In English you don’t have a term to translate dhyana into because nothing like that has existed in the West – only thinking, concentration, meditation, contemplation, nothing like dhyana. Dhyana means a state of no mind; dhyana means sitting silently doing nothing; dhyana means a gap, a thoughtless gap, an interval where no thought is moving. When thoughts are not moving, the master can move in you. When thoughts have stopped, for even a single moment, suddenly the energy of the master rushes toward you. That is called baraka.Hassan came upon Rabiya one day when she was sitting amongst a number of contemplators, and said, “I have the capacity of walking on water. Come, let us both go onto that water yonder, and sitting upon it, carry out a spiritual discussion.”Now, this is absolutely stupid of Hassan. But he was a man like Satya Sai Baba. He was more interested in power trips. He must have learned how to walk on water, now he wanted to show it to Rabiya. He wanted to have some certificate from Rabiya. He wanted Rabiya to recognize that he had become a great mystic or something. He had not seen the people who were sitting there, he had not seen what they were doing there. He was more interested in showing some power that he had attained.When powers start happening in your spiritual growth, the greatest courage is needed not to show them.It is said of a disciple of Zen master Rinzai that a disciple of another religious master was talking to him. And the other master’s disciple said, “Our master is a man of miracles. He can do anything he wants. I have seen him doing many miracles, I have witnessed them myself. What is the great thing about your master? What miracles can he do?”And the disciple of Rinzai said, “The greatest miracle that my master can do is not to do miracles.”Meditate on it. “The greatest miracle my master can do is not to do miracles.” When miraculous powers start happening, only the weaklings will do them. The stronger one will not do them because he knows that now this is another trap. Again the world is trying to pull him back.This is the last trap. If you can avoid psychic energies, silently witnessing, if you can pass them by without being entangled by them, without being imprisoned by them, only then do you arrive home. It is a great ensnarement.Hassan must have stumbled upon this, now he wants to show… Naturally he must have come to Rabiya, the greatest mystic of those days.“I have the capacity of walking on water. Come, let us both go onto that water yonder…” And he may be thinking deep inside that maybe even Rabiya does not have this power.“…and sitting upon it, carry out a spiritual discussion.” Now, there is no possibility of any spiritual discussion ever. Spirituality knows nothing of discussion. Spirituality knows of dialogue, but it knows nothing of discussion. Spirituality knows no argument. Sufism has no argument in it. It has knowledge, but it has no argument in it. A master can share what he knows, but there is no discussion in it.While I was traveling in India for many years it used to happen almost every day. People, knowledgeable people, would come – pundits, scholars, learned men – and they would say, “We want to discuss something with you.”And my response was always, “If you know, you tell me, share with me. I will be happy and glad to receive it. If you don’t know, then I know something, I can share it with you. Then receive it. If we both know then there is no need to talk at all. If we both don’t know, what is the point of talking? Discussion is meaningless. These are the only possibilities: either we both don’t know, then we can go on arguing and argument will not bring any conclusion. That’s how man has argued down the ages – great argumentation, to no end. Or we both know, then there is no point in saying anything.”Kabir and Farid, two mystics, met and sat silently for forty-eight hours. Not a single word was uttered. There was no need. Both looked into each other’s eyes and found the same reality. Not a single word. Yes, that will happen. If Jesus comes to meet Buddha, that will happen. If Zarathustra comes to see Lao Tzu, that will happen. What is there to say? You know, the other knows, there is no way to talk, there is nothing to talk about.The third possibility is that one knows and one does not know, then whoever knows… That has been my approach. I used to say to those people, “If you know, just tell me. I will receive it. If you don’t know, then don’t be foolish and argue. I am ready to share whatever I know, then you receive it. But I don’t see that there is any point in discussion.”This Hassan must be an egoistic fellow. First he wants to show the miraculous power he has attained, next he wants to discuss. Truth is. You cannot argue about it. Either you know or you don’t know. There is no other way. These are the only two simple alternatives – either you know or you don’t know. If you know, you know; if you don’t know, you don’t know.Rabiya said, “If you wish to separate yourself from this august company, why do you not come with me so that we may fly into the air and sit there talking?”She must have seen the foolishness of this man. She must have seen the ego functioning in this man. Now he had stumbled upon a toy. It always happens – when you stumble upon a toy you think you have come upon truth.It happened in Ramakrishna’s time…Ramakrishna had a disciple, Vivekananda, who felt great power the first time he had a satori. And in the ashram of Ramakrishna there was a very simple innocent man whose name was Kalu. He was so innocent and so simple, so childlike, that Vivekananda always used to tease him. Vivekananda was an intellectual type, argumentative. And this Kalu was a simple villager.And Kalu used to worship: his room was a temple and in his room there were almost hundreds of gods – in India you can purchase as many gods as you want. Any stone can become a god; just put red color on it and it becomes a god. So he had almost three hundred gods in his small room. There was not even any space left for him to sleep. And he had to worship these three hundred gods every day; it used to take six to eight hours. By the evening he was finished with the worshipping, then he would take his food.Vivekananda was always saying, “This is stupid, this is foolish. Throw all these gods into the Ganges. Be finished. This is nonsense. The god is within.”But Kalu was such a simple man that he said, “I love those stones. They are beautiful. Don’t you see this stone? See how beautiful it is. And I have found it by the Ganges; the Ganges has given it to me. Now how can I throw it back into the Ganges? No, I cannot do that.”The day Vivekananda attained his first satori, he was sitting in another room just close by Kalu’s room. With the first power rush the idea came into his mind that Kalu must still be worshipping. It was afternoon, but he must be worshipping. So just to have fun he thought of an idea, he projected an idea into Kalu’s mind from his room: “Kalu, now take all your gods and throw them into the Ganges.” He felt that the power was there. He could project the thought and it would be received.Ramakrishna was sitting outside. He saw this whole game – what Vivekananda had done. He must have seen the thought being projected. But he waited. Then Kalu came out with a big bundle; he was carrying all the gods in one big bag. Ramakrishna stopped him and he said, “Wait, where are you going?”Kalu said, “An idea came into my mind that this is foolish. I am going to throw all these gods away. I am finished with them.”Ramakrishna said, “Wait. Call Vivekananda.” Vivekananda was called and Ramakrishna shouted very angrily and said, “Is this the way to use power?” And he told Kalu, “Go back to your room, put your gods back in their places. This is not your idea, it is Vivekananda’s.”Then Kalu said, “I felt as if somebody was hitting me, like a stone, as if it had come from the outside. But I am a poor simple man, I didn’t know what was happening. And the idea took such possession of me and I was trembling with fear – what am I doing? But I was almost possessed.”Ramakrishna was so angry with Vivekananda that he said, “Now I will keep your key. You will only receive this key just before you are dying, just three days before. You will never have any more satoris again.”And this is how it happened. Vivekananda didn’t have another satori again. He cried and wept for years but he didn’t have another satori, he could not have. He tried hard. And then Ramakrishna died. When Ramakrishna was dying Vivekananda was crying and saying to him, “Give my key back.”Ramakrishna said, “You will get it just three days before you die – because you seem to be dangerous. Such power cannot be used in such a way. You are not pure enough yet. Wait. Go on crying and you go on meditating.”And exactly three days before Vivekananda died he had another satori. But then he knew his death had come, only three days were left.This Hassan thinks he has attained a great power. Rabiya is joking. Rabiya says:“If you wish to separate yourself from this august company, why do you not come with me so that we may fly into the air and sit there talking?”Hassan said, “I cannot do that, for the power which you mention is not one which I possess.”Remember, you can possess power, but you cannot possess God, so power can never be spiritual. With God you have to be possessed by him, you cannot possess him. If you possess something then the ego will be there. Who is this one who claims that “I possess”? “I possess money, I possess a political post, or I possess spiritual power” – but the I continues to possess. The I is possessiveness. Through possessiveness the ego exists. That’s why the ego goes on possessing. It wants to possess as much as possible. It wants to possess all. It is never satisfied. Whatever you possess, the moment you possess, it becomes meaningless. Your hankering for more – it is always for more. You can possess the whole world and still you will be hankering for more.It is said that an astrologer once saw Alexander’s hand and by seeing his hand he said, “One thing, sir, I have to tell you. You will be victorious and you will become the emperor of the whole world, but remember, there is only one world to win.”And it is said that Alexander became very sad with the idea that there is only one world to win. Then what will he do? What will happen to that “more,” that mind that continuously hankers? He has not yet been victorious; there is just an idea that one day he will be victorious and he will be the emperor of the whole world. The astrologer said, “But then you will be in difficulty because there is only one world, sir, so what will you do then? Where will you project your ‘more’? Where will you put your hope? How will you desire? Without desire you will be stuck.”This is how it goes on. You can possess and then there is the “more.”Immediately Rabiya made him aware that he did not possess the power to fly in the air. He immediately felt inferior. Now that bragging was no longer there. Suddenly he was back on the earth. He said: “I cannot do that, for the power which you mention is not one which I possess.” He had become poor again. Rabiya punctured his balloon just by creating “more” in it. The same was done by the astrologer. He must have been a very, very wise man. He punctured Alexander – there was no other world.It is said that in the great Emperor Akbar’s time there was a great wise man, Beebal. One day the great emperor came into his court, drew a line on the wall, and said to his courtiers, “You have to do something. Find a way to make this line that I have drawn on the wall smaller – but you are not allowed to touch it. It has to be made smaller without touching it.”It looked impossible. How to make it small if you can’t touch it? You could make it small by touching, by reducing it. And then came Beebal and he drew another line just below it, a bigger line, without touching the first line, and it became small – comparatively, relatively.What is small? Nothing is small in itself and nothing is big in itself. It is all comparative.Rabiya drew a bigger line. She said, “If you really want to do it then we should go into the air.” She drew a big line. Hassan must have felt very poor. In that moment the ego could not brag. He felt hurt. He said, “That power I don’t possess.”Rabiya said, “Your power of remaining still in the water is one which is possessed by fish.”It is nothing very valuable – otherwise all the fish would be spiritual saints.“My capacity of flying in the air can be done by a fly.”So that too is not much, otherwise all the stupid flies would be great buddhas.“These abilities are no part of real truth – they may become the foundation of self-esteem and competitiveness, not spirituality.”This is a great lesson to be remembered. If anything of competition enters your mind, you are falling away from godliness because with competition, ego is created. Competitiveness is nothing but an effort to create the ego.Yes, you can have great self-esteem, but the greater your self-esteem is, the farther away you are from the universal self. The greater you think you are, the farther astray you have gone. And remember, I am not saying that you should start saying, “I am very small, I am just the dust underneath your feet.” No, I am not saying that – because again that is a claim.A real spiritual man has no idea of whether he is big or small, he has no idea at all.When the Emperor Wu asked Bodhidharma, “Who are you?” Bodhidharma said, “I don’t know.” This is a spiritual answer. “I don’t know.” Great silence. Indefinable silence. Utter silence. “I don’t know.”The man of spirituality does not know who he is. There is no way to define. In fact, he is no more. He has become part of the whole, he has disappeared into this great orchestra. He is a simple note in this great rich orchestra. He is just a small color in this colorful existence. He is no longer separate. He is not and he possesses nothing – neither power of this world nor power of the other world. He possesses nothing. He is possessed by God.That’s why Sufism insists on surrender. Surrender and be possessed by God. Don’t try to possess God, don’t try to grab God. Many start with the idea that they have to possess God. Many seekers move with this tremendous ego: that they have to search, their ego is at stake. But they will never find. You can find God only when you have disappeared. When the seeker is no more, suddenly only God is left. And then you start laughing because God has always been there. Just because you were so much of a seeker, you were so full of yourself, you could not see him. He has always been there. He is the reality. You cannot possess him. You cannot have God in your fist. If you have a fist you will go on missing him. You can have him only with open hands. He is there when your heart is like an open hand and not like a fist. Then you have him. Only then he is.This is a great lesson to be remembered. You have to understand the ways of the ego. This Hassan has fallen into a subtle trap of the ego again. He has left the world, now he possesses spiritual power. Now he can walk on the water.Once a man came to Ramakrishna. He was a great yogi. And he declared the same thing to Ramakrishna. He said, “Can you walk on the water? I can.”And Ramakrishna laughed and he said, “What is the point of it? How much effort and how much energy and how much time did you have to waste to learn this?”He said, “Eighteen years.”Ramakrishna said, “This is foolish. Just by giving two paise to the boatman he takes me to the other side. Just a thing worth two paise – eighteen years? Are you stupid or something?”This has always been the approach of a real spiritual person like Rabiya or Ramakrishna. What is the point? Even if you can walk on the water, what is the point in it? How is it relevant with your life problems? How is it going to help you? How is it going to make you happier? Just by walking on the water, will you become happy? So why are you not happy while you are walking on the earth? Just by flying in the air, will you become happy? So who is preventing you? Why can’t you become happy right now?This is not the spiritual approach, this is the egoistic approach. Beware of the ego because the ego is the only wall between you and God.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-1-10/

The first question:Osho,Surely meditation is for mystics. Why do you propose it for ordinary people and their children?First, I have never come across an ordinary person; they do not exist. They are only created by egoistic people. The egoist has to create the ordinary – that is the only way the ego can exist, persist. Not a single human being is ordinary because each human being is so unique. Each human being is created by existence – how can he be ordinary? Existence never creates the ordinary. All its creation is rare. Each individual is so unique that he is never repeated. You never were before, you will never be again. You cannot find anybody who is just like you.Forget about human beings. Not even animals, not even trees, not even pebbles on a seashore, not even two pebbles, are alike. Wherever you find the signature of existence, it is always the original, never the ordinary.Existence is not a manufacturer, it is a creator. It does not manufacture people like cars on an assembly line. You can have many Ford cars exactly alike – that’s the difference between a machine and a man. A machine can be duplicated, a man cannot be duplicated, and the moment you start duplicating, imitating, you become more like a machine – then you are no longer respectful toward your humanity. That’s how robopathology is created.You ask me, “Surely meditation is for mystics.” It is for mystics, surely, but everybody is a born mystic – because everybody carries a great mystery within him which has to be realized, everybody carries a great potentiality which has to be actualized. Everybody is born with a future. Everybody has hope. What do you mean by a mystic? A mystic is one who is trying to realize the mystery of life, who is moving into the unknown, who is going into the uncharted, whose life is a life of adventure, exploration.But every child starts that way – with awe, with wonder, with great inquiry in his heart. Every child is a mystic. Somewhere on the way of your so-called growing you lose contact with your inner possibility of being a mystic and you become a businessman, or you become a clerk, or you become a collector, or you become a minister. You become something else. And you start thinking that you are this. And when you believe it, it is so.My effort here is to destroy your wrong notions about yourself and to liberate your mysticism. Meditation is a way of liberating your mysticism and it is for everybody – without any exception. It knows no exception.“Surely meditation is for mystics. Why do you propose it for ordinary people and their children?” There is no one ordinary, and children are the most capable. They are natural mystics. And before they are destroyed by the society, before they are destroyed by other robots, by other corrupted people, it is better to help them to know something of meditation.Meditation is not conditioning because meditation is not indoctrination. Meditation is not giving them any creed. If you teach a child to become Christian you have to give him a doctrine, you have to force him to believe things which naturally look absurd. You have to tell the child that Jesus was born of a virgin mother – that becomes a fundamental. Now you are destroying the natural intelligence of the child. If he does not believe you, you are angry, and of course you are powerful and you can punish the child. You can torture the child in many ways. If he believes you, it goes against his intrinsic intelligence. It looks like nonsense to him, but he has to compromise with you. And once he has compromised he starts losing his intelligence, he becomes stupid.If you teach a child to be a Mohammedan, then again you will have to teach him a thousand and one absurdities. And so is the case with Hinduism and with all kinds of creeds, dogmas.If you teach a child meditation you are not indoctrinating him. You don’t say he has to believe anything, you simply invite him to an experiment in no-thought. No-thought is not a doctrine, it is an experience. And children are very, very capable because they are very close to the source. They have just come from God! They still remember something of that mystery. They have just come from the other world, they have not yet forgotten it completely. Sooner or later they will forget, but still the fragrance is around them. That’s why all children look so beautiful, so graceful. Have you ever seen an ugly child?Then what happens to all these beautiful children? Where do they disappear to? Later in life it is very rare to find beautiful people. Then what happens to all the beautiful children? Why do they turn into ugly people? What accident, what calamity happens on the way?They start losing their grace the day they start losing their intelligence. They start losing their natural rhythm, their natural elegance, and they start learning plastic behavior. They no longer laugh spontaneously, they no longer cry spontaneously, they no longer dance spontaneously. You have forced them into a cage, a straitjacket. You have imprisoned them.The chains are very subtle, they are not visible. The chains are of thought – Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. You have chained the child and he cannot see the chains, so he will not be able to see how he is chained. And he will suffer his whole life. It is such an imprisonment. It is not like throwing a man into jail; it is creating a jail around a man, so wherever he goes the jail continues around him. He can go to the Himalayas and sit in a cave and he will remain a Hindu, he will remain a Christian, and he will still have thoughts.Meditation is a way to go within yourselves to that depth where thoughts don’t exist, so it is not indoctrination. It is not teaching you anything in fact, it is just making you alert to your inner capacity to be without thought, to be without mind. And the best time is when the child is still uncorrupted.The second question:Osho,Is there anybody in the world who is perfect?Perfection, the idea of perfection, is an ugly idea. A perfectionist is a neurotic. Perfectionism is a psychological disease.So the first thing to be remembered is that I am not for any kind of perfection. I want you to be whole, but not perfect; I want you to be total, but not perfect. Avoid perfection because perfection means death; perfection means that now there is no more growth. Perfection means an existential cul-de-sac – you have come to the very end of your tether. Now there is nowhere to go, you are stuck and stuck forever: you are perfect.Just think of the horrible situation – that you are stuck, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no possibility to grow, no direction to flow. You are just there like a rock.Life is a flow. Imperfection is beautiful. Be total, and never strive for perfection. What is the difference? When I say, “Be total,” I mean that whatever you do, do it totally, not perfectly – these are two different dimensions. You have been taught to be perfect.For example, if you are angry the perfectionist will say, “This is not right. Drop anger.” Anger cannot be allowed in a perfect human being; a perfect human being cannot be angry. That’s why in India the so-called religious people cannot respect Jesus very much because there are moments when he became angry. He became angry in the temple. He turned over the boards of the money-changers, all alone he threw them all out of the temple. He was really angry. Now, Hindus will say, “This is not perfection. Jesus getting angry? This simply means he is an imperfect human being.”Perfectionism will say “No anger.” In fact, the perfectionist’s idea is no love either – because if you are loving that too shows some need. So Jainas don’t say that Mahavira was loving, they simply say he was nonviolent. Now this is a very ugly way to describe such a loving man – to describe him through a negative, just to say that he was nonviolent, that he would not hurt anybody. That’s all. But he would not love. How could he love? He was perfect. He had no need for any human relationship, all his needs had disappeared.Love is a need. You want to love and you want to be loved. This is how imperfection goes. Mahavira is perfect, he cannot love. So Jainas depict him as being almost cold. That coldness is the coldness of death.Perfectionism goes on denying all that is human. Perfectionism is a kind of inhuman ideal. You cannot think of Buddha crying, you cannot visualize tears coming to Buddha’s eyes.It happened that a great Zen master died, and his disciple – the chief disciple – started crying. Thousands of people had gathered. They had all believed that this disciple had attained enlightenment and now he was crying. So a few of them told him, “This doesn’t look good. It goes against your prestige. People think that you have become enlightened and you are crying! What will they think about you?”The disciple said, “I can drop being enlightened, but I cannot be untrue.”They said, “But you have been telling us that the soul never dies. So if your master is still there, why are you crying?”The disciple said, “I am not crying for the soul – the soul is eternal – but I am crying for his body. His body was so beautiful, and it will never be again. Can’t I even cry for it? I will never see my master’s body again!”Now, the traditional Buddhist will not accept this – that an enlightened person can cry. These are the perfectionist ideals; you have to take away all that is human, then what is left behind is just a marble statue.I teach totality. If you are crying, then be total in it, then let your whole heart cry. Then don’t be so-so, don’t be lukewarm, just go into it. In that moment let crying be your total being. Let tears come from every pore of your being. If you are angry, then be totally angry – as Jesus was angry in the temple. Whatever happens, be total in it!And now I would like to say something very paradoxical: if you can be totally in anger, anger by and by disappears. If you can be totally in anything, there comes a great transformation; the whole energy changes because you start understanding what anger is. It is not that you drop it by conscious effort, deliberately, but simply because of understanding it is no longer relevant. Or, if sometimes it is needed there is no hindrance either; you can be angry. I love Jesus because he could be angry. He was so human. Buddha looks inhuman – at least the way he is depicted is inhuman. Mahavira is utterly inhuman – at least the way he is described in the Jaina scriptures. He looks as if he has no heart.But that is the goal of the perfectionist. Jesus is more human. Many times Jesus says in the Bible “I am the son of man.” Sometimes he says “I am the son of God” and sometimes “I am the son of man.” He says both things. He is saying, “I am both – as perfect as God and as imperfect as man. As high as God and as low as man. I am a bridge between these two.”I teach you totality. Be total whatever you are doing. If you love, love totally. If you are angry, then be totally in anger. Cold anger is a sin! Hot anger is perfectly human. Cold anger has to be avoided. But that’s what happens when you have the ideal, the perfect ideal of not being angry – that’s what happens. Anger is there because you have never been able to understand it. How can you understand it if you have never been totally angry?Only in a total flame of anger does one understand, does one encounter it. So you go on repressing. On the surface you keep a mask that you are not angry, deep inside you go on boiling, ready to explode like a volcano. So what will you do? You will have to learn how to remain cold on the surface, ice-cold. And if you are ice-cold on the surface, you will go on doing things which are angry – only you will not show your anger. And in a hot anger there is something beautiful: it is a man in his energy, in his radiance. In a cold anger there is only death. If somebody gets angry and hits you, you can forgive him; but if somebody remains perfectly cold and hits you, you will be never able to forgive him.That’s why a distinction is made even in the courts. If a man became too angry, enraged, and murdered somebody, his crime is not that big. But if a man remained cold, calculating, arranged everything perfectly and did the whole thing in a mathematical way, planned it in detail beforehand, then he is the most dangerous man. It was not on the spur of the moment, it was a planned thing. For months he calculated when to commit the murder, how to commit the murder, how to commit it perfectly so he would not be caught. All over the world courts differentiate – this man is really dangerous, this man is really a criminal.Sometimes you do something in the spur of the moment. You were not really trying to kill the other; it may have happened just accidentally – yes, you became angry. Remember, I am not teaching anger, I am simply teaching totality. Through totality anger disappears, but you never become perfect, you always remain growing. Remain growing.You ask me, “Is there anybody in the world who is perfect?” I am reminded of this small story.At a revival meeting the evangelist exclaimed, “Who is the most perfect man? Is there such a being? If anybody has ever seen the perfect man, let him stand now.”A small nervous man rose in the rear of the hall. The evangelist gazed at him in astonishment. “Do you mean to say, sir, that you know who the perfect man is?”“I certainly do!”“Who may he be?”“My wife’s first husband!”That is the only way to find a perfect man – your wife’s first husband.The perfect man is brought in only to condemn somebody – hence your wife’s first husband. She wants to condemn you, so she creates an image of her first husband as the perfect man. Then in comparison she can condemn you.The priests have imagined Jesus, Buddha, Mahavira, as perfect men – to condemn ordinary humanity, to condemn natural human beings, to condemn you. Buddha was growing to the very last moment of his life; on the very verge of death he was growing. Growth is life, aliveness. But the Buddha imagined by the Buddhist is not the real Buddha, it is an image painted perfect in order to condemn you. You can only be condemned if there is an image to be compared with, otherwise how can you be condemned? Once the perfect man is painted then you are in trouble. You will start feeling guilty. How am I to become a Buddha? When? And you can never become a “Buddha,” because even Buddha was not like that! Nobody has ever been like that. That is just in the scriptures. It is a strategy of the priests.That’s why when a buddha is alive you are not so interested in him. The priest is not interested at all. People are not so interested when a buddha is alive because he is alive with all his imperfections. Life needs imperfections. He is fallible! And you will go and you will have old ideas that Krishna was perfect and Rama was perfect and Moses was perfect, and you will compare this buddha with them – and he is still alive so he is still imperfect. And those comparisons will tell you, “No, he may be a good man, but he has not yet arrived.”Once he is gone then the painters are at work, then the dreamers and the poets gather together, and the scholars, and they create a perfect buddha. Unreal – so unreal that it sometimes becomes ridiculous. Even the size: they cannot depict a buddha as six feet tall. How can a buddha be six feet tall? – he has to be bigger than all human beings.In Sri Lanka there is a temple in Kandy where a tooth of Buddha is worshipped. It is preserved. And it is not the tooth of Buddha, it is not even the tooth of a human being. It must belong to some ape – it is so big! If Buddha had that kind of tooth he would have been a very ugly man. But it is worshipped, and you cannot point out to them what a ridiculous thing they are doing. This is not a human tooth. Now scientists have been working on it and they have proved that this is not human – but who listens? They say Buddha was so big – the size!If you go into Jaina scriptures you will be surprised. Their ancient masters, old ancient tirthankaras, are depicted as a thousand feet, two thousand feet, three thousand feet high. And they lived for thousands of years! Just false ideas. But why have these false ideas been created? To condemn you. The priest needs some way to make you feel guilty.Mahavira does not perspire. He stands naked in the hot north Indian sun and he does not perspire. How can Mahavira perspire? No perspiration ever comes. He never has to relieve himself, he does not defecate or urinate – everything simply disappears inside him. This seems to be the most chronic case of constipation. He never goes! How can the priest afford, how can the priest allow Mahavira to do such ordinary things like sitting on a toilet? It will look so absurd. Just imagine…Mahavira sitting on a toilet? It doesn’t look good, it doesn’t look good at all. He looks perfectly good in a yoga posture sitting under a tree. Foolish ideas. And this is how all thinking has continued down the centuries.Remember, life is growth. Growth is possible only when you are imperfect. There is nothing wrong in being imperfect. There is no need to try to become perfect. If you try to become perfect you will create anguish for yourself, anxiety; you will create great tension for yourself; you will start living in hell.The very idea of perfection brings the future into the mind. You cannot be perfect right now. You can be total right now, but you cannot be perfect right now. For perfection you will have to work hard – many, many lives; one life will not be enough. Then after thousands of lives you may be perfect. So perfection is in the future, and you can only go on postponing. Today you have to live like an imperfect human being and tomorrow you can hope that you will become a perfect being. You remain the same. Your idea of perfection simply makes you guilty, it does not transform you.The idea of totality transforms you immediately because it can be done right now. If you are listening to me, listen totally. If you don’t want to listen to me, don’t come at all. Nobody is forcing you to come – then be somewhere else. Sit in a movie house or in a hotel, but be total there. Sitting in a movie house, don’t think about me; sitting here, don’t think about the movie house. Wherever you are, be totally in tune there, and then you start growing fast and your life starts becoming richer. Each moment of totality brings new treasures.But I will tell you one thing again: you will never become perfect, you will always remain open to more growth. That is the meaning when we say that God is eternal. Let me say it to you – even God is not perfect. A perfect God is a dead God. God is also growing. God is exploding every moment into new creativity, new songs, new joy. God is evolving.Because of the Christian concept of perfection, there was great conflict between the idea of evolution and the Christian Church. Christians thought that when God created the world, a perfect God was bound to create a perfect world, so how could there be evolution? That was the basic problem between the church and the Darwinians: “How can God create an imperfect world, and then it starts evolving? No. God has created it perfect. It is the same world, now there is no need to grow, it cannot grow. How can it be better? It is the most perfect world as it is.”Darwin brought in this concept of evolution. Christians were very angry with him; he was destroying the very roots of their perfect God and the perfect world. But by and by they had to accept defeat because the idea of evolution is a true idea.Darwin never dared to say that God is also evolving, but I would like to say to you that it is not only that the world is evolving, even God is evolving. It is not only that the creation is evolving, the creator is also evolving. In fact, everything goes on evolving and there is no end to it. The journey is eternal. There will never come a moment when things will stop and somebody will declare, “Now everything has become perfect.” And it is good that perfection is not possible. Feel blessed that perfection is not possible.The third question:Osho,I can't find the synthesis between surrendering and taking responsibility for oneself or growing mature and independent.First, you are not, not yet, so you cannot take any responsibility for yourself. First you have to be, to take responsibility for yourself. You are carrying only a false idea of the ego; that ego is not you. And the true you has nothing to do with the ego.The idea of surrendering creates a problem in the mind only because you can’t make a distinction between the real self and the unreal self. When you surrender, you surrender only the unreal; the real cannot be surrendered. You surrender only the ego, you don’t surrender the self. And by surrendering the ego you become yourself for the first time. It is not paradoxical, it is not contradictory, because you never were the ego. That was just an illusion in the mind.Who are you? Do you know exactly who you are? If you try to ponder over it you will find that you don’t know, and all that you know means nothing – that you belong to a certain family, that this is your name, that this is your caste, that this is your religion. That makes no sense at all. It does not say anything about you. You can change your church, and one day you can come across some papers that prove that your father was not your father, that somebody else was your father – but still you will remain you. One day you can come to know that the woman who was pretending to be your mother was not your real mother, you were adopted by her when you were a child. But that will not make any change in you; you remain the same. So who are you? Your name can be changed very easily and you will not change.So there is something inside you that you are not yet aware of. By surrendering, you surrender only this so-called ego, this false idea of oneself. And when you surrender it, the possibility to be your real self opens. So there is no contradiction really, it is only apparent.You ask, “I can’t find the synthesis between surrendering and taking responsibility for oneself…” There is no need for any synthesis because there is no contradiction. They are not opposite, they are one phenomenon. You surrender the false and you become the real. By surrendering the false you become the real. And only then can you take responsibility for yourself, only then can you grow mature.But one thing: you ask, “I can’t find the synthesis between surrendering and taking responsibility for oneself or growing mature and independent.” Maturity knows nothing of independence. Immaturity knows two things: dependence and independence. Both are immature states of mind. Maturity knows interdependence. In maturity you disappear so utterly that you become part of the whole. A mature person is neither dependent nor independent. A mature person has no claim to any separation from existence, he is one with existence.Please don’t try to create any synthesis. Just look into the fact that you are not yet.A man came to Gurdjieff and said, “I would like to serve humanity.”Gurdjieff looked at him and laughed. He said, “But where are you? I don’t see you anywhere. I am sorry to say it to you, but you don’t exist! Who is going to serve humanity?”A similar case is reported in Buddhist scriptures.A man came to Buddha and said, “I have so much money. I have so much power.” He was one of the richest men of those days. He said, “Just tell me how to serve people, how to serve humanity.”And it is said Buddha became very silent. He closed his eyes. The man was disturbed, confused. He became restless. He asked, “Why have you closed your eyes, and why do you look so sad?”Buddha opened his eyes and he said, “I feel great compassion for you. You want to serve humanity, and you are not. First be!”That is a basic requirement: First be! By surrendering, for the first time you attain that being-hood. You surrender all that you are not, you surrender only the false, you surrender only the persona, you surrender only the mask, you surrender that which you think you have but you don’t have. And by surrendering that which you think you have and you don’t have, you attain that which you already have and you have always had. The false has to disappear for the real to be revealed. This is growth.But growth never makes you independent. The very idea of independence is still a hangover from those days of dependence. You are still thinking in terms of dependence or independence. A mature person is not separate, he is not an island. He has merged with this infinite continent of existence.The fourth question:Osho,Where can one always find happiness?See the dictionary under the letter H – only there will you always find happiness. In life things are very mixed up. Day and night are together, so are happiness and unhappiness. Life and death are together, so is everything. Life is rich because of polar opposites. The very idea that one would like to be happy forever is stupid. The very idea will only create unhappiness and nothing else. You will become more and more miserable because more and more you will be missing your so-called eternal happiness. Your greed is too much.Then who is the happy person? The happy person is not one who is always happy. The happy person is one who is happy even when there is unhappiness. Try to understand it. The happy person is one who understands life and accepts its polarities. He knows success is possible only because failure is also possible. So when failure comes he accepts it.I remember an incident of my childhood. A great wrestler had come to my town. My town was very interested in wrestling, so the whole town had gathered. I have seen many people and many wrestlers in my life, but he was really rare. He had something of Zen in him.For ten days the wrestling continued, and every day he defeated a famous wrestler. Finally he was declared to be the winner. The day he was declared to be the winner he went around and touched the feet of all the ten people whom he had defeated.Everybody was puzzled about why he did it. I was a small child, I went to him and I asked him, “Why did you do that? This is strange.”He said, “It is only because of them that I am victorious. It is only because of them. If they had not been defeated, if they had not allowed themselves to be defeated, I would not be victorious. So I owe it to them. Without them, how could I be victorious? My victory depends on their defeat, my victory is not independent of them. So really I feel greatly thankful to them. There was only one possibility: either I was to be defeated or they were to be defeated. And they are good people, they accepted defeat.”This is a very Sufi or Zen idea. Things are interdependent: failure–success, happiness–unhappiness, summer–winter, youth–old age, beauty–ugliness: all are interdependent, they exist together. And the man who starts seeking one pole against the other pole is getting into unnecessary trouble. It is not possible. He is desiring the impossible and he will get very frustrated.Then what should the attitude be? When happiness comes, enjoy happiness; when unhappiness comes, enjoy unhappiness. When there is happiness, dance with it; when there is unhappiness, cry with it. That’s what I mean when I say enjoy. Unhappiness is a must. If you can accept unhappiness as smoothly as you welcome happiness, you will transcend both. In that very acceptance is transcendence. Then unhappiness and happiness will not make much difference to you, you will remain the same. When there is sadness you will have a taste of it; and when there is joy you will have a taste of it. And sometimes bitter things also taste beautiful.Sadness also has something of depth in it which happiness can never have. Happiness has something shallow. Laughter always looks shallow, tears always look deep. If you want to be always happy, you will become a shallow person, a superficial person. Sometimes it is good to fall into the dark dismal depths of sadness. Both are good. And one should be total in both.Whatever happens, go totally into it. When crying, become the crying, and when dancing, become the dance. Then the ultimate happens to you. By and by you forget the distinction between what happiness is and what unhappiness is. You enjoy both! So by and by the distinction disappears. And when the distinction has disappeared, then arises something which is eternally there, which remains always there. That is witnessing, that is sakshin. And Sufis say that if you can become a witness of all that happens to you, you have arrived home.The fifth question:Osho,Why are there so many religions in the world?Because there are so many types of people, because there are so many different kinds of people.Religion is one, but the languages of religion are different. The Jew understands one language, the Christian understands another language. The difference is of language. The Hindu speaks still another language – but all differences are linguistic. Just as English can be translated into French and French can be translated into Italian and there is no conflict, so Christianity can be translated into Hinduism, Hinduism can be translated into Judaism – there is no problem. One just needs clarity to see.A religious person will see that there is only one religion in the world, although the manifestations are many. And there is nothing wrong; it is good. If these religions don’t fight with each other and don’t nag each other, it is perfectly good, it is enriching. It makes the world more livable, more lovable. Just think of a town where there are only temples and no mosque and no church and no synagogue. The town is a little less rich. When there are all kinds of temples and all kinds of shrines and all kinds of prayers going on, it is beautiful. God can be worshipped in many ways. And you have to choose your way.The problem is not why there are so many religions; the problem is their conflict, their constant antagonism to each other, their constant enmity. That is the problem. If this enmity disappears, I don’t see any problem. In fact, in a better world there will be even more religions than there are now, because basically each person is so individual and so unique that he will have his own religion, he will have his own version.In fact, that’s how the reality is: two Christians are not alike. Even while praying in the same church and reading the same Bible, two Christians are not alike. Their approaches will remain a little different. Their approaches will keep something of their individuality, something of their color. Something of each person’s nuance will be there.Conflict should disappear; there should arise a friendship. They are all working for God, why should they be in conflict? The conflict comes because of the politics in it. The Christian priest wants the whole world to be Christian. In just the same way, the communist wants the whole world to be communist. Why bother about the whole world? If there are a few beautiful Christians, that is more than enough. They should be Christians, that is the thing. They should live in Christ, that is the thing. Now that you have a big crowd behind you, what does that crowd matter, how does it matter? But the crowd creates power in the world of politics.If you have many Catholics, Catholicism is more powerful. Then the Vatican pope becomes more powerful. If you have more Hindus, then the Shankaracharya of Puri becomes more powerful. It is really power politics.People are different and they all need different approaches toward God. One should remember only one thing: that one is moving toward God. How he is moving, in what garb, with what language he prays, is irrelevant. But the conflict is there, the politics is there, and the politics is a shadow of egos.So many religions are not the problem, many egos are the problem.I have heard…A Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Methodist, and a Roman Catholic met by agreement to dine on fish. As soon as grace was said, the Catholic rose, armed with knife and fork, and taking about one-third of the fish, including the head, moved it to his plate saying, “The pope is the head of the church.”Immediately the Methodist minister stood up and helped himself to about one-third, including the tail, saying, “The end crowns the work.”The Presbyterian, taking the remainder of the fish to his plate, exclaimed, “Truth lies between the two extremes.”The Baptist had nothing before him but an empty plate and the prospect of a slim dinner. So seizing a bowl of melted butter, he dashed it over them exclaiming, “I baptize you all!”This is what goes on. These are egos in conflict – not religions. How can religions be in conflict? These are egos, subtle egos. Beware of these egos; these egos are working in you too.If you are a lover of truth, then all manifestations of truth will be welcome to you. You would not like to convert a Hindu to Christianity or a Christian to Hinduism. Your whole prayer will be that the Christian should really become a Christian and the Hindu should become a real Hindu. And a real Hindu and a real Christian are exactly the same thing, precisely the same thing.Remember, if the world becomes almost of one religion there will be such monotony, it will be so boring. It will not be good. Just think, if the whole world were to become of one religion, were to come under one church and one fold, it would be sheer boredom, intolerable. There is so much joy because of the variety. Variety is good in everything. There are so many trees. Just think – one kind of tree all over the earth. Who would look at those trees? Even if it is rosebushes all over the earth – who would look at the rosebushes? The variety is a kind of celebration. Thousands of colors and thousands of kinds of animals and trees and birds; everything is rich with difference, with distinction.And this should be the case in every dimension of life.Rabbi Hirsch was sitting in the confessional box with Father Dolan to learn the principles of the Catholic religion. Two women confessed to having made love with their boyfriends, and when questioned further, admitted that it was not once but three times. As penance they were told to say three prayers and put ten dollars in the poor box.Just then the phone rang, and Father Dolan was called away to give the last sacraments to a dying man. “Stay here and confess the rest of these people,” said the priest to the rabbi. “It is Saturday night, and they won’t otherwise be able to take communion tomorrow. After all, it is all one God, just be sure to get the ten dollars.”He left and Rabbi Hirsch sat nervously in the box. The first girl to enter confessed to having relations with her lover. “Three times?” asked the rabbi.“Just once, Father.”“You are sure it was not three times?”“No, Father, just once.”“I will tell you what. Go back and do it twice more. We have a special this week. Three for ten dollars.”But this variety is good! Or listen to this…A priest and rabbi happened to find themselves sharing a first-class carriage on a long rail journey. They argued without rancor about the truths of religion until the priest, feeling he was getting the worst of it, said rather sharply, “Look here, Rabbi, on your oath as a man of religion, can you swear you never enjoyed the taste of pork?”The rabbi colored up, wrestled with his conscience a moment, and said, “Very well, Father, I will admit it. I have eaten pork.”“And it was very nice, wasn’t it?” exclaimed the triumphant man of Rome.The rabbi retired behind his Jewish Times in a long and thoughtful silence. Suddenly, re-emerging he said, “I say, Father…”“Yes, brother, what is it?”“Can you swear as a Christian priest that you have never enjoyed sex with a girl out of the flock?”The priest tried to beg off, but the rabbi insisted. “The truth, come on, the truth!”“Well, Rabbi, I confess it, I have.”“Nicer than pork, isn’t it?”It is good – different kinds of people, different varieties of religion, different standpoints, different approaches. All is good. Just there should be no conflict. There need not be. Egos should disappear, not religions. If egos disappear, then there can be as many religions as you like and it will be very fulfilling because everybody can find his own way, choose his own way.My own idea about religion is that nobody should be given a religion by birth. Birth should not be involved in it. A child should be given a chance to see all kinds of religions possible. He should be allowed to go to the synagogue, to the church, to the temple, to the gurdwara. He should be helped in every way; he should be introduced to all kinds of religious varieties going around so he can choose on his own. The parents should help him to become alert about all the varieties of religion – they should not try to impose any religion on him. Then if he finds that he would like to become a Sikh, perfectly good. With all blessings he should become a Sikh; he should start going to the gurdwara. If he thinks he would like to become a Buddhist, that’s perfectly good.In a better world with more understanding, there will be many religions in every family – the father is a Buddhist, the mother is a Christian, the son is a Hindu, the daughter has become a Mohammedan, and so on, so forth. Each family should have all kinds of varieties, and it will be a richer life. And the family will have more understanding, more religiousness, because all the people searching in different ways will bring new understandings and pour them into the pool of the family. There is no need to create politics; there is no need to be so afraid of each other. One should be more available.And if you are not feeling good being a Hindu, if you don’t feel that it fits with you, it is perfectly right to become a Christian or to become a Mohammedan. Or if you are not feeling good being a Mohammedan, it is perfectly good, you can choose. It is not a betrayal! In fact, if you don’t like being a Mohammedan and you remain a Mohammedan, you are betraying God because your search will be betrayed. If you hate the whole idea of Mohammedanism and you remain a Mohammedan because you have been brought up as a Mohammedan, because accidentally you were born in a Mohammedan family, then you will be a religion-less person. Your Mohammedanism will not make you joyous and you cannot change your Mohammedanism. And maybe the Hindu temple was the right place for you – where you could have danced, where you could have come closer to God.Religion should be by choice, not by birth, and there should be as many religions as there are types of people.The sixth question:Osho,You are quoted as being here to proclaim a new tradition, not to perpetuate the old. Why is this, and how do you see the future?First: the creation of a new tradition is the only way to perpetuate the old, the only way. The old has to become new again and again. Only then can it be perpetuated. It is like Buddha attaining enlightenment sitting under a bodhi tree near Bodhgaya. That tree has existed, not exactly the same tree, but again and again branches of the tree were planted – three times it has happened. The old tree died and when the tree was dying a branch was planted. Then that tree also died, but before it died another branch was planted. It comes in the same continuum. It is not the same tree in a sense, just as your son is not you in a sense, but it is the same tree in another sense – just as your son is another you in a sense, your continuity.Each time the world consciousness takes a new turn, a new religion has to be born – and this new religion will in a sense be absolutely new, and in a sense absolutely old. It will contain all that is true in all the old traditions, but it will be a new birth, a new body. The wine will be old, but the bottle will be new.Truth cannot be new or old, it is the same truth always. It has no difference in time. The truth that Buddha attained is the truth that I have attained. The truth I have attained is the truth you will attain. It is not that truths are many – truth is one. But Buddha’s language is no longer relevant; my language is relevant. Buddha was talking two thousand five hundred years ago to a different kind of people, to a different kind of society, to a different kind of mind. Naturally, he had to speak a language that those people were able to understand. I speak to a different kind of world, to a different kind of time, to a different kind of mind. I have to speak a different language. Truth is the same, the wine is the same, just the bottle is different.You ask me, “Osho, you are quoted as being here to proclaim a new tradition, not to perpetuate the old.” To proclaim a new tradition is the only way to perpetuate the old. If you go on insisting on the old, the old dies. If you cling to the old, you cling to a corpse. If you cling to the old, you cling to death, you cling to the past.Each time, each age, has to discover truth on its own, has to find its own way of expressing it, its own way of dancing it, its own way of singing it, its own gospel, its own scripture, its own master. Each age has to find truth again and again. It is the same truth, but it has to be found again and again.It is not like science. In science you discover one thing and it is discovered forever. Then there is no need to rediscover it. Religious truth is utterly different; it has to be rediscovered again and again, only then does it remain alive.I am proclaiming a new religion. But how can religion be new? It is the ancientmost truth. But this is the only way to give it a new body and new clothes and a new language and new concepts, and a new stir and a new thrill – to make it alive for you. I am bringing the same religion for you that was brought by others for others. It is new in a sense; it is the ancientmost in another sense.So those who understand me, they will find… If they have loved Jesus, they will find Jesus in me; if they have loved Buddha, they will find Buddha in me; if they have loved Mohammed, they will find Mohammed in me. That’s why so many people have gathered around me. It is a rare phenomenon. Hindus are here, Jainas are here, Buddhists are here, Muslims are here, Christians are here, Jews are here. You can find varieties of all kinds of people around here. It is rare; it has never happened this way before.It could not happen this way before because it is only in this twentieth century that the consciousness has become so alert about stupid things. It has become so alert about superstitions that it is ready to drop them. If I had spoken the language that I speak in a Mohammedan country one thousand years ago, I would have been killed the first day, the very first day. It was not possible, but now it is possible. You can ask Krishna Mohammed, you can ask Radha Mohammed… I have Mohammedan sannyasins here. This is a rare phenomenon. They love me; they don’t find any conflict between me and Mohammed. In fact, they find Mohammed in me. Through me they become better Mohammedans.Jews are here, a great number of Jews are here. Jews are ordinarily very orthodox people. They have persisted in their own idea that they are the chosen people of God, that the real religion belongs to them, that God has spoken only to them. Jews could not accept their own son, Jesus, but fifty percent of you here are Jews. You will be surprised – fifty percent! And it is not an exaggeration, it may be more. This is rare. You could not accept Jesus, your own son, but you can accept me. What has happened?This twentieth century brings a new consciousness into the world, it is a quantum leap. Now you can see, now you are no longer bothered by language and words. You can look deep into my eyes and you can see the same truth as is revealed in Moses or as is revealed in Baal Shem.I am proclaiming a new religion – the essential religion. In Islam it is known as Sufism, in Buddhism it is known as Zen, in Judaism it is known as Hasidism – the essential core. But I speak your language; I speak the way you understand, the way you can understand. I speak a very religion-less language. I speak as if I am not religious at all. That’s what is needed in this world. This twentieth century needs a religion completely free from all kinds of superstitions, utterly nude, naked.This century is trained in the ways of science, is trained very logically. Never before was any other human society so logically trained. I am talking about something that is basically illogical, but I have to talk in a logical way. If you go to a Sufi, he talks about the illogical in an illogical way. I talk about the illogical in a logical way. If you go to a Zen master, he simply talks in an illogical way. You will not be able to make a bridge between you and him. With me, the bridge is very easy. I go with you to take you with me further.First, I go with you; I make you perfectly happy that I am coming with you. Sooner or later you forget when things change and you start coming with me. I am ready to come into your valley – the darkest valley, wherever you are – I am ready to come into your unconscious cave, and in the way you want. I am ready to come there. Once I have entered there I can bring you out. That is the only meaning when I say, “I proclaim a new religion.”And you ask me, “…how do you see the future?” The future is great because the present is great. I don’t think about the future, the present is more than enough. But if the present is so beautiful, then the future is going to be great – it will be born out of this present. That future will contain this present.We need not worry about the future, we need not be prophetic about the future, we need not say a single thing about the future. We should be joyous and happy in this moment, and the next moment will be coming out of this moment. It will be suffused with the celebration of this moment, and naturally it will lead you into a higher celebration. The future is going to come out of this present.There are two kinds of people: one who goes on thinking about the future, not bothering about the present at all. That future is not going to come, that future is just a fool’s imagination. I don’t think about the future. I am a totally different kind of person. I don’t think about the future at all, it is irrelevant. My whole effort is how to beautify this present moment, how to make people more celebrating, how to make people more joyous, how to give them a little glimpse of blissfulness, how to bring laughter to their life. Then the future takes care of itself. You need not think of the morrow, it comes. It comes out of this moment. Let this moment be of great celebration.The last question:Osho,When two women or two men are making love to each other does it do any harm to their energies?Love is always preferable to lovelessness – that is the first thing to be remembered. Love in any kind and any form is more preferable than lovelessness. That is a basic assumption with me. But there are three planes of love. They have to be understood. The first is auto, the second is homo, the third is hetero.One can be very narcissistic; narcissism is masturbatory. It has many dimensions to it. That is the first kind of love, the most primitive. Every child passes through that stage of being narcissistic – he loves only himself, he is his own world. It is good as far as it goes. One has to love oneself; that should be the foundation. If you don’t love yourself you cannot love anybody else. If you can’t even love yourself, how can you love anybody else?So the foundation is autoerotic. Each child has to love himself, and parents down the centuries have been preventing it. That’s wrong. Children should be allowed to have fun; nothing is wrong in it. In fact, they are learning the first basic lesson of love – and they can love only themselves. Their consciousness is not so developed that they can bridge with anybody else. They have a small circle of energy; it moves within themselves.So the first is auto; that is natural. It has been disturbed, it has been disturbed so much that the disturbance persists for the whole of life. Then other kinds and other planes of love are never as perfect as they could have been. It is only in this century that psychological investigations have proved that autoerotic love is perfectly natural, normal, and each normal child will be interested in it and he should not be prevented. Each child has to play with his body so that he starts loving his body, so that he becomes sensuous about his body, so that he becomes more and more sensitive about his body, so that he has sheer joy in being in the body. That joy is missing.If you have never loved your own body, then when somebody else loves your body you will shrink because you don’t know how to open. And if you have never loved your body and you have been taught to hate it, despise it, condemn it, when somebody else starts loving your body you will feel, “How foolish. How is it possible? How can anybody love my body?” And you will not be able to love somebody else’s body either because bodies are bodies – yours or others, does not make any difference. Body is body.First the body has to be loved, in deep reverence. In a more enlightened age, children will be taught how to love their body with respect, reverence, because the body is the temple of God. And from there their love will start flowering and will take a right direction.The second kind of love is homo. That too is normal, natural. First the child loves himself and then, naturally, he loves somebody who is like himself – that is a natural growth. A boy cannot suddenly love a girl, that is going too far. The girl is so different, another kind of animal. The girl cannot love the boy immediately, a bridge is needed. To move from oneself to the opposite polarity, one has to go through somebody like oneself. So from the masturbatory stage, love moves to the homosexual stage. The boy will love a boy, the girl will love a girl. This is perfectly natural; there is nothing of pathology in it.Pathology comes in only when somebody is stuck. If somebody is stuck at the first stage and is not able to love anybody, then there is some pathology. Then somebody can be stuck at the second stage – the second stage is better than the first, but lower than the third. One should take the jump and the man should be able to love the woman, and the woman should be able to love the man. That is the hetero stage – the polar opposite. This is the natural course.Then there is the fourth kind – the transcendence. When you have passed all these three stages naturally, totally, a moment comes when you transcend sexuality. You are no longer interested in sex – sex as such – your body, somebody else’s body. Men’s or women’s bodies don’t interest you. Not that you have any condemnation about the body; in fact, bodies disappear – there are only souls. The body is just the outermost core of it. It is a great shift in your consciousness. That is the fourth stage, the stage of the siddha. In India we have called the fourth stage brahmacharya – the state of being divine.But that comes not by denying the third, not by denying the second, not by denying the first. It comes only if you go on fulfilling each plane in its own right.Now, there are a few things to be understood. The hetero relationship is the most difficult relationship, the most inconvenient and conflicting, because two opposite polarities are there – man and woman. They exist differently; they are attracted to each other because they are so different, so mysterious to each other. Man has never been able to understand how the mind of the woman functions, and so is the case from the woman’s side too. They are such different dimensions, hence the attraction to explore each other. But the difficulty is also there. Men and women love each other and hate each other; are together and are continuously nagging, fighting, struggling. There is a constant effort to dominate the other.So the hetero relationship is the most inconvenient, although the most fulfilling too. So there is a danger, but there is a thrill. The danger is that there will be conflict, continuous fight. But only through that fight is one fulfilled, and only through that fight does one transcend sex.The second stage – homo – is far better as far as convenience is concerned. Two men or two women are perfectly at ease with each other. They belong to the same mind, the same quality of energy; they are similar. The homosexual relationship is less troublesome. That’s why homosexuals look gay and heterosexuals look very sad. They are happy people because they are not in a constant fight and struggle and nagging. They understand each other. Lesbians are also happier women because there is no problem, they function on the same wavelength, so things fit together, there is a rhythm, a kind of harmony. But the fulfillment is less.Always remember: for the higher you have to pay higher. If you want deep fulfillment you have to take the trouble and you have to stake your life. It is risky.Because of too much risk, in this century particularly, many people in the world have turned homosexual. People have become alert about heterosexual relationships being ugly. Continuous fight – who bothers? The whole life is so troubled. One wants to be happy somewhere at least. And even in love there is the same trouble and the same conflict and the same ego struggle. People are turning toward homosexuality. That is relapsing. It is not good.The first – the auto-sexual relationship, the relationship with yourself, masturbatory sex – is the most convenient, but there is no fulfillment. With the first there is no inconvenience, but no fulfillment – at the most a sexual release. With the second there is a little trouble and a little fulfillment. With the third there is great possibility of both trouble and fulfillment. They grow in the same proportion.And one should be alert to move from the first to the second, and from the second to the third. Only then can you move to the fourth, brahmacharya, celibacy.Now, all over the world religious people have tried celibacy, but they have not tried it in a scientific way. Somebody simply jumps into celibacy from his childhood. Then your so-called monks remain masturbatory. It is a suspicion of the psychoanalysts – and I think they are right – that the Buddhist monks, the Catholic monks, and all kinds of monks and nuns become masturbatory. Or, the second possibility is that they will turn to homosexuality. Because monks and nuns are not allowed to mix there is every possibility that they will both turn homosexual. That’s what happens in schools, colleges, hostels and in the army. Wherever there is only one sex available, people turn to homosexuality. Army people are homosexual.If you want to avoid homosexuality in the world, the army should not be monosexual – there should be women and men together. And the hostels should be for both together, not separate. Then homosexuality will disappear.Homosexuality has a function to fulfill in the growing child. Somewhere from the first year to the seventh the child remains masturbatory. From the seventh year to the fourteenth the child turns homosexual. From the fourteenth onward he should, if things go naturally, in a natural way, turn heterosexual. And by the age of forty-two he will start being a celibate. And that celibacy will be a natural, spontaneous phenomenon, not a repression.You ask, “When two women or two men are making love to each other, does it do any harm to their energies?” It does not do any harm but it does not do any benefit either. It is not harmful and it is not beneficial. Masturbation is harmful – beyond a certain stage it is harmful, it is destructive. A masturbatory person loses all contact with the world, he becomes unrelated, he becomes very egoistic because he feels he is enough for himself. There is no need to depend on anybody, not even for love. It is harmful. Homosexuality is neither harmful nor beneficial. Heterosexuality is very beneficial.I would like to tell you one anecdote:“There are those in this congregation,” shouted the revivalist, “who have committed the unutterable sin of he-ing and she-ing. Stand up and repent!” Three quarters of the congregation stood up.“And those who have committed the double sin of sins: he-ing and he-ing. Stand up!” The rest of the men got up.“And I positively know that there are those who have committed that triplest of triple sins: she-ing and she-ing!” The remaining women all rose, sobbing hysterically. No one was left sitting but one old man.“Elder,” he muttered, “how do you stand on me-ing and me-ing?”These are the four possibilities, in fact, three possibilities of your sexual energy. Either auto – but auto becomes closed, you become an island. Or homo – you make a bridge, but you make a bridge man with man, woman with woman. It is not much of a bridge because both are the same. Not much difference is there. Or hetero – the real polarity, and the real bridge. And only when you have bridged your sexual energies with the polarity does a new kind of integration arise in you, and that integration can become brahmacharya, can become celibacy.Don’t think these are sins. These are natural growth points. The only thing to be remembered is: don’t get stuck anywhere. The goal is brahmacharya, one has to go beyond sex.It is not that there is something wrong in having sex, but that which you will only have glimpses of through sex can be attained totally when you go beyond. In a sexual love moment, for a single second, time disappears, space disappears. For a single moment the ego disappears. For a single moment you are lost into the cosmic. That’s why there is so much joy, so much ecstasy. That’s what orgasm is – the individual is lost into the whole.But this happens only for a single moment, and not even always. So sex only opens a window and closes it again. You have to go beyond sex. Going beyond sex means going beyond the house, the confinement: going under the sun, going into the open sky. Then that ecstasy is yours, and it is constantly yours. A real saint, one whom I call a saint, is continuously in orgasm – that is my definition of a saint. His ecstasy is a natural phenomenon like breathing.You may not have ever heard a definition like that, but that’s my definition. Jesus or Buddha or Mohammed are continuously in an orgasm. They don’t need anybody, they don’t need to connect with anybody, they don’t need any kind of sexuality. Their energy is constantly orgasmic because they have disappeared into the whole. The part no longer exists, no longer claims to be the whole. The part has become the whole, the wave has become the ocean – and that is their orgasm, that is their ecstasy.Out of this ecstasy great songs have been born: the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, Jesus’ sayings. They are nothing but ecstatic ejaculations, ecstatic expressions. They have tremendous beauty and poetry.Remember this. These three stages are normal, there is nothing to be condemned in them. But don’t get stuck anywhere, always go beyond. You have to go beyond, you have to go beyond all kinds of sexuality. Sex is natural, beautiful, but to get stuck in it is to become dormant. Sex gives you glimpses of godliness. It makes you aware of godliness. Then one has to seek godliness in its purity.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Hassan asked Ajami, “How did you reach your present heights of spiritual attainment?”Ajami said, “Through making the heart white in meditation, not by making paper black with writing.”A little boy was playing with his blocks when his father entered the room.“Quiet, Dad, I am building a church.”The father, thinking that he would test his son along the lines of religious knowledge said, “Why do we want to be quiet in church?”“We have to, because the people are sleeping.”Man is asleep. This sleep is not ordinary sleep, it is a metaphysical sleep. Even while you think you are awake, you remain asleep. With open eyes, walking on the road, working in your office, you remain asleep. It is not only that you are asleep in the church, you are asleep everywhere. You are simply asleep.This metaphysical sleep has to be broken; this metaphysical sleep has to be completely dropped. One has to become a flame of awareness. Only then does life start being meaningful, only then does life gain a significance, only then is life not the so-called day-to-day, ordinary, dull routine. Life has poetry in it and a thousand and one lotuses flower in the heart – then there is God.God is not a theory, it is not an argument. It is an experience of significance in life. And the significance can only be felt when you are not asleep. How can you feel the significance of life in sleep? Life is significant, immensely significant. Each moment of it is precious. But you are asleep. Only awakened eyes can see this significance, live this significance.Just the other day there was a question. Somebody asked, “Osho, you go on telling us to celebrate life. What is there to celebrate?” I can understand. His question is relevant. There seems to be nothing to celebrate. What is there to celebrate? His question is your question, is everybody’s question.But reality is just the contrary. There is everything to celebrate. Each moment is so immense, is so fantastic, each moment brings such an ecstasy, but you are asleep. The ecstasy comes, hovers around you and goes. The breeze comes, dances around you and goes, and you remain asleep. The flowers bloom and the fragrance comes to you, but you are asleep. God goes on singing in a thousand and one ways, God dances around you, but you are asleep.You ask me, “What is there to celebrate?” What isn’t there to celebrate? There is everything that one can imagine. There is everything that one can desire. And it is more than you can imagine. It is in abundance. Life is a luxury!Just think of a blind man. He has never seen a roseflower bloom. What has he missed? Do you know? Can’t you feel any compassion for him? That he has missed something, something divine? He has not seen a rainbow. He has not seen the sunrise or the sunset. He has not seen the green foliage of the trees. He has not seen color. How dull his consciousness is! And you have eyes and you say, “What is there to celebrate?” There is the rainbow, there is the sunset, there are the green trees – such a colorful existence.And yet I understand. Your question is relevant. I understand that this question has some meaning. The rainbow is there, the sunset is there, the ocean, the clouds are all there, but you are asleep – you have never looked. Although you have eyes you have never looked at the roseflower. You have passed by, you have seen the roseflower. I am not saying you have not seen it: you have eyes so you see, but you have not looked at it, you have not meditated upon it. You have not given a single moment of your meditation to it, you have never been in tune with it, you have never been by the side of it, sitting close by, in communion. You have never said hello to it, you have never participated with it. Life passes by, you are just there, not participating. You are not in rapport with life, that’s why your question is meaningful. You have eyes and yet you don’t see, you have ears yet you don’t hear, you have a heart yet you don’t love. You are fast asleep.This has to be understood, that’s why I go on repeating it again and again. If you understand that you are asleep, the first ray of awakening has entered you. If you can feel that you are asleep then you are no longer asleep, then you are just on the verge of where the day breaks – the morning, the dawn.But the first essential is to understand that “I am asleep.” If you think you are not asleep then you will never be awake. If you think that this life you have been living up to now is a life of an awakened being, then why should you seek and search ways to awaken yourself? When a man dreams, and dreams that he is awake, why should he try to be awake? He already believes that he is awake. This is the greatest trick of the mind and everybody is befooled by this trick. The greatest trick of the mind is to give you the idea of that which you are not, and to help you feel that you are already that.Gurdjieff used to tell a parable…There was a magician, who was also a shepherd. He had thousands of sheep to look after. He was a very miserly man so he didn’t want many servants and he didn’t want many watchmen. He did not want to pay anybody and he did not want his sheep to be lost or taken by the wolves. But it was very difficult for him to take care of all the sheep alone. He was very rich and he had many sheep.So he played a trick on the sheep. He hypnotized them – he was a magician. He hypnotized them and told every sheep, “You are not a sheep. Don’t be afraid.” To some he said, “You are a lion.” To some he said, “You are tigers.” To some he even said, “You are men. Nobody is going to kill you. Don’t be afraid and don’t try to escape from here.”The sheep started believing in his hypnosis. Every day he would butcher a few sheep, but the others would think, “We are not sheep. He is butchering only sheep. We are lions, we are tigers, we are wolves, we are this and that – even that they were men. Some were even told that they were magicians and they believed it. It was always some sheep that was to be butchered. They remained aloof, distant. They were not worried. And by and by they were all butchered.“This is the situation,” Gurdjieff used to say. When somebody dies, has the question occurred to you that it is your death? No, the mind goes on playing the game. The mind says it is always the other that dies, it is never you.Sometimes an old man comes to me, very old, and he is always worried about my death. He asks, “Osho, if you die, what will happen to me?” He is near about seventy-five. I am always surprised when he says, “If you die what is going to happen to me?” Osho is going to die and he himself is not going to die! There is every possibility he will die before me, but about that he never asks. Whenever he comes this is his question, “Don’t leave me. If you die, what will happen to me?”This is how the mind goes on functioning. It is always somebody else who dies. Have you not seen people in their cars rushing with mad speed? Why? There is a deep idea in the mind that accidents happen to others. It is written even on boards how many accidents are happening every day, how many people died yesterday, yet people go on rushing by. Who bothers – these things happen to others. “These accidents, yes, they happen, but they never happen to me.” That idea persists. Gurdjieff’s parable is not just a parable.All that is wrong happens to somebody else; even death. You cannot conceive of your own death. And if you cannot conceive of your own death, you cannot become religious. Even to think about it seems impossible: “How can I die? How?”You go on keeping yourself separate from all, you go on believing that you are the exception. Watch out! Whenever you feel that you are the exception, remember, the mind is going to deceive you. The magician of the mind is tricking you, and it has tricked everybody. This is the metaphysical sleep. “Death is not going to happen to me, and I am already that which I want to be. And everything is good, and I am awake. And I already know, so what is there to seek and search for?”These false notions, these absurd ideas have been repeated for so long that you have been hypnotized by them. You have autohypnotized yourself. The magician is not somewhere outside, it is your own mind. It takes all significance away from you. Significance is only in awareness. Significance is in awareness. Significance is awareness, it is a kind of radiance. When you become aflame with awareness everything becomes aflame with significance.It is you who are reflected in existence – existence functions as a mirror. If you are dull and dead, there is nothing to celebrate because existence simply shows your dull and dead face. What is there to celebrate? If you are alive, flowering, singing a song, dancing a dance, the mirror reflects a dance, a song – there is so much to celebrate. When you celebrate there is much more to celebrate, and it goes on and on. There is no end to it. If you don’t celebrate, by and by you become more and more dead and more and more dull. There is less and less to celebrate. Suddenly one day life is absolutely meaningless.Children are more alert than they will ever be again in their life, unless they deliberately start seeking some path of awareness, some path of meditation. Unless by accident they come close to a master – a Sufi, a Zen, a Hasid – they will get more and more into the mire of sleep. Children are born awake and old people die fast asleep, snoring. If you are asleep there is no celebration.But why – why is man asleep? What is the root cause of it? It is a way to avoid; sleep is a way to avoid. There are many problems in life. Obviously they are there. When I say celebrate, I don’t mean there are no problems. There are problems. They have to be encountered, they have to be transcended. And celebration is a way to encounter them.I am not saying there are no problems, I am not telling you fairy tales, I am not telling you that there are no problems and that life is simply beautiful and there are no thorns and only roseflowers – there are not. For every one rose, there exist one thousand thorns. I am not creating a dream for you, a utopia. I am utterly realistic and pragmatic.But the way to get beyond the thorns is to celebrate life, is to celebrate that one flower. In fact, that one flower is more precious because there are one thousand thorns. If there were all flowers and flowers and no thorns, flowers would be meaningless. It is because of darkness that the morning is so beautiful, it is because of death that life has such joy, it is because of illness that health is significant.I am not saying there is nothing to be worried about. There are many things, but there is no need to worry about them. They can be encountered. They can be encountered without any worry, they can be encountered through celebration. There are only two ways to encounter them: one is the way of worry and the other is the way of celebration. The way of worry is the way of the world; the way of celebration is the way of religion. The way of worry creates sleep – there are so many worries, how to get rid of them? You don’t know. Not even a single worry can be solved.For example, there is death. How can you solve it? What can you do to solve it? It is there, naked in front of you. You cannot even avoid it, it is happening every moment.We have made every arrangement to avoid it. We make our cemeteries outside the town, we make our graves with beautiful marble and we write beautiful maxims on it. We go and put flowers on graves. These are ways to make the shock of death a little less shocking. When a man dies we say that his soul is immortal. This is again a trick. I am not saying that the soul is not immortal – it is, but for you it is not immortal, it is only for those who have awakened. You are simply using it as a consolation. It is a prop to avoid death.We paint the dead man, we put beautiful clothes on the dead man. Now in the West a whole profession exists of how to decorate the dead body so that it looks alive, at least in appearance. And sometimes it happens that a dead body can be decorated so perfectly that the man never looked so radiant when he was alive as he looks when he is dead.I have heard about a rich man. He purchased a beautiful Cadillac and just three days later he died. The doctors had said that the disease was so sudden that nothing could be done about it and he would die within twenty-four hours. So he made a will. He said, “I have just purchased my Cadillac. It was specially ordered, made to order, and I have not even been able to drive it, so do one thing – bury me in my Cadillac.”His will was followed. A big grave was dug and he was put in the Cadillac, and with a crane the Cadillac was put in the grave. The whole town had gathered to see this thing. All were there.Two beggars also came and one beggar said to the other, “Man, this is the way one should live. This is what I call living! This is life, man!”It happens. You are so dead in life that sometimes your death can look very, very alive – comparatively.You cannot solve the problem of death. There is no way. Then what is one supposed to do? The easiest way that man has found is to go into a kind of sleep about death – not to look at it, to avoid it. Never look at it face-to-face, eye-to-eye. Avoid it. Avoidance has become the way of man.There are problems – there is ill health, there is disease, there is cancer, there is tuberculosis, and many things. Nobody is ever secure, nobody can ever be, because life exists in insecurity. You may have a big bank balance, but the bank can go bankrupt any day, or the country can turn and become communist. Anything can happen. You have a wife and suddenly she falls in love with a stranger and is gone. You have a son and you were trusting in him and he becomes a hippie – or a sannyasin! Who knows? Life is insecure, there is no security. You can only pretend that you are secure. Nothing ever is.Then what to do? Escape into sleep. Create a haze around yourself so that you don’t see clearly what is what. People live with this haze, this metaphysical haze around themselves like a fog, so they can believe whatever they want to believe.I have heard about a man who was driving his car. A young hippie was standing on the road; he wanted to be picked up, taken for a ride. The driver very lovingly opened the door and took him in, and the car started going again with mad speed.It started raining, and as it started, the driver increased the speed. The wipers were not working. The hippie could not see at all through the windshield so he said to the driver, “The wipers are not working and you are driving with such speed. I can’t see anything. My eyes are perfect and you are an old man, how are you managing?”The driver laughed. He said, “Don’t be worried. It doesn’t matter whether the wipers are working or not because I have left my glasses at home!”When you don’t see, you think nothing matters. You create a fog around yourself, then you don’t see what is ahead. Death is there, you don’t see; insecurity is there, you don’t see; your wife is going to leave tomorrow, you don’t see; your husband is going to become a poet, you don’t see. There is a fog. You remain asleep.Sleep is avoidance. It is a trick of the mind to avoid real problems in life. It is a drug invented by man. But it doesn’t help; the reality remains as it is, the danger remains as it is, the insecurity remains as it is. In fact, it becomes worse because you are unaware. You could have done something, but now you cannot because you cannot see and you have created a fog. The problems are multiplied by your fog and your sleep, they are not solved. Nothing is solved by your sleep. But you can have a kind of consolation that there is no problem.You must have heard about the ostrich and his logic. This is his logic: when the ostrich sees an enemy coming he simply puts his head into the earth, into the sand. He stands there completely unafraid because he cannot see. His eyes are closed in the sand, he cannot see the enemy. And his logic is that if you cannot see, then the enemy is not.This ostrich logic is very human. Don’t laugh at the ostrich, this is what you have done, this is what millions of people have done, this is what ninety-nine percent of humanity is doing. Don’t see the enemy; just go on believing everything is okay. At least in this moment nothing is wrong, everything is okay, so why bother? Go on living in this drugged state.But this is the sure way to never to be in a mood of celebration. You will never be able to celebrate because celebration comes through transcendence, when problems are transcended. Remember, I use the word transcendence, not the word solution. No problem is ever solved. No problem can ever be solved because to call them problems is, in fact, not right. They are not problems.Try to understand it. Is insecurity a problem? We call it a problem, but it is just the way life is. You don’t say that the tree is green, so green is a problem. It is just the way trees are. You don’t say that the sun is hot, so this is a problem. It is not a problem. The sun is hot – it is simply how the sun is. Insecurity is a basic ingredient of life. In fact, life cannot exist without insecurity. Without insecurity life will be dead – it is only through insecurity that it remains alive, throbbing, hopeful.Insecurity makes it possible for life to change. Change is essential. If you change, there will be insecurity; if you don’t change, there is no insecurity – but if you don’t change then you are a rock. A rock is more secure than a rosebush. Naturally, because a rock does not change so fast. For millions of years it can remain the same, there is no problem. But for the rosebush there are many problems. If water is not given to it for two days the roses will start disappearing, the greenery will start disappearing, the bush will start dying. Or, if the sun is too hot, or a madman comes, or an animal enters the garden, then too it will die. The rosebush has to exist amid so many insecurities – for the rock there is no problem. But the rosebush changes, that’s why it is alive.Animals are less alive, man is more alive – or at least can be. It is his potentiality to be more alive. But then there is more insecurity. No animal is aware of death, hence there is no problem. Only man is aware of death. But if you are aware of death, then it can become a challenge: how to transcend it, how to face it, how to live in the face of death, not avoiding it; accepting it totally, knowing totally that it is there; how to live knowing that death is going to happen.In fact, life will have a great intensity when death is known. You know that it is possible that death may come tomorrow – or maybe the next moment – so you have only one moment at a time in your hand. Don’t waste it. And don’t live lukewarmly, because who knows, the next moment may never come. This is the only moment that you have, the next is not certain. It may be, it may not be, you cannot depend on it. You cannot postpone, you cannot sacrifice the present for the uncertain future.If you accept death and if you face death, you will start living in the present. Death is not a problem; death will help you to be alive, more alive, intensely alive. You will start living totally because there is no way to have any hope for the future. The future does not exist. If death is known, accepted, then the future disappears.With the disappearance of the future, the only thing that remains in your hands is now. Then you can go deep into this now – whatever you are doing. You can be eating or dancing or making love to a woman or singing or digging a hole in the ground – whatever you are doing. This is the only time you have, why not do it totally? Why not celebrate it? Celebration and being total mean the same thing. You celebrate only when you are total in something, and when you are total in something you celebrate it.Have you not watched it yourself? Whenever you are total in something there is celebration. For example, if listening to me you become a listener totally, there is great celebration. You are not doing anything, you are simply sitting there. But listening to me deeply, totally, intensely, a great joy arises. And you are not doing anything, you are not creating that joy, the joy is already there – you just have to be here, herenow. Here is the only space and now is the only time, because death is there.To think of death as a problem is to move in the wrong direction. Then you start avoiding it. When you avoid it you become asleep. To accept death… Yes, death is there, it is part of life and it entered you the very day you were born, it entered with birth. Birth and death are two aspects of the same coin. The day you were born you became vulnerable to death. Now there is no way to avoid it.Yes, I know medical science can help man to live for two hundred years or three hundred years, but that doesn’t make any difference. Whether you live thirty years or three hundred years does not make any difference. The difference can be made only by one thing – how you live, not how long. If you live sleepily, you can sleep for thirty years or three hundred years or three thousand years, it doesn’t matter – there will be no celebration. If you live a life totally, meditatively, then even three minutes may be enough, even a single second may be enough. A single second of total ecstasy gives you a taste of eternity. It is enough, more than enough. You will not hanker for anything more. It is so fulfilling, it is such contentment.Don’t avoid, otherwise you will remain asleep. Don’t avoid death, don’t avoid problems, don’t avoid anxieties – accept them, encounter them, they are part of the game.Just the other day I was reading a passage from Bernard Shannon. He writes an almost Sufi parable:A man awakens suddenly in the cabin of a ship and realizes that he has no memory of boarding the vessel, nor knowledge of for where he is bound. Hoping to find someone who could enlighten him, he leaves the cabin and ascends to the deck, finding it crowded with people who appear to be playing various deck-games with complete absorption.The man approaches the nearest group, and hesitantly inquires as to the destination of the ship. The group look at him blankly, saying they do not know. The man, puzzled, now asks when and from where the ship sailed, to again receive negative replies and blank looks. At that moment, one of the players is pulled to the rail by some invisible force and vanishes over the side. The group still seems intent upon its game, so the man agitatedly points out that one of their number has been whisked over the side. The players shrug, telling him that it happens all the time – people just get swept away and are never seen again.Bemused, the man goes further along the deck, only to see other players falling suddenly to the deck, afflicted by disease or accident. He is thoroughly alarmed – what a bizarre situation to be in! A passenger on a ship, without knowledge of how he came to be there nor of where the ship sailed from or is bound. The other passengers all absorbed in games, and freely admitting they have no idea of how long they will be aboard; the invisible force could sweep them away at any moment, or they can be struck down by painful afflictions or disabilities.The whole set-up is wildly illogical, yet the strange position has been accepted as natural by the other passengers. They just do not think about it, but instead prefer to divert their minds by immersion in the ups and downs of the deck-games. These games are governed by certain rules that are termed ( logic!This is what is happening on the earth. The earth is the ship on which you suddenly find yourself one day, not knowing from where you come, not knowing where you are going, seeing people becoming old, afflicted, seeing people die. You start inquiring and nobody is interested in your question. In fact, whenever you ask somebody “What is death?” he starts feeling restless. He wants to avoid it, he wants to drop the topic. He will think you are a little morbid or something. Why bring up such an ugly subject? Why talk about death?The very word death gives you a shiver in the spine. People don’t use the word death when somebody has died, they say he has “passed away.” Just to avoid the word death they say he has passed away, or he has been called by God, or he has gone to his heavenly abode. Tricky people. Just to avoid one single word, death, to avoid the fact that he has died – because death can hurt you, that you have to die can hurt you – they say, “He has gone to a heavenly abode. Now it is perfectly okay, let him go. He must be enjoying the company of God.” This is the situation.And people are deeply involved in their games. Somebody is playing the game of politics – he wants to become the prime minister or the president or somebody. He is completely absorbed in it.In India, just a few days ago, Morarji Desai became the prime minister. He is eighty-two. He was still interested in being a prime minister, he is not interested in death at all. It is time to think about death, but no, he is not interested in death. He goes on saying that within ten years he will solve all the problems of the country. Within ten years… How long does he think he is going to live? No, he has not thought about that at all – nobody does; he is not the exception in this regard.And people are completely absorbed in their games. Somebody is absorbed in his money game: how to have more money, how to grab more money. Somebody is absorbed in holding knowledge. These are all games, and these games are invented by man to avoid real problems in life. These games give you a chance to solve things. You cannot solve anything in real life. Nothing can be solved because real life is a mystery not a problem.Death is a mystery not a problem. You cannot solve it. It is not a crossword puzzle, it is a mystery. It remains mysterious. You have to accept it as it is. There is no way to solve it, but through accepting it you transcend. Through accepting it a great transformation comes to you.The problem remains there, but it is no longer a problem. You are no longer against it. The very word problem shows that you are against it, afraid of it, it is the enemy. When you accept it, it becomes a friend, you befriend it. Insecurity is there, but it is no longer a problem. In fact, it gives you a thrill. In fact, if your wife leaves you tomorrow, don’t be worried about it. Let it be a thrill, let it be an adventure. Nothing is wrong in it.If your son becomes a hippie, don’t be worried. At least he has done something that you never did. You missed something he is not going to miss. Let him live in his own way. He has more life; he is more interested in real life than in your bogus games. You wanted him to become rich and he has become a beggar. You wanted him to become a president or a governor or some other nonsense and he has become a sannyasin. Don’t be worried. It is not a problem at all. You have given birth to an alive person – be happy, feel thankful. It is good.Maybe by his turning into these unknown paths some window will open in your mind also, some ray of light will enter your dead being, you will start pulsating again. Who knows? You are not really dead, you have only become dead. You have gathered an armor around you that has become heavier and heavier every day and it is difficult to move with it. Seeing your son turn to the unknown maybe you will drop your armor, you will start moving for the first time into the labyrinth of the mysterious life. For the first time you become alert that the games you have been playing are meaningless, they are just games.Have you not watched people playing chess and how absorbed they become? And all is false; the king and the queen and the elephants and the horses, everything is false, just symbolic. But people get so absorbed in the symbols that they forget that life is real, not symbolic.I have heard…A motorist was driving along a country road when he saw a big sign: Beware of the Dog. Farther down the road was another sign in even bigger letters: Beware of the Dog. Finally he arrived at the farmhouse and there was a little poodle standing in front of the house.“Do you mean to say,” asked the motorist, “that this little dog keeps strangers away?”“No,” replied the farmer, “but signs do.”Who bothers to look at the dog? People have become so afflicted with signs, symbols, words, language – who bothers whether there is really a dog or not?It works. I know, because I have practiced it. Once I used to live in a town – and I have never had a dog, not even a poodle – but I used to put up a sign. Just a sign, a big sign, on the door: Beware of the Dogs. And people wouldn’t enter. That was enough to keep them away. You need not really have a dog. Who bothers about reality?Games are symbolic. People were playing games on that ship and they were not very interested in what was really happening: from where they came, where they were going to, and what was happening to people who simply disappeared one day and were never seen again. And they accepted it, this mysterious thing, without meditating over it. They said, “Yes, it happens all the time.” People disappear, and still they are absorbed in their games. They don’t want to look at that fact. That fact is disturbing, that fact is inconvenient. It may disturb their sleep.So people have gone into sleep because they are trying to avoid. And they are trying to avoid because they have wrongly taken mysteries as problems. Insecurity is mystery. Death is mystery. Love is mystery. All is mysterious. And by mysterious, I mean it is not logical. It is very illogical. One never knows.Do you know, when you fall in love with a woman or a man, have you any answer why? Can you answer it? It simply happens. It simply happens out of the blue. You come across a strange woman and suddenly something has clicked. You can’t answer, she can’t answer. Suddenly you find yourself moving together in the same direction. Suddenly you find you are on the same wavelength, you fit. And as suddenly as it happens, it can disappear also. It is a mystery. You may live with a woman for twenty years, in deep love and with all the joys of love, and then one day that climate is no longer there, that vibe is no longer there. You are there, the woman is there, and it is not that you have not loved each other – you have loved for twenty years – but suddenly, as it came out of nothing, it disappears into nothing. It is not there. Now you can pretend, and that’s what husbands and wives go on doing. You can pretend. You can pretend that the love is still there, but now life will become a drag. The joy is no longer there.Love cannot be pretended and love cannot be managed. There is no way to manage love; it is bigger than you. It comes from the same source as birth and death. Love comes from where they come. These three things – birth, love, and death – come from the unknown. They suddenly enter you like a breeze and they suddenly disappear.You cannot solve these problems, but you can transcend them. And the way to transcend is to accept that they are there. And don’t think that they are problems, they are mysteries. Once you start feeling that they are mysteries, suddenly you are in rapport with life and there is celebration, there is trust.This is possible only if the mind is not allowed to play games. The heart is the center where love happens, birth happens, death happens. When death happens, it is the heart that stops. When love happens, it is the heart that dances. When birth happens, it is the heart that starts beating. All that is real happens in the heart and all that is unreal happens in the mind. The mind is the faculty for the unreal, for the fictitious, for the games.So the only transformation that is needed by Sufism is how to shift your energy from the mind to the heart.Hassan asked Ajami, “How did you reach your present heights of spiritual attainment?”Ajami said, “Through making the heart white in meditation, not by making paper black with writing.”A small statement, but of tremendous beauty, meaning, truth.Hassan’s question is very ordinary. Ajami was a great master. Hassan also became a great master finally, but he took a long time. He went to many masters, he was a great seeker, but as seekers go he was more interested in knowledge than in knowing. Hence it took so long. Finally he attained. Finally everybody is going to attain. This life or another life, or another life, finally everybody is going to attain.Hassan used to go to Rabiya, to Ajami, to other masters, to whoever was available, but his questions are that of a knowledgeable man. Just the formulation has to be understood.Hassan asked Ajami, “How did you reach your present heights of spiritual attainment?” Now, all the words that he has used are unspiritual. First: “How did you reach…” Spirituality is not something that you reach, it is already the case. It is not a goal somewhere, it has already happened in you; it is there in your heart. But you are not there in the heart, hence you go on missing it. The treasure is in the heart and you are in the head. This is the only difference between you and God: the difference between the head and the heart. It is not much – maybe one foot, one and a half feet – it is not much.Somebody asked Rabiya al-Adabiya, “What is the difference between truth and a lie?”Rabiya said, “Four inches.”The man was puzzled. He asked again, “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”She said, “The difference between the ear and the eye is the difference between the lie and the truth. The lie is all that you hear from the ear; the heard is the lie and the seen is the truth.”Truth is your own experience, your own vision. Even if I have seen the truth and I tell you, the moment I tell you it will become a lie for you, not a truth. For me it was truth, for me it came through the eyes; it was my vision. For you it will not be your vision, it will be a borrowed thing. It will be a belief, it will be knowledge – not knowing. It will come through the ear. And if you start believing in it, you will be believing a lie. Now remember: even a truth becomes a lie if it enters your being through the wrong door. The truth has to enter through the front door, through the eyes. Truth is a vision. One has to see it.And the same can be said about God and you – the difference is not more than one and a half feet or two feet. You exist in the head: you are always there, hung up, like a cloud. And the heart is there, full, full of celebration, just waiting for you to come back home. The treasure is there, but you have gone searching for it all over the world.There is a famous Hasid story…A man dreamed that near a certain bridge in the capital there was a great treasure, and that if he went there he could find it. In the morning he laughed. He was a poor man, a poor rabbi. He laughed. He said, “All nonsense. And it is so far – one thousand miles. And a dream is a dream.”But the dream came again. Then he became a little suspicious. Maybe it was not just a dream. Maybe God was giving a hint. But still he could not gather enough courage to go one thousand miles just for a dream. He was a poor man and he would have to beg for the money to purchase tickets. And who knows whether that bridge exists or not? He had never been to the capital.But the third day the dream came again, and with great persistence the dream said to him, “Just go and find it. It is all yours. Just by the side of the bridge.” An exact place was shown. Not only that, he could see the whole place, all the surroundings. It was so clear that he had to go.He traveled one thousand miles. Many times suspicions came, many times doubts came, but he said, “It has to be finished. I have to go and see.” He went and he was surprised. The bridge was there – exactly the same bridge that he had seen in the dream. Absolutely the same: the same surroundings, the same trees, and the same place that was shown. But there was a problem. In the dream there was no policeman, and now he found that a policeman was constantly there. Shifts changed, but another came. For twenty-four hours there was someone there.He inquired why this policeman was standing there. People said, “Because a few people have committed suicide from this bridge.” But now it was a problem. He was moving round and round, around the place, coming this way, that way, and the policeman became suspicious about him.Seeing him coming and going so many times, one day he asked, “What is the matter? Are you thinking of committing suicide? Don’t create trouble for me. Why are you constantly here? What do you want?”The rabbi said, “Listen. I have nothing to do with the bridge. I am here because I had a dream. And the dream persisted.” And he told the dream to the policeman. He said, “This is the dream, and where you are standing, just here, within three feet, there is a great treasure.”The policeman laughed uproariously and he said, “You are a fool! But this is a mystery. I also had a dream that in a certain town” – and it was the town in which the rabbi used to live – “there lives a certain rabbi…” And he was the rabbi: “…of a certain name. And I have been constantly dreaming about going there because underneath his bed there is a great treasure. But I never pay any attention to dreams. Dreams are dreams. You are a fool. I am not such a fool. I will not go one thousand miles and search for this small village and then search for this poor rabbi and then look under his bed. Dreams are dreams. Go back home!”The rabbi rushed back home. He went and dug a hole underneath his bed and there was the treasure.It is a beautiful parable. The treasure is within you, in your own home. You need not go to Warsaw or to New Delhi or to Washington. Underneath your own consciousness, just within you, is the Kingdom of God. It has not to be searched for, because all search means searching outside. It needs only a coming inside. It is not a reaching, it is really a coming. It is not going anywhere; it is stopping all going so that suddenly you are there where you should be.“How did you reach,” asked Hassan, “your present heights of spiritual attainment?” Now, the heights are visible, but they depend on the depths – just like a tree. A tree rises high in the sky, one hundred feet high, talks to the clouds, whispers to the moon and the stars, plays with the sun rays, but that is not the real tree. The real tree is underneath, it is in the roots. The real source is in the roots. The heights depend on the depth.The roots can exist without the tree. You can cut the tree, but the roots will still exist, and another tree will be born. But if you cut the roots there will be no tree and there never will be again. So the essential tree is in the roots and the roots are in the depth. That which is visible above the ground is not the essential part of it. The foliage and the flowers and the fruit are nonessential parts. The essential part is hidden underneath the ground, underground. It is in the roots. There is the source of life. And there is the source of spirituality.If a man understands rightly he will ask about the depths, not about the heights. The heights don’t matter, the depths do. One has to go deep into oneself. Yes, when you go deep, great foliage and great flowers and great fruit arise. Your branches rise high into the sky, you have a great height.And that height is seen by everybody, it is visible. Always remember, the visible is not very real; the real always remains invisible. The real source is in the invisible, the roots. Why are the roots invisible? Because God is invisible. Why are the roots invisible? They have to be otherwise they will be destroyed, and once the source is destroyed there will be no possibility for the tree. The tree can afford to exist on the outside, the roots cannot. They are so precious that they have to remain hidden so nobody knows about them.That’s why real religion is secret. Islam is the tree, Sufism is the root. Buddhism is the tree, Zen is the root. Judaism is the tree, Hasidism is the root. The real religion is always hidden, the real religion is secret – it is occult, it is esoteric, because it is in the depth.You can see it everywhere. If you put a seed on the ground it will not grow, it cannot grow. Visible to everybody, exposed to everybody, it cannot grow. Growth needs darkness, depth. Put the seed deep underneath the ground and then it starts growing.A child grows in the womb of the mother – that’s why in the East we have always called the woman “the earth.” The child is the seed, goes deep into the woman, disappears into the woman. Even the woman cannot see it, what to say about others? Nobody can see it. It has disappeared deep into the depths. And from there it starts growing.God functions in privacy, in secrecy. And as it is true with the child in the womb, as it is true with the seed in the earth, so it is true with the ultimate growth of your essential nature, of spirituality. Darkness, not light, is needed for something to grow because privacy is needed.Birth is in privacy. The birth day is not the real birth. The child has already lived nine months. Your birthday is not right. The real birth moment is when the child was conceived. It was completely private.It is not just accidental that people like to make love in privacy. It is part of it. It looks ugly and obscene to make love in a public place. It looks just ugly. Love is so precious, it is so fragile, it cannot be exposed. When people are standing there and watching and you make love, you are doing an ugly act against life and against God. It is profane, it is sacrilegious. Love needs secrecy, privacy. That’s why the night has been the time to make love, not the day – darkness, privacy.Have you watched? When you make love to a woman she even closes her eyes. She knows better than men. Only men are interested in looking at the naked body of the woman; no woman is interested in looking at the naked body of men – they have more sense and more respect. They are more intuitively in tune with the divine. It is ugly; to become a watcher is ugly. One should feel it with closed eyes. When you love a woman she closes her eyes. With closed eyes, she starts feeling with her whole being. When you are looking at a woman with open eyes then you will not feel her with your whole being. Then you will be an onlooker.And it does not make much difference whether you are looking at a naked picture in a Playboy magazine or at a real woman. Both are pornographic. Man is pornographic, woman is not. She is more in tune with nature. When two lovers are really in love, even the man will close his eyes. They will disappear into deep depths, into the unknown. There is the meeting. The meeting is not of the bodies, the meeting is of the souls. And when a child is conceived, it is conceived in deep darkness.So is death. You will die a private death; nobody will be a witness to it. People will see your dead body, but nobody will see you dying. As nobody ever saw you being born, nobody will ever see you dying. In the death moment, you will again be alone. It will happen in your privacy, in the uttermost privacy. Nobody can be there. You cannot invite anybody. You cannot share your death. People will be standing outside, but what they will see will be just the body and the disappearance of something from the body, but they don’t know what and where.Life enters invisibly, life disappears invisibly. And so does love – it appears from some unknown, and disappears into some unknown.“How did you reach,” asked Hassan, “your present heights of spiritual attainment?” A really authentic seeker, one who understands, will ask about the depths not about the heights. And he will not talk of spirituality as an attainment. It is not. It is not anything that you attain, it is not an achievement, it is not an ambition fulfilled, no. It is the disappearance of all ambition, it is the disappearance of the achieving mind. The achieving mind is no longer functioning. You are no longer an achiever.You are not even a seeker. The seeking, the achieving, the reaching – all have disappeared. There is no ambition, there is no desire. It is a state of desirelessness. Suddenly, when you don’t desire and there is no longing in your heart, where can you go? Desire is the path to go away: when there is no desire you fall into your very center, into the very core of your being. It is not an achievement, it is a realization.When Buddha was asked after his enlightenment, “What have you achieved?” he laughed and he said, “I have not achieved anything at all. In fact, I have lost much. I have lost my ignorance and I have lost my ego and I have lost my mind, and I have not achieved anything.”The people were puzzled. They said, “But we had always thought that spirituality was a great attainment, and you say you have not achieved anything.”Buddha said, “No. Whatever I have achieved was always there, so I cannot call it an achievement. It was already the case, only I was not looking at it, that’s all. So I have looked at it. It is not a discovery, it is a rediscovery. It was given to me. It has been with me for millennia, from the very beginning. Not for a single moment had I lost it. I had just lost a memory. So it is a recognition – pratyabhigya, a recognition.”It is just like when you have money in your pocket and you have forgotten about it, and suddenly you become a beggar because you don’t have any money. And then after a few years, one day, searching for something else, you put your hand in your pocket and the money is there. It has never been anywhere else, it has always been there. You just forgot about it.So Sufis say that God is not lost but only forgotten. God has not to be found, only remembered – zikr. Hindus call it surati, Buddhists call it samyak smriti – just to be remembered. It is yours just for the asking. Even if you don’t ask, it is yours.Ajami said, “Through making the heart white in meditation, not by making paper black with writing.” Ajami says, “Not by thinking, but by meditation; not by thought, but by love; not by the head, but by the heart, it has happened.”First, something to be understood about thinking – only then will you be able to understand about meditation. Something has to be understood about the head, only then will you be able to descend into the heart.Thinking is abstract. Thinking is nothing but hot air. Let me tell you a story – that will make it clear.Mulla Nasruddin was traveling in a compartment with three women passengers. These three women were doing their utmost to impress each other – as women do. Their whole life is just an effort to convince other women that they are far more beautiful or far more rich or far more famous.One said, “My husband bought me a bracelet worth fifty thousand rupees, but I had to return it to the jewelers because I am allergic to platinum.”The second said, “My husband bought me a mink costing seventy-five thousand rupees, but I had to return it to the furriers because I am allergic to it.”Before the third lady started, just as she was going to say, “My husband…” But she could not complete her sentence because suddenly Mulla fell down and fainted. When he regained consciousness the three ladies asked what caused him to faint so suddenly. And he looked so healthy and so perfectly all right.He replied, “It is just because I am allergic to hot air.”Thinking is just hot air. It is unreal. It is the same stuff dreams are made of. If you want to connect, contact, relate with reality, thought is not the bridge, cannot be the bridge. It is the barrier. Reality can be contacted only when there is no-thought. Only in no-thought are you one with reality. There is nothing to hinder. Thought functions as a screen, it creates a fog around you. It helps sleep; it is the metaphysical sleep I have been talking about. The more you think, the more you fall away from reality. Thinking means going astray from the real. The real needs no thinking, the real needs only awareness. That’s what meditation is. Meditation means just being alert, seeing that which is without thinking about it.Try it. In the beginning you will find it difficult, but by and by you start getting the knack of it. And then it is tremendously beautiful. It is the greatest experience that life can give to you, the deepest ecstasy that is available through life. Look at a roseflower and just go on looking at it. Don’t think, don’t verbalize. Don’t bring language in. Don’t say it is a beautiful flower. Then you have missed.I have heard…Lao Tzu was going for a morning walk. A neighbor who used to go with him knew that he was a very silent man and did not like talking.Once the neighbor mentioned that the morning was beautiful – it was a beautiful morning. Lao Tzu looked very puzzled. He looked at him as if he had said something mad.The man became restless. He said, “What is the matter? Why are you looking at me in such a way? Have I done anything wrong?”Lao Tzu said, “I am also looking at the morning, so what is the point of saying that it is beautiful? Do you think I am dead, I am dull, or asleep? The morning is beautiful, but what is the point of saying it? I am also here, as much as you are.”Then the neighbor stopped talking. He used to follow him, walk with him, and after years of going for a morning walk with Lao Tzu he also became alert about what meditation is.Then a visitor came to the neighbor and he also wanted to come for a walk. And the visitor said that day, “It is a beautiful sunrise.”That day the neighbor understood. He looked puzzled, as once Lao Tzu had looked puzzled at him, and he said, “Why should you mention it? I am also here.”And Lao Tzu said, “Now do you understand?”There is a way of being in contact with reality without words. In fact, that is the only way there is. Words don’t help, they hinder.So, sometimes sitting just by the side of a rosebush – look. Sometimes sitting at night with the stars, look, don’t think. Don’t start thinking what the name of this star is. Stars have no names. The rose does not know that it is called “rose,” and the sun is not at all alert and aware that it is beautiful. Forget all these things; just be there. That being there, that presence, is what meditation is.And when Ajami said: “Through making the heart white in meditation, not by making paper black with writing,” he means this: “I have not been reading the scriptures, I have not been writing books, I have not been creating a philosophy. I am not interested in doctrines or theology, I am not interested in words, I am not at all concerned with logic and logic-chopping. My whole effort has been how to transform my energy into feeling energy instead of thinking energy. I have dropped from the head into the heart.”And there is a new phenomenon when you drop into the heart: the head is cold and the heart is hot, because the heart is alive. The head is as cold as a grave and the heart is as alive as God and as hot. Through the head you can create greater and greater logic, through the heart you can only bring more and more love.“Through making the heart white in meditation…” Meditation is falling into the heart, and when you fall into the heart, love arises. Love always follows meditation. And vice versa is also true: if you become a lover, meditation follows. They go together. They are one kind of energy, they are not two. Either you meditate and you will become a great lover, you will have great love flowing all around you, you will overflow in love; or start becoming a lover and you will find that quality of consciousness called meditation where thoughts disappear, where thinking no longer clouds your being, where the haze of sleep that surrounds you is no longer there – the morning has come, you are awakened, you have become a buddha.Ajami says, “This is how I have entered the divine, the dimension of the divine. God is all over – you just have to be in your heart and you will fall in tune with God.”God is broadcasting himself all over, but your mechanism is not functioning correctly. It is as if your radio is not functioning correctly, or you have not tuned into the station correctly – hence your life is dull, stale. No joy is showering on you, no celebration.And you ask me, “What is there to celebrate?” What is not there? What is missing? All is there, only you are asleep. Come out of your sleep. And when I say come out of your sleep, I mean come out of your dead head. Come into the heart, let the heart pulsate, let the heart sing, let the heart dance. And then don’t be worried about the God of the theologians – you will be getting the real God. Then don’t be worried about the God of the Mohammedans and the Hindus and the Christians – then you will be getting the God who has created all. The real God is not the God of Hindus or Mohammedans or Christians, the real God is simply God. All belongs to him. And he belongs to nobody as a possession.Sufis have a very beautiful dictum. They say: The world is God, although God is not the world.The world is a small thing. God is a big circle and the world is a small circle in it. We can say the small circle is the big circle, but we cannot say that the big circle is the small circle. The world is God, but God is not the world. God has infinite potential. This world is just some small part of God that has become actual.But you can find God here. He is everywhere – in each tree, in each river, in each mountain, in each person. When a child smiles, it is he who smiles; when a woman is crying and tears are flowing, it is he who is crying. It is in the beggar and in the emperor, it is in me, it is in you – because only it is, only God is.But somehow we go on missing. We want to seek and search and we want to go to the Himalayas or to Kaaba or to Kailash. There is no need to go anywhere. He is as much here as anywhere else, he is as much in you as in Mohammed or Mahavira or Krishna or Christ. He is equally available. There is no inequality; you just have to create that kind of attunement where you start receiving him. And that reception happens in the heart, never in the head.The whole function of a master is to behead his disciples – that’s what I go on doing here. You have nothing to lose but your head.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,So many people are looking for instant enlightenment these days and there are all these gurus running around saying “Follow me,” and yet it is questionable whether the answer is there. What do you attribute this to?Every age has its own special pathology. Too much time-consciousness is the special pathology of this age. The modern mind is very conscious of time and wants everything to be done instantly.There are reasons for it. First, the modern mind is West-oriented. The East has disappeared from consciousness. Even in the East it is the West that has become the reality. The East exists no longer. The East had the consciousness for eternity, for timelessness. The West is too time-conscious.The reason is in Christianity, which thinks that there is only one life. That creates anxiety; if there is only one life then everything has to be done in this life, there is no other.The East has a very, very long span – millions of lives. There is no hurry. Patience is possible, one can wait. Even if this life is lost, nothing is lost; you will be coming back again and again. There is no need to rush.This was a totally different world view, the world view of timelessness. The East has never been worried about time, about a lack of time. The East has never said that “time is money.” The whole idea that time is money is just stupid.Time as such exists not. Time exists in your desire, in your mind. That which really exists is eternity. It is always there, it has always been there. So the East has lived in a kind of absolute patience.But the East has disappeared from the world. The Western outlook says there is only one life and even that is no longer certain. Because of the third world war, because of the atomic energy, the H-bomb, it is not even certain that you will be able to live your whole life. Any moment… These mad politicians cannot be depended upon. They are so mad that any moment the world can simply disappear. More fear has arisen.That’s why in the younger generation, the people who have come upon the earth after the Second World War, there is so much anxiety for instant enlightenment. It should be soon. If it is going to be at all, it should be soon; one never knows.The people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not even dreamed about what would happen to them, not even in their nightmares, and within a few seconds they all disappeared. One hundred thousand people in Hiroshima disappeared within five minutes. They were people just like you. You can disappear within five minutes. The politicians have the power to destroy the earth.For the first time in human history the politician is immensely powerful, tremendously powerful. The politician has always been dangerous – the politician is the most insane person possible, but he has never been so powerful. He has always been mad, but this time the madman has the H-bomb.Hence the children who were born after the Second World War are very conscious that something has to be done soon, and fast, immediately. Hence the word instant has become very, very important – instant coffee and instant sex and instant enlightenment. Everything has to be just now – now or never. Who knows about tomorrow? You cannot trust. Tomorrow has never been as uncertain as it is today. That’s why.First, the Western idea of one life, then second, the Western invention of the H-bomb, the possibility of the whole world disappearing in flames, have created an intense desire to know, to love, to be.Time-consciousness, too much time-consciousness, is a tension in the being. It does not allow you to relax. And now comes the dilemma: if you really want to be enlightened, the most necessary requirement is not to be tense. And if you want enlightenment instantly, then it is impossible because you are so tense. That’s why you ask for it to be right now.If you want enlightenment to ever happen, you have to be ready to wait for it. Even if it comes in eternity you are ready to accept it, you are not in a hurry. Then it can come instantly too. A man who is ready to wait forever is so relaxed, knows no tension, no anxiety, no anguish. In that relaxed moment, satori, samadhi, enlightenment is possible.I will tell you an ancient Hindu parable.A great saint, Narada, was going to paradise. He used to travel between paradise and earth; he used to function like a postman between that world and this world. He was a bridge.He came across an ancient sage, very old, doing his transcendental meditation – TM – under a tree, repeating his mantra. He had been repeating that mantra for many years and many lives. Narada asked him, “Would you like to inquire about something? Would you like some message to be given to the lord?”The old man opened his eyes and said, “Just inquire about one thing: how much longer do I have to wait? How long? Tell him it is too much. For many lives I have been doing this mantra, now for how long am I expected to do it? Just ask this. I am tired of it. I am bored with it.”Just by the side of the ancient sage, underneath another tree, was a young man with an ektara, a one-stringed instrument, playing it and dancing. Must have been a kind of Baul.Narada asked him just jokingly, “Would you also like to inquire about how long it will take for your enlightenment to happen?” But the young man did not even bother to answer, he continued his dance. Narada asked again, “I am going to the lord. Have you some message?” But the young man laughed and continued to dance.Narada went. When he came back after a few days he told the old man, “I inquired, and God said that you will have to wait at least three more lives.”The old man became so angry that he threw down his beads. He was almost ready to hit Narada. He said, “This is nonsense! I have been waiting and waiting and I have been doing all kinds of austerities – chanting, fasting, all forms of rituals. I have fulfilled all the requirements. Now this is too much! Three lives – this is unjust.”Then Narada became very afraid to tell the young man, because although the young man had not asked him to inquire, he had inquired. The young man was still dancing so joyously under his tree. Narada was afraid, but still he went and told the young man, “Although you did not ask, I inquired out of my own curiosity. When God said that that old man would have to wait three lives, I inquired about the young man just by the side of the tree, who is dancing there with his ektara. And he said, ‘That young man – he will have to wait as many lives as there are leaves on the tree under which he is dancing.’”The young man started dancing even faster and he said, “Then it is not very far. Just as many leaves as are on this tree? Then it is not very far, then I have already arrived – because just think how many trees there are on the whole earth. Compare! So it is very close. Thank you, sir that you inquired.” And he started dancing faster.And the story says that the young man became instantly enlightened, that very moment.The story has not said anything about the old sage. I think he must be somewhere here now. He cannot become enlightened. His very approach is wrong. His very approach is that of a tense mind. His very approach is that of a demanding ego. You attain enlightenment only when there is no ego to demand – there is no demand, there is no demander.Time creates the ego. The ego does not exist in animals because they are not conscious of time. The ego does not exist in children because they are also not conscious of time. When you become conscious of time, you become conscious of many things. First, the consciousness of time creates the fear of death. You immediately become conscious of death.That’s why in Sanskrit we have the same name for both – we call time kal and we also call death kal. We have the same name for both because they are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Time and death are not separate at all. The moment you become alert about time you become alert about death, because time is running out fast, death is coming. Death is there and you have to do something before death grabs you. Then fear, anxiety…In that fear and anxiety, in that impatience, you can go on searching but you will not find. It is not that you have to find God, it is that you have to allow him to find you. So you have to be in a receptive mood, in a non-desiring, non-demanding mood, utterly at ease, as if it has already happened. There is no need for it to happen; it is as if it has already happened. With this silence, this peace, with this non-tense state, it happens.You ask, “So many people are looking for instant enlightenment these days and there are all these gurus running around saying ‘Follow me,’ and yet it is questionable whether the answer is there.” The answer is in you, it is nowhere else. So if you want to follow a man, follow the man who throws you back to yourself because the answer is in you. The outer guru’s function is to help you to find your inner guru.If the outer guru wants you to cling to him and hang around him, and if he wants you to remain always dependent on him, then he is dangerous. Avoid him. Then he is not a master. Then he has need of followers, but he is not a master. Then through followers he is fulfilling his own ego. He feels good because he has so many followers. His feeling good has nothing to do with enlightenment; his feeling good is almost as political as any politician’s when he is in power. It gives a kind of power when you know that you have so many disciples, so many thousands of followers. It gives power. It is a power trip.But if somebody is on a power trip he will not help you to go into your innermost core. He will be the last person to help you. He will hinder you. He will create all kinds of barriers so that you cannot reach your own core, because if you reach your own core you will be free of that so-called guru. There will be no need. Yes, you will thank him and you will move on your own way. You will be grateful that he helped you, that he guided you to your own innermost being, but that’s all. You are ready to move on your own, you are ready to be your own being.So remember, this has to be the criterion. If you feel that a certain guru is enjoying the idea of having so many disciples and is creating barriers for you to enter your own being – and is desirous that you should go on clinging to him and makes you more and more helpless and dependent, makes you more and more afraid and creates guilt in you, and goes on saying, “It is only through me that your salvation is possible,” takes away your freedom, destroys you – then escape from that man. He is the Devil incarnate. Avoid him.Search out somebody who is not in any need of having followers, who has no need of having a big crowd around himself, who is utterly satisfied with himself even when he is alone, who is absolutely contented with his own self. Then he can be of tremendous help.But remember again, the answer is not anywhere else, the answer is within you. The Kingdom of God is within you. You are already carrying the answer within yourself. Maybe you have not looked and read it, maybe you don’t know how to decode it, maybe you have lost the key to your own innermost shrine. Somebody can be of help. One who has come to his innermost being can show you the path.Buddha has said, “Buddhas only show the path. You have to travel.” They cannot travel for you. Nobody can create your salvation. It is only your responsibility, because it is you who have created the bondage and it is you who can drop it. Yes, somebody can be of immense help to make you aware, to make you alert about the situation.One thing more about this age. The old supports have disappeared. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, don’t have the kind of hold on you that they used to have in the past. The church, the temple, the mosque are only decorative now, formal. Nobody’s heart is there.Friedrich Nietzsche is the prophet of this age. He declared that God is dead and man is free. True, I support half his statement, the beginning part: God is dead – at least, the God that people used to believe in is no longer there, it is dead. The God of believers is dead, the God of Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans is dead. Of course, the real God can never be dead because the real God simply means life eternal, nothing else. The real God cannot be dead if existence exists; the real God simply means existence, life, this cosmos. But the God of the believers is dead. True – I absolutely support half Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement. But man is not free. God is dead; man is not free. In fact, man is in great chaos.Man has always depended on beliefs, churches, organizations, scriptures; they have all disappeared. And man has not yet become grown-up. He still needs somebody to depend upon – hence he goes on searching for gurus.In the old days, the Christian had his priest and the Hindu had his guru and the Mohammedan had his maulana. Now they are no longer relevant. But deep down in man there is a kind of helplessness. Man is not yet capable of being on his own, he cannot stand on his own. He is afraid, he wants somebody to lean on. So he is ready to fall into the trap of whoever can claim that “I am going to support you.”You ask me, “What do you attribute this to?” Why are there so many people seeking for instant enlightenment and why are there so many people claiming that they can deliver the goods? It is a simple law of economics: when there is a demand, there is a supply. If you ask for instant enlightenment, there must be somebody cunning and clever enough to start claiming that he can supply it. You simply demand and you will find the supplier. Anything demanded will be produced. The producers are always there.Just the other night I was reading a book. I was surprised. Such books can be written only in this age and only in America, nowhere else. The author says in the introduction: “Are you unemployed? Are you ill? Are you without a woman or without a man? Are you poor? Would you like to have better health, more money? Would you like to win over a woman or a man? Would you like to defeat your enemy? Or anything? Then here is the key.” And this man is pretending to be a spiritual master. “Here is the key.” And as a proof he says, “Look at me. Just three years ago I was poor, my life with my wife was a constant conflict. I was unhappy and was thinking of committing suicide. I was one of the most miserable men in the world. But I found this secret from a guru in Tibet.” Now this “Tibet” is beautiful. You can always find something from Tibet!“And that secret worked. Now I have a Cadillac car, a beautiful house to live in, a bank balance of five figures; my life has become absolutely beautiful, love has flowered between me and my wife. I have become famous.” And he gives his address. He says, “You can come anytime.” He lives in Montreal. “You can come any time and you can see yourself what miracles have happened through my guru and his blessing. And I can give you the secret too.”People would have laughed at this kind of spirituality in the ancient days. But these kinds of people are available, these kinds of people have become very prominent. Whatever you demand they are ready to give – at least, they promise to give. There is no need to really give, the promise is enough. You go to one guru and if you fail, if you don’t attain, you start moving to another. And somebody else comes to the first guru, and this way people go on moving from one guru to another guru with the desire that somewhere it is going to happen.First be alert that this world is a market, a supermarket. All kinds of claimers are there. They listen to your desires and they claim. They speak the language of your desires.A real master does not speak the language of your desire and your demand. A real master only promises one thing – death. A real master says, “I am going to be your cross. I can help you to die and disappear.” A real master can only promise you crucifixion because only through crucifixion is resurrection. Only when you disappear as man is God born in you. Only when you are not, God is.So whenever you find a dangerous master who is ready to throw you into flames, who is ready to destroy you utterly and who is not in any need of your being a follower, who does not care a bit whether you follow him or not – only that master can be of some help.But always remember, the answer is within you. He will only direct you within yourself. Because you are not capable of going into your own self, a kind of help is needed – somebody who knows the way; somebody who has gone into his own being and is fully aware of the path and the possibilities of going astray; who is aware of how many pitfalls there are; who is aware of how many wrong turns there are; who is aware of how many false doors there are and who is aware of the arduous work that one has to do.A real master will not promise you instant enlightenment – that is just stupid. There are no shortcuts. One has to grow slowly, patiently. Money may be possible instantly – you can become a thief – but you cannot steal God, you cannot become that kind of thief. Money is possible – you can deceive the income tax officer, or the income tax department – but how are you going to deceive God?Money is possible instantly if you use wrong means, but if you use wrong means in your spiritual growth you will be self-destructive. Wrong means are not possible there. In the spiritual world the means and the end are the same. You cannot use wrong means for right ends in the spiritual world. In the ordinary world you can. The ordinary world is perfectly available to those who want to exploit it, oppress it, but God is not available to the exploiters. God is available only to the true, the innocent. God is available only to the authentic. There, means and ends are not separate, they are the same. Only the right means will lead you to the right end.If somebody promises you instant enlightenment, it is a certainty that he is going to deceive you. And if you fall into his trap you are responsible – because in the first place you wanted enlightenment instantly. That was stupid. That has led you to this stupidity and to this imprisonment. God cannot be demanded on order. You have to prepare yourself, you have to become worthy. And it is a long journey. You will be fortunate if you can ever attain it. You will be blessed if it ever happens.I am not saying it cannot happen now, remember. If you are ready, if you are ready to wait forever, it can happen now because this moment is as potential as any other moment. At this time God’s door is as open as ever. But you will need eyes to see, you will need wings to fly, you will need a womblike receptivity to receive, you will need an innocent mind, thoughtless, aware, loving, compassionate. These things are not seasonal flowers; they take time to grow roots into the earth.The second question:Osho,Have I to push the river?First, even if you try, you will not be able to push it. For a moment you may feel powerful – that you are pushing the river – but finally you will be defeated by it. The river is huge, the energy is huge and it will take you. Finally you will only feel defeated, frustrated.That’s what people are doing and that’s why people look so frustrated and so sad, so defeated, so depressed. Pushing the river, fighting with life – not trusting life, but fighting with life.A very poisonous idea has entered the human mind: that life is a struggle, that one has to fight, that it is a struggle to survive, that everybody is your enemy. Treat everybody as your enemy and beware. Everybody is going to destroy you. So before somebody else destroys you, it is better that you should jump on him.Just the other day I was reading a new commandment: Do to others before they do it to you. This is a poisonous idea, very irreligious.Religion means trust, surrender, going with the river, going with existence. We belong to this universe, we are not alien; nobody is your enemy. Even the enemy is not your enemy – that’s why Jesus says “Love your enemies.” He means that even the enemy is not your enemy, you must have misinterpreted him. In the final reckoning even your enemies are your friends. They were giving you challenges, they were creating situations for you to grow.Don’t fight with life. If you fight, you will never win. Let me give you this paradox – and all great statements are paradoxical. If you want to win, don’t try to win; if you want to be defeated, try to win.I was reading about Alexander the Great and about his last words. The last words that he uttered are tremendously significant. Remember them. The last words that he uttered do not look like Alexander’s, but he has come to an understanding – of course, very late. But even then it is never too late. Even if you come home when the sun is setting, then, too, it is not too late.The sun was setting, Alexander was dying. He was dying in his golden palace. He had the most beautiful palace that anybody has ever had before or since. He had all the power that a man can have and all the riches and all the beautiful women. He had all the greatest physicians of the world to take care of him and he was not very old, but he was dying.The physicians said, “Now we are helpless.” He wanted to live at least twenty-four hours more, just twenty-four hours, because he wanted to see his mother. He had promised his mother that he would come back. He had to go and conquer the world, but when he was leaving he promised his mother that he would come back. And the distance was very little, but at least twenty-four hours were needed to reach there, or for his mother to be brought to him. So he only wanted to live for twenty-four hours more. With all the wealth of the world and all the power of the world… But the physician said, “It is impossible. You cannot live for even twenty-four minutes. Life is disappearing, slipping away. We are sorry, but we cannot do anything.”Lying on a golden couch studded with valuable diamonds, how helpless Alexander must have felt. He was just asking for twenty-four hours – not much. Not much at least for an Alexander. He was not a beggar. Twenty-four hours for a man like Alexander was not too much, but even that was not possible.And when the last flicker of life was disappearing he opened his eyes, looked at his gold palace, his generals standing around him, his immensely costly couch on which he was dying – a poor man, a beggar – and he laughed at the whole ridiculousness of it. And he wanted only twenty-four hours! These were his last words. He said, “All is vanity,” closed his eyes and died.All is vanity? And he struggled his whole life for this vanity? He died a poor man, empty, exhausted, utterly disillusioned. He was a conqueror. He was pushing the river of life according to his desires. He wanted to impose himself on existence.Please, flow with the river. You are a part, you cannot impose yourself on the whole; the whole is infinite. It is as foolish as a small wave trying to direct the whole ocean or to dominate the whole ocean, trying to push the ocean in a certain direction, to certain goals. It is not possible; how can a small wave be in control of the vast ocean? And we are not even waves, we are just ripples. For one moment we are there, another moment we are gone.With this momentary life the only thing that you can learn is to surrender, to be in a let-go; don’t push. Pushing, you will be moving in a wrong direction, the direction of the ego. Fight, all fight, is out of the ego.Surrender: not even swimming. Just floating with the river wherever it takes you. Finally it takes you to the ocean. If a man is courageous enough to surrender, then God takes possession of him. Then you are directed by infinite sources of understanding, love, energy. Then you are no longer to decide on your own. And when you are not to decide on your own, all anxiety disappears – obviously.I have heard about a man who was a great philosopher. He was robbed – he was going from one town to another and he was robbed on the way. And he then did not have a single pai.So he went to a farmer – he was a man of pride – and he said, “I am hungry and I have been robbed. I would like to work for you – any work you can give me, so that you can give me something to eat and a shelter for the night. In the morning I will start traveling again.”The farmer took pity on him. He was a poor man and he had no work really, but he could see this man’s pride. So he said, “Okay.” He took him into his house where there was a big pile of Irish potatoes and he told him, “You have to sort them out. Make one pile of the biggest, another of the smallest and, just in the middle, of those which are between the two – neither big nor small.” He left.After four, five hours he came back. Not even a single potato had been moved. The philosopher was perspiring and was very anxious. The farmer asked, “What has happened? You look so tired and so exhausted and I don’t see that any work has been done.”The philosopher said, “What you are talking about? The deciding, all this deciding, is driving me mad. Which one is the bigger and which one is the smaller and which one is just in the middle. All this deciding is driving me mad. I have not been able to decide.”If your life is going insane just look deep down – you will find that all this deciding is driving you too mad. What to do? What not to do? Where to go? Where not to go? All is unknown and mysterious. And whatever you do, there is doubt about whether this is right or not. If you don’t do it there is doubt – maybe it was right. All this deciding… If you want to push the river you will become insane.Relax. Let God do it. Don’t be a doer. This is one of the most fundamental principles of Sufism – don’t be a doer, let God do it.I have heard…A Baptist minister rushed down to the train station every single day to watch the Sunset Limited go by. There was no chore he wouldn’t interrupt to carry out this ritual.Members of his congregation considered this eccentricity rather juvenile and asked him to give it up.“No, gentlemen,” he said firmly. “I preach your sermons, teach your Sunday school, bury your dead, marry you, run your charities, act as chairman for every drive you conduct. I won’t give up seeing that Southern Pacific train every day. I love it! It’s the only thing in this town I don’t have to push!”You need not push anything. You can just relax and let existence take over. You can become a vehicle; you can become an instrument – which in India we call nimitta. You can become instrumental.That’s what Krishna goes on teaching to Arjuna in the Shrimad Bhagavadgita. The whole teaching can be condensed into one thing, into one essential point, that you need not be a doer. Let God do it.Arjuna was worried, naturally, because he was thinking that it was a decision to be made by him – whether to fight or not, whether to kill or not, whether to go into this massacre or not. It was going to be a great war, many would be killed, it was going to be murderous. He started thinking and he became worried whether it was worth it. A great religious idea arose in his mind that it was too violent and meaningless and what was one going to gain by it? It was not worth it. He became very, very depressed by the whole idea. He fell into despair.Krishna, his friend, his master, his charioteer, argued long to convince him, “Whatever is going to happen is going to happen. God has already decided it. It does not make any difference whether you do it or not – somebody else will do it. These people you are seeing as alive are already dead. Their death has already happened. You are not the one to decide whether they should live or die. Who are you? You cannot even decide about your own life, how can you decide about somebody else’s life? God has decided it already. He has chosen you as an instrument. If he wants you to kill, relax; if he wants you to renounce, renounce; but leave the decision to him. Don’t you decide because through the decision comes the ego.”Krishna was not saying that you necessarily have to go to war, remember. That is a fallacy. Many people have thought that Krishna was forcing him to go to war. On the surface it looks like Arjuna was a pacifist and Krishna was a warmonger. It is not the case. In fact Krishna was not saying anything about war – and nobody knows whether this war ever happened. It may be just a parable; that is more of a possibility. It may be a metaphor.But the message is immensely significant. The message is that you don’t decide: don’t stand in the way, disappear. If God decides that you renounce and go to the Himalayas then you go, but let it be God’s decision not your own. Or if he wants you to fight, then it is perfectly okay. You are not responsible when you don’t decide.This is the life of a sannyasin. The life of a sannyasin is the life of one who has dropped deciding, who has relaxed, and who says, “Let God do. I will function as an instrument. I will be a hollow bamboo. If he wants to sing a song, he will make a flute of me; if he does not, I will remain a hollow bamboo. But I will be a hollow bamboo.”You cannot sing any song on your own. All songs are his. Whenever you dance it is he that dances, and whenever you celebrate it is he that celebrates. Your life is not really yours, it is his life. All life is his.So please, don’t push the river. Relax in the river. The river is already going to the ultimate goal. It will take you with it.The third question:Osho,Why do heterosexual relationships create trouble and is it something new or has it always been the case?It creates trouble because it is hetero. It creates trouble because it is between two opposite polarities. It creates trouble because it is between two different kinds of species – man and woman.Man and woman are different kinds of species. They exist in opposite directions, hence the attraction. Opposites attract. The negative electricity is attracted by the positive electricity; the positive electricity is attracted by the negative electricity. If you put two positive poles of magnetism together they repel each other. They don’t attract. The similar repels, the contrary attracts.The woman is attracted to the man, the man is attracted to the woman because they are opposite: yin–yang, day–night, life–death, earth–sky; they attract. But remember, the very attraction is because of the opposition. They are opposite, so they attract. When you come closer there are bound to be difficulties because you will be speaking different languages, you will be functioning from different parts of your being.The woman functions illogically, the man functions logically. Logic and illogic don’t meet. The woman is more poetic, the man is more prosaic. Their approaches toward life are different.The woman is more interested in the immediate, the man is more interested in the far away. You can watch it in everything. The woman cannot believe why man is so interested in the moon and Mars. It looks stupid. What is the point? The woman is interested only in the neighborhood; the neighborhood gossip is her gospel. Man talks about great things, faraway things. The woman never raises those questions, those questions are irrelevant. She is interested in the immediate, the close by. The man talks about what is happening in Vietnam, Korea, and Israel; whilst the woman talks about what is happening with the neighbor’s wife and who she is fooling around with, what is happening in the close-by world.The man functions from the left hemisphere of his mind and the woman functions from the right hemisphere of her mind. They don’t meet, they can’t understand each other. They are attracted by each other, but they can’t understand each other. So there is a constant game of coming closer and going away. That is the problem – both relating and being distant continue.You come close to a woman to a certain point where a meeting happens, and then you start going away. You move like two pendulums: you come close and then you go far away, come close, go far away.And this is nothing new because man and woman are nothing new.Listen to this small story.The Lord called Adam from the Garden of Eden and spoke to him. “I am going to teach you to kiss.”“What is a kiss?” asked Adam.“Go to Eve and you place your lips on hers.”Adam did this and returned shortly.Now, said the Lord, “I will teach you to make love.”“What is love?”And the Almighty explained to Adam, and Adam left to try what he had learned. Very soon he came back.“Lord,” said Adam, “what is a headache?”That’s how it goes. So when your woman says that she has a headache, don’t bother her. It is not something new. It started with Eve – and the very first day Adam made love to her.Then there is a constant effort to dominate. That too is natural, natural as long as man remains man and woman remains woman. The man wants to dominate the woman in his own way, in his muscular way; the woman wants to dominate the man in her own feminine way – by tears, by crying, weeping. Those are her strategies. Just as you have muscles, she has tears. And it almost always happens that muscles are defeated by tears because the softer wins over the harder.This is bound to be so because whenever there are two people, the fear arises that the other may dominate. So before the other starts dominating, you have to plan. This is very unconscious. This is not done deliberately, it is instinctive, it is natural, biological. It is built-in. One remains afraid the other may start dominating – and then? So it is better to dominate before the other starts any kind of domination. There is bound to be a constant conflict.Unless a woman and a man understand the whole structure of this polarity very deeply; unless they become meditators; unless they meditate on their own innermost desires, power trips, egos; unless they understand how their minds function; unless they understand how their minds function mechanically, it is not possible to remain in silence and peace. Conflict will continue.Man and woman are intimate enemies – enemies and yet intimate. There is great pull and great attraction because of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the uncharted, the mysterious. But for the same reason, there is conflict.If your woman is with you then you start feeling: How to be alone? When you are alone, after a few days you start a great thirst and hunger for your woman: How to be with her? If you are alone, an appetite arises for love; if you are with somebody, the appetite disappears and you start thinking, “Why not go to the Himalayas and sit silently in a cave? Why go on bothering with this nonsense?”Just a few days ago Ramananda wrote a letter to me. First he used to live alone, then he became tired of aloneness – naturally. Everybody gets tired of aloneness, gets fed up with oneself. Nothing else to do, nowhere to go, nobody to look at, nobody to be with, nobody to hug, nobody to care for you or to care about. He became tired and started looking for a woman – and when you look for trouble it comes!So then came Vani from faraway Germany, and they were both happy – as stories go. They were both happy. Then things started getting entangled, and there was conflict and fight and nagging; all natural things.Then for two days Vani was ill and Ramananda was alone again. He enjoyed those two days like anything! He wrote me a letter: “Osho, to be alone is so incredible, so beautiful, I have never known that aloneness is so beautiful.”I told him, “Wait, Ramananda! Just a few more days and you will start hankering.”And this goes on and off, again and again.One has to understand. One has to understand how one functions, man or woman – and how the other functions. And don’t be too personal about it. It has nothing to do with you. It is just the man’s mind and the woman’s mind, it has nothing to do with Ramananda and Vani. It is basically biological. You have to understand it very impersonally, only then can you go beyond it, only then can you transcend it.Watch every move that you make and watch every move that the woman makes. Listen to the deepest instinct, to what is happening. Don’t throw the responsibility on the other and don’t start feeling guilty that you are doing something wrong. Nobody is doing wrong. It is simply natural.But one can go beyond nature because there is a supernature too. I am not saying that you are condemned to be natural, that you will remain always natural, no. With understanding one becomes wiser, wiser than nature. One becomes more meditative than nature allows. And through that understanding there comes liberation.But that liberation is so alchemical that it transforms you totally, radically. Then you are no longer a man and your woman is no longer a woman. Then you both become more like two spirits – man, woman seem irrelevant. And when a man is no longer a man and a woman is no longer a woman, it means they are no longer confined to their biologies, no longer confined to their bodies. Because the difference is only in the body: beyond the body there is no difference. Hidden behind, you are the same. It is just the body, the medium, that makes the difference. Once you have started learning how to go beyond the medium, how to transcend biology, physiology, then you have become only two spirits.And only two spirits can live in communion forever. Then there arises a new kind of love which I call friendship. Friendship is higher than your so-called love. Your so-called love is full of hate; friendship is pure love. All hate has disappeared. All conflict, nagging, fighting has disappeared. All desire to dominate, possess, be jealous, has disappeared. Friendship is pure love. All that was not needed is no longer there. All that was nonessential has been left behind. Only the essential fragrance…Friendship is the fragrance of love. And remember that unless you and your wife become friends, you will never be at peace.The fourth question:Osho,Can we not love and accept our heads, our minds, our egos, as part of the whole of life? Why reject them?I have not told you to reject them. How can you reject something which is not? I have been telling you only to see, to look into them.I am not telling you to reject them. Rejected, they will remain: rejected, they will remain deep in your unconscious, repressed. They will remain. Rejection means repression. What will you do? Rejected they will not disappear, they will move into the dark corner of your soul and they will function from there.No, I am the last person to tell you to reject. I don’t say to reject the darkness. I only say to bring light. Bring a lamp and look around: Where is the darkness? It disappears. It is not to be rejected, it cannot be rejected.Look into your ego and it starts disappearing. Not that you reject it, not that you do anything to it. With just a deep insight into it, it disappears. It exists only because you have not looked into it.It is like a shadow. You are walking and the shadow follows you. Now, if you are alone and in a desert, or in a cemetery, and you become afraid that somebody is following you, you start running. And the more you run, the more the shadow runs with you. Then you become even more afraid and the logical mind will say, “Run faster.” This way you will not be able to win. “Go faster and faster!” But how are you going to win? You can go as fast as you can, but the shadow will be with you.All that is needed is to stand and turn around – a hundred and eighty degree turn – and look into the shadow. There is nobody, it is your shadow. It is just a shadow. A shadow means nothing. It exists not. That very moment the shadow has disappeared.By disappearance, I mean it will not affect you anymore. It will not be powerful over you anymore. It will not make you frightened anymore.You say, “Can we not love and accept our heads, our minds, our egos, as part of the whole of life?” It is impossible because the very mechanism of the ego is that the part tries to pretend, the part tries to claim that it is the whole. That is the whole problem. The ego says, “I am the whole.” The ego is not ready to accept that it is only a part. The ego says, “I am the king and I am the whole.”How can you love the ego and accept it as a part? That is the very thing the ego denies. It says, “I am not a part, I am the whole.” The part claiming to be the whole is what the ego is all about. The head claims, “I am the whole.”“Can we not love and accept our heads, our minds, our egos, as part of the whole of life?” No, there is no way. You will have to look into the ego. When the ego disappears you will know what the whole is – otherwise the ego goes on pretending that it is the whole. And you will never know the whole.When the ego has disappeared, when no part claims to be the whole, then the whole comes into existence, starts functioning on its own. Then there is great accord, great harmony.And you cannot love the ego because who are you? The ego says that you are not separate. The ego claims your totality. The ego is your identity. When you say, “Can I not love my ego?” do you think you have two I’s? I and the ego? Who is going to love whom? It is a trick of the ego. The question is from the ego. The ego is trying to befool you. The ego is trying, “Why destroy me? Can’t you love me?” But who are you? If you know yourself as separate from the ego then the question will not arise. Then you have come to be your soul, you have attained your center. And in that very attainment there is no ego, there is nobody left to love.And if you think that you can love the ego, then you are not. This is the dilemma. If the ego is, you are not. If you are, the ego disappears. They cannot both exist together, just like darkness and light cannot exist together.You ask, “Why can’t one love the ego?” The ego is the destroyer of all possibilities of love. It kills the heart. It makes it impossible to love. Love disappears – you become a desert, a wasteland. Love no longer grows in you. How are you going to love the ego? Love is not there. If you start being loving you will find the ego disappearing. If love starts flowing in you, you will not find any ego in yourself. Then the heart will become your center.That’s what Sufis call heart-wakefulness. Then the heart wakes. And the moment the heart wakes, the head disappears. The head can function only while the heart is asleep.It is – as Gurdjieff used to say – as if the master of the house is asleep and the watchman pretends to be the master. If somebody comes, the watchman talks as if he is the master. And the master is asleep. Then the master awakes and he comes out: the watchman becomes again a servant. He is no longer a master, he cannot pretend. The master is present.Have you not seen it happening in a class of small children? The master is not there, the teacher is not there, and they are all shouting and screaming and doing a thousand and one things. And then the master comes. Suddenly they are sitting at their desks. Everybody is reading very concentratedly, as if there had been no noise, no chaos. What has happened? His very presence has been a transformation.It happens exactly like that inside you. When you are awake, the ego disappears. Then your head and your mind become your servants. You cannot accept them, you cannot reject them, you have only to understand them. And then all happens of its own accord.The last question:Osho,I have been studying religious literature for many years and for three years I have been studying your books too. Through all this study I have progressed a lot on the path. Osho, would you say something about what I should do next?What are you talking about? Path? You are on the path just by studying books?It is not possible. Through books one never comes to the path. Through books one only hears rumors about the path: just rumors that the path exists, that the path is, that the path is possible – perhaps the path exists somewhere – that’s all. Books can only give you rumors; they cannot put you on the path.That’s what I go on saying to you every morning – that knowledge is a barrier, that one never comes to godliness by learning. One comes by unlearning; not by becoming knowledgeable, but by becoming innocent. One has to burn one’s scriptures, my books included. One has to burn all language, verbalization, thinking. Only then does one come to the path, not before it.And you are asking, “I have progressed a lot on the path. What next?” You have not even dreamed about the path.A woman was seriously ill. Her husband summoned the doctor, who dashed inside the sickroom and came out a minute later asking for a chisel. The stunned but anxious husband didn’t ask questions. He found a chisel.Minutes later the doctor poked his head out and asked, “Have you got a hammer?”The husband was puzzled, but not wanting to doubt the doctor, gave him a hammer. Five minutes later, out came the doctor asking for a hacksaw.By now the husband was completely upset and screamed hysterically, “Doctor, you asked for a hammer, a chisel, and a hacksaw. What are you doing to my wife?”“What wife?” asked the doctor. “I’m trying to open my satchel!”You have not even opened your satchel yet. What path are you talking about? The doctor is just opening his box. Scriptures can’t help you more than that. And there is every possibility that whatever you read in the scriptures may not be in the scriptures at all.How can you read something that you don’t already know? You can read only that which you know. So people go on reading themselves in their books. They don’t read the books. When you read my books you cannot read them. You will be reading only something about your own mind into it. You will interpret it in your own way. You will be an interpreter.To understand what I say, you will have to enter with that state of mind from where it is said. To understand Christ, you will have to attain christ consciousness. To understand Krishna, you will have to attain krishna consciousness. Just by learning, you will not be able to understand – you will misunderstand. All your interpretations are going to be wrong. They will be your interpretations out of your ignorance and out of all your kinds of stupidities.Parson Sloan, with a nervous habit of winking his eye, was sent by his parish to New York City.Sloan asked the taxi driver for a good hotel – as he winked – and the cabbie mistook the wink and took him to a bawdy house.The parson asked the madam for a nice room – as he winked – and she took him by the hand to a room filled with her girls, telling him to take his pick.But Parson Sloan said – as he winked – that he didn’t want any girls.The madam went to the head of the stairs and shouted, “Oh, Clarence, here’s one for you!”People understand only according to their state of mind. And that is natural. It has to be forgiven.But listening to me, reading my books, you have not even understood a simple fundamental that I go on repeating: that through knowledge godliness is not possible, through knowledge knowing is not possible, through knowledge wisdom is not possible.Your question reminds me of this small anecdote:Farthington and Smythe, two Englishmen, went on holiday to Ireland. Farthington had a reputation for tactlessness, so Smythe warned him not to say anything disparaging about the Catholic Church.One evening they were playing darts in the local pub when news came over the radio that the pope was ill. Immediately everyone crowded around the radio to listen.“Oh, to hell with the pope,” said Farthington. “Let’s get on with the game.”He woke up in the hospital to find Smythe sitting next to him. “I warned you not to say anything about their religion,” said Smythe.“Yes, I know,” said Farthington. “But you didn’t tell me the pope was a Catholic.”Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Hassan of Basra relates:“I had convinced myself that I was a man of humility, and less than humble in my thoughts and conduct to others.“Then one day I was standing on the bank of a river when I saw a man sitting there. Beside him was a woman and before them was a wine flask.“I thought, ‘If only I could reform this man and make him like I am instead of the degenerate creature which he is.’“At that moment I saw a boat in the river beginning to sink. The other man at once threw himself into the water where seven people were struggling, and brought six of them safely to the bank.”“Then the man came up to me and said, ‘Hassan, if you are a better man than me, in the name of God save the other man, the last remaining one.’I found that I could not even save one man, and he was drowned.”“Now this man said to me, ‘This woman here is my mother. This wine flask has only water in it. This is how you judge and this is what you are like.’”“I threw myself at his feet and cried out, ‘As you have saved six out of these seven in peril, save me from drowning in pride disguised as merit.’“The stranger said, ‘I pray that God may fulfill your aim.’”Jesus says, “Judge ye not.” His statement is absolute, with no qualifications. It is categorical. He does not say, “Don’t judge wrongly,” he simply says, “Judge ye not.” Don’t judge at all. He makes no distinction between right judgment and wrong judgment. His statement declares that all judgment is wrong. Judgment as such is wrong.This is a tremendously powerful statement – and the same is the attitude of Sufism about life. A real man of God has no judgment. He can’t judge. It is impossible for him to judge. Firstly, to judge you need to be an egoist. The ego is a must. Judgment is possible only if you are standing egocentrically. If you have no ego left, who is going to judge? And how? And in comparison to what?A real man of God exists as a nothing. He is emptiness – what Buddha calls shunyata. He is nonbeing. Inside him, there is no one except God. He is one with the all. He cannot make a distinction of I and thou. He cannot stand against the thou in any way; because there is no I left, there cannot be any thou. He is one with all. With a thief he is a thief; with a saint he is a saint. He cannot stand against, he cannot even stand for – because to stand against or to stand for, you need an ego. That is a basic requirement. He cannot judge because he is not.When Jesus says “Judge ye not” he is saying please disappear. The judgment won’t allow your ego to disappear. It will keep feeding it, will keep strengthening it. So those who judge become very, very egoistic. They are not religious people, not the people of the path.Secondly, to judge you need criteria, rules, paradigms. Rules come from the past, rules come from history – and life always goes on transcending history. History is where it once was, but it is no longer there. So all rules are inadequate. They belong to the dead past, they have nothing to say about the alive present.Martin Luther has said that faith is based in history. That is an utterly absurd statement and very unchristian. Faith is not based in history, faith is based in your own experience of life herenow. It has nothing to do with the past. The past is no more. The past is nothing but footprints on the banks of time. Life has moved from there, just as sometimes a snake moves out of its old skin. To judge the alive snake by the dead skin would be foolish; to judge man by history is nonsense.But without history there is no other criterion. You cannot judge from the past because it is no more, you cannot judge from the future because it is not yet, and by the time you find a criterion to judge man in the present, the present will have become past. It is changing each moment.Life is a process, a flux. Life is unpredictable. No rule contains it; no rule can contain it. It is uncontainable. It has an absolute freedom. It goes on moving in new directions, new ways. It goes on finding new pastures of joy and bliss and ecstasy.Rules come from the past, that’s why every society has different rules – because every society has a different history. Hindus have lived in one way, in one kind of climate, in one country; Mohammedans have lived in another way and in another kind of climate; Tibetans, again, have lived in a totally different way. Their histories are different, that’s why their moralities are different, that’s why their rules are different. Those rules are all arbitrary. They are utilitarian. They have nothing of reality in them. Yes, they help at a certain moment in time, but once life has moved beyond that moment they become just hangovers, ugly, burdening, heavy. They make you dull.Martin Luther is not right. He was not really a man of God, he was more of a politician, more of a protestant – protesting, fighting – more of a revolutionary. He did not have a religious consciousness.Faith is not based in any history, faith is based in experience. And when I say experience, I mean experiencing – because once an experience has become complete, it is past. While you are in it, pulsating, alive, throbbing, dancing, only then and there can you contact the divine. And with that contact arises faith. Faith is not a conditioning; it is your own experience of the divine in life.So remember, faith does not have a base in the history of the race. It does not even have a base in your own autobiography, it is not autobiographical. The real man of faith has no autobiography.That’s why in the East we have a tradition that the sannyasin should not write his autobiography – because he should not think in terms of autobiography. If you ask a sannyasin from where he comes, he will laugh; to what society he belongs, he will laugh; what his old name was, he will laugh. He will not give you any clue about his past. Yogananda is the first Hindu sannyasin who has written an autobiography – The Autobiography of a Yogi – otherwise, the sannyasins have always insisted that they don’t have any past. They efface their past. They have only the present; the now is all that they have – hence the freedom, the absolute freedom of the sannyasin. Because he has no past he is not imprisoned anywhere. He has no autobiography.Just think – if you can drop your autobiography completely, how free you will become in that very instant.That is the meaning of my sannyas too. When I give you sannyas, what I am in fact telling you is to drop your history, drop your autobiography. Now be connected with your past no longer, become discontinuous with it. Now live the moment, and live the moment with clarity, intelligence, awareness, love, but not according to rules. Rules come from the past; love arises herenow. Intelligence is herenow; rules come from the past.And always remember, a person who lives through rules is bound to be unintelligent. In fact, to live according to a rule is just a way to avoid intelligence. Then you can afford to be stupid. There is no problem; the rule takes care. You don’t feel responsible, you are simply following a certain dead rule, you are following it perfectly. Then you need not be intelligent. What is the point of being intelligent?When you go to the church every Sunday, you don’t go out of your own inspiration, you simply go as a rule. You say a certain prayer that has been given by tradition down the ages – you simply repeat it. You are a gramophone record. It is not in any way connected with you and your heart, it is not your pulsation, it is not your vibe. It is not you, it is tradition speaking through you. It is other people’s voices ringing through you, resounding through you. You are just an echo: How can the echo be intelligent?People who don’t want to be intelligent become followers – followers of tradition, followers of scriptures, followers of rules and regulations, rituals. An intelligent person has no rules, no rituals – and I don’t mean that he is insane and irresponsible or that he will hurt others, no, not at all. In fact, just the contrary is the case. Because he lives intelligently he cannot hurt anybody. The people who follow rules are always violent people. Violence comes out of stupidity; nonviolence is a flowering of intelligence. Intelligence and love always go together. The more intelligent you are, the more loving you are; the more loving you are, the more intelligent you are. They are two aspects of the same coin.By intelligent I don’t mean intellectual, remember. The intellectual is not an intelligent person, the intellectual is again living in the past. He can recite the Vedas, but he cannot create a single richa, a single piece of poetry of the quality of the Vedas. He can recite the Gita or the Koran or the Bible, but he cannot sing a single song of the quality of the Gita. He cannot express himself in any creative way – the way Mohammed did. His utterances are borrowed, his utterances have no life in them; his utterances have no heart to beat, they don’t breathe. They don’t have that aliveness that Jesus’ utterances have. He will be intellectual, he will be a pundit, a scholar.And through being intellectual you can deceive yourself and others that you are intelligent. Intelligence has nothing to do with intellect. Intellect is part of memory; intelligence is part of your heart. They are totally different phenomena.Sometimes you can find a farmer, a woodcutter, a fisherman, who is very intelligent – but not intellectual, certainly not intellectual. He may not know anything about the scriptures and theories and philosophies.All Jesus’ apostles were nonintellectual people, but they were immensely intelligent. To be with Jesus one needs intelligence, not intellect. Those people were simple people, but they had clarity. They could see the radiance of Jesus, they could see what had happened to him. The professors could not see it; the fisherman, the woodcutter, the gardener could.The rabbis could not see it. They thought that this man was mad, they thought that he was dangerous. They compared notes with the past and they thought that he was not fulfilling the old law. In fact, they thought this man was against all laws, all regulations, all rules, and that he was a danger to society.Yes, this man was a danger to society. Because the society that has existed up to now is not worth calling a society. It is an ant heap. It is an anonymous mass. People are lost in it, drowned in it. People have lost their souls in it.When a man becomes part of the mass of society he has forgotten himself completely. A man has to be a man; a man has to be an individual; a man has to have his own life, his own lifestyle; a man has to have his own way of doing things, his own uniqueness – only then does he fulfill himself, only then does he come closer to God. God loves the creators, not the people who are lost in the anonymous mass and have become part of society, of history, of race, of religion, of church. God would like you to see, to be yourself.A Hasid master, Joshua, was dying and somebody told him, “Remember Moses so that he can help you. You are going to die, remember Moses.”Joshua opened his eyes, laughed and said, “Stop all this nonsense! Sooner or later I am going to be encountering God. It is a question of a few minutes or a few hours at the most. I am on my deathbed. Stop all this nonsense. I will be standing before God and God will not ask me, ‘Joshua, why are you not a Moses?’ He will ask me, ‘Joshua, why are you not a Joshua?’”Yes, God will ask you why you are not you. Why are you somebody else? By being somebody else you remain unfulfilled. By being somebody else you are a traitor to God.The real man of God lives his own life, lives intelligently, lives lovingly, lives understandingly, with great compassion – but he has no fixed rules. He is liquid. He is not frozen. How can he judge? Against what? And how?Just think of it in this way. If you are a born Jaina or a Buddhist – born, I am saying, not one who has really attained buddhahood, not one who has tasted something of buddhahood or jainahood. If you are just born a Jaina or a Buddhist, and you see Jesus sitting with his friends drinking wine, what are you going to think? Won’t you judge? You will immediately judge that this man can’t be the son of God. Mahavira never drank wine, Buddha never drank – not even in his dreams – and this man is drinking wine?If you are a Christian, born a Christian, and you see Mahavira standing naked, you will think he is crazy or something. “Jesus was never naked. This man has gone neurotic. This is not the way a man of God should be. Never in the history of Christianity has there been a naked mystic. So what is he doing, this man Mahavira? He must be wrong.”This is how we go on judging. We have a certain pattern, a certain idea transferred to us by our history, by our race, church, religion, and then with that idea we are prejudiced, with that idea we think we have a priori knowledge of what should be the case. Then we can judge.A man of God has no fixed rules and ideas. He belongs to no history, to no race, to no religion, to no church. He belongs only to his innermost core. He has nothing there as a fixed idea so that he can judge. A real man of God will be able to see Jesus and recognize Jesus even when he is drinking wine with his friends. And he will be able to recognize Buddha, and he will be able to recognize Mahavira in his nakedness, and he will also be able to recognize Krishna playing on his flute with his girlfriend dancing around him. Now, if you are too much of a Christian you think the man of God has to be always on the cross. That is just one instance; it happened once that Jesus was on the cross – but that is not the rule. There is another possibility also – Krishna playing on his flute, arrayed in beautiful clothes, decorated beautifully, dancing. Now, you cannot conceive of Christ dancing.If you are too fixated upon Christ you will not be able to see what is happening in Krishna. Or, if you are too fixated on Krishna you will not be able to see what is happening in Christ. God manifests in millions of ways – in Krishna and in Christ and Mahavira and Buddha and Mohammed and Zarathustra and Lao Tzu – millions of ways. And all ways are his.But to recognize that you will need great intelligence, and the first step toward intelligence is to drop all a priori ideas, prejudices, to drop all that has been given by others to you, to drop all the dust from your mind so that you can become a pure mirror and you can reflect.First, the man of God has disappeared as an ego; there is no “I” to say anything against or for. Second, he has no fixed rules, so he cannot weigh who is doing right and who is doing wrong. Third, a great acceptance has arisen in his soul; total acceptance has arisen in his being. All is good because all is from God. Yes, he can bless the whole because he is so blessed by the whole. He has no judgment. That is the meaning when Jesus says, “Judge ye not.”So remember, there are no right judgments and no wrong judgments – judging as such is wrong. Drop judging. And if you can drop judging you will be surprised how many burdens, how many rocks from your heart have been dropped. You will feel weightless. You will almost feel like flying. You are chained by your prejudices, you are chained by your past – that’s why you feel life as being so heavy. Life is not heavy, it is your carrying of the past that is making it heavy.That’s why children are light and old people become very heavy – because the children have no autobiographies yet. As they grow up they will start gathering, accumulating junk – experiences, knowledge, this and that – and sooner or later they will be drowned in their own past.Judgment is moral, and morality has nothing to do with religion. That misunderstanding has to be dropped. People always confuse morality with religion. Morality has nothing to do with religion; a moral man is not necessarily a religious man. An atheist can be moral, perfectly moral. You can find the moral man in Soviet Russia – there is no need for the moral man to be religious. A religious man is a new dimension.Morality is a need of the society. The society needs rules and regulations, the society needs distinctions between what is right and what is wrong and what is good and what is bad. It certainly needs them – because people are so asleep. To manage these sleepy people you need some demarcations. You have to give them some fixed rules, otherwise there will be chaos.The religious man can drop his morality because now he has his own eyes; he need not have any other guides. His eyes are enough. It is as if you were blind and you used to have a stick with which to walk around, to grope your way, to find your way. Then one day your eyes open. Will you still carry the stick? You will throw it away. Now it is meaningless, now you don’t need to grope. Now the walking stick is no longer a help, it will be a burden.So is morality – it is a walking stick for a blind man. For those who have decided to remain stupid, morality is needed. But for those who have decided to stake everything and become alert and aware, morality is no longer needed. A person who is aware is spontaneously moral. He need not carry any morality around him, he is simply moral. Not that he tries to do good – no, not at all – but whatever he does is good.See the distinction. It is of immense import. A religious man is one who is not concerned with doing good, but whatever happens through him is good because he has surrendered himself to God; and all is good through God, through surrender to him. He cannot do wrong. It is not possible. It is as impossible to do wrong when you are alert as it is to walk through the wall, or to try to walk through the wall when your eyes are open. You will find the door! It is as simple as that.But a blind man sometimes tries to get out through the wall. He cannot; there is no possibility. But a blind man is a blind man. He cannot see where the wall is and where the door is. The religious man is one whose eyes are open and he sees where the door is. Then there is no need to carry any idea that one should always go through the door – one simply goes through the door. When you know, that very knowing becomes your virtue.Socrates says, “Knowledge is virtue” – a very pregnant statement. To know is to be right. To know is to do right. Through knowing, right comes on its own like a shadow. Virtue is a by-product of right knowing. It need not be practiced. If you practice it, it is false. The practiced morality is a false morality, it creates only hypocrites. Religion is that which is not practiced at all, it happens simply because you know – your eyes are open, you can feel, you are sensitive, so the wrong cannot happen anymore. The religious person is neither moral nor immoral, he is simply religious. Religion is a higher standpoint than morality. Morality is an effort to pretend to be religious.With no morality, judgment goes. When morality goes, judgment goes. If morality is there you will always be judging: that’s why the moralists, the puritans, are continuously judging. Their whole day and night – twenty-four hours – is of judgment. They are comparing, always looking. They are peeping Toms. They are looking into everybody’s life: What are you doing and who is doing wrong? Their whole life is that of continuous inspection. These are ugly people. It is very difficult to live with a moralist, he is utterly boring. He is dull and dead, and he creates a dull and dead atmosphere around himself. Unfortunate are those who have to live with moralistic people, because those moralistic people sooner or later will poison them too.The moralist creates guilt, and guilt is the cancer of the soul. Once you become guilty you are ill and it will be very difficult for you to regain your health again. But all the so-called religions – which are not religions but only moral standpoints – have done that harm.Jesus’ statement “Judge ye not,” when looked at meditatively, is one of the most revolutionary statements ever made.Judging takes it for granted that man exists for the rules. That is putting things upside down, that is putting things into complete disorder. Man does not exist for the morals, the morals exist for man. Man is not the means, man is the end. But the moralist always thinks that the rule is more important than the man. The man can be sacrificed for the rule, but the rule cannot be sacrificed for the man. The rule becomes more important.This is a very sorry state of affairs. The rule cannot be more important than the man. The rule exists to help man, otherwise it is as if you sacrifice the blind man for the walking stick. Yes, the walking stick is helpful, but it is not the end or the goal.Watch how you judge people. When you judge people, are you not making the moral principle the end? Are you not condemning the man and praising the principle? Things should be put in the right order. Principles are there to be used. They are arbitrary. They are only conveniences, they have no intrinsic value. When times change, when circumstances change, when man attains new ways of being in life, they have to be dropped. They should be dropped, they should be dropped immediately. They should not become a burden on humanity.Rules go on living, but times have changed. The Hindu code of life was written five thousand years ago. It is still the ideal. In these five thousand years, how much water has flowed down the Ganges? Everything has changed. Nothing remains the same as it was in the days of Manu – Manu wrote the code and it is still being followed.It is utter nonsense to follow it now. It has nothing to say to this age and to this man and to this time. And Manu is not responsible, because whatever he wrote was meaningful – meaningful in his time. If he comes back he will not be able to believe how foolish people can be. “Why are you following these rules now?” he will say. “Who told you to follow them? Life has changed. Life is no longer the same. Nothing is the same anymore.” But those rules continue.Moses has given a certain pattern of life to be lived, but it is three thousand years old. The world has gone far away from that point. It is irrelevant, but people go on following it. We are worshippers of the dead, we are worshippers of all that becomes irrelevant. We don’t look into life. Each and every moment one has to look into life and find a way to respond to life, not to dead codes.Now Jesus is two thousand years old, Buddha is two thousand, five hundred years old, and the Jaina code of life is one of the most ancient codes, nearabout five thousand or seven thousand years old. Modern man is burdened. If you follow an ancient code of life, it is inadequate; it makes it impossible for you to live. If you don’t follow it, you start feeling guilty. So in both ways it is destructive.If you follow Manu, Moses, Mahavira, you will be a museum piece; you will not be herenow, you will not be relevant at all. You can go and see the Jaina munis, the Jaina monks. They are irrelevant. They should be discarded; they belong to the dustbin. They are no longer relevant to the time. They are just corpses.If you follow the rules this is bound to happen. You will not be contemporary. You will be a contemporary of Manu or Mahavira or Moses, but you will not be a contemporary of mine, you will not be contemporary to the society and world you are living in, you will not belong to this twentieth century. To belong to this century, all the past centuries have to be dropped. And if you cannot do it…It is impossible to follow one of these ancient codes of life. It is so difficult to do it that nobody can do it perfectly. How can you belong to a five-thousand-year-old code and live in the twentieth century? It is such a feat that, although you can try your best, you will always remain imperfect and will always feel as if you are falling short. And the guilt…you are not being as good as you should be, you are not a really religious person. It will be like a wound and it will make your life a misery.Very few people try to follow these rules. People have simply found a way to pay lip-service to them. This is just to protect themselves. But even the lip-service does harm because deep down you think that they are right and you are wrong – if you are not following them, then you are wrong. And the idea that you are wrong will make you shrink, will make you close, will not make you open and will not give you the thrill and the joy that is needed to grow.One has to accept one’s reality so totally that there is no guilt, not even a shadow of guilt. Only then does one flower and bloom. Only a guiltless person blooms. And when I say be guiltless, I don’t mean: follow these rules and don’t commit any sin, then you will be guiltless. Nobody can do that. When I say be guiltless, I mean, drop all the rules that create guilt. Be without rules. Trees are existing perfectly without rules; they are guiltless. Stars are existing without rules; they are guiltless. Be natural, be guiltless – with only one difference.That difference is that you have to be aware. Trees cannot be aware; they are guiltless, but not aware. That’s why they are in God, but they cannot know that they are in God. Stars are guiltless, but not aware. So they move in God, they move far more smoothly, far more totally in God than we do, but they cannot know it. They remain unconscious.This is man’s dignity and man’s potential – to be in God and to be fully aware; to be in God, consciously. This brings the greatest joy, the celebration.“Judge ye not.” This statement of Jesus’ is not only concerned about others – this is the last thing I would like to remind you of. A few people start thinking, “Okay, we will not judge others. If somebody is passing and doing something we will say, ‘We are not concerned. This is his business. Who am I to judge?’”Yes, it is possible not to judge others, but if you go on judging yourself it is the same game being played on another plane. First you were judging others, now you start judging yourself: “I have done this wrong. I should not have done this. Tomorrow I will improve upon myself. I have to evolve and become spiritual.” And this and that. You have ideals and you think you have to fulfill them. So you may not judge others, but you are judging yourself. It is the same. Now you will be destructive to yourself.“Judge ye not” simply means judge ye not – neither the other nor oneself. Judgment has to disappear. Be without judgment and see what great joy comes to you, what great ecstasy starts exploding in you.Before we enter this beautiful story, a few things that will help you to understand it.There are three possibilities between the subject and the object, between the inner and the outer. The first possibility is that of the politician, the moralist, the priest. The politician is only interested in how to manipulate people. His only interest in the other is how to manipulate him, how to dominate him, how to become powerful over him. He is not concerned with anything else. His trip is that of power – how to control people. If he says something, he says it with that idea. He is not concerned about truth.That’s why politicians have to go on telling lies, promising things which they know they cannot fulfill, which they know are not possible to fulfill. They go on promising because that’s what you need, that’s what you desire. And if they want to manipulate you they have to tickle your desire, they have to buttress you, they have to show you beautiful dreams. The politician talks in order to manipulate the other, the other person. His whole concern is exploitative.And so is the priest’s. It is not very different. He also tries to manipulate the other. His idea of power is not of this world, his idea of power is of the other world – but it is of power. He also wants to dominate in the name of God.The politician and the priest are not very different, that’s why they have always been together. There has always been a conspiracy between the priest and the politician to dominate people. In the old days it was so, and today it is so. The politician and the priest have always been conspiring together against people. The priest used to say to people that the king was from God and the king in his turn would go and touch the feet of the priest. This is the conspiracy. They have a mutual understanding. They decided long before that their goal was the same. And they have a line of demarcation – the priest should rule the peoples’ souls and the politicians should rule the peoples’ bodies. The politicians should not interfere as far as soul matters are concerned, and the priests should not interfere as far as body matters are concerned. This was an understanding and a conspiracy.This is one way of relating to people. The other way of relating is the way of the poet, the painter, the artist, the singer, the dancer. He is not concerned with manipulating, dominating – not at all. In fact, he is not much concerned with the other. His expression is subjective; it is an outpouring of his being. The politician, the priest, are objective. Their goal is the other.The artist, the poet, the painter, the dancer, is not objective. He is subjective. He talks, relates, but his talking and relating is an inspired ejaculation, his explosion. If he wants the other there, he only wants the other to be an audience so that the other can also enjoy. The poet wants to share. The dancer dances. If he wants you to be there, it is only so that the dance can be shared with you. He has some joy and he would like to relate it. He would like it to be spread to everybody. He has some fragrance and he wants to give it to the winds so they can take it to the farthest corner of the world.But he is not interested in dominating – that’s why the poet has remained very poor, the painter has remained poor. They have remained powerless. They don’t have any power. They are the most nonviolent people, and powerless.I have heard that a man went to his physician and he said, “For many days I have been suffering from constipation.” The physician prescribed some medicine.The man was so poor that he said, “I cannot purchase it.” So the physician gave him the medicines from his own money.After two or three days the man came again and he said, “Nothing has happened. The constipation still continues.”The physician was puzzled. He said, “This medicine functions absolutely.” And the man was looking so poor, so exhausted that he asked, “What kind of work do you do?”He said, “I am a poet.”And the physician laughed. He said, “Why didn’t you say so before? Now take this money – first go and eat.”This has been the situation. The poet is poor, the painter is poor. When somebody wants to become a poet, the family thinks a calamity has happened. Poets are neither priests nor politicians; they are not concerned with the other in any way, to dominate them, to be powerful over them. If they invite you it is an invitation. If you come to them they are very happy and grateful to you. They have some gift. They want it to be shared. But they are subjective.The politician is interested in the other; the poet is interested in himself. Both are half-half, unbalanced. Both are part, not the whole.The third possibility is the mystic, the saint, the sage. He is whole. He is neither subjective nor objective. Subject and object meet in him. I and thou meet and become one. He is not interested in manipulating, in overpowering, and he is not interested in sharing some poetry with you, no. He has some truth – not only poetry, not only a dream, not only a beautiful painting. He has godliness himself to be shared. But his sharing is such that it can be shared only when you become one with him and he becomes one with you.The poet can share his poetry, there is no need to become one with him. There is only one requirement – that you should be sympathetic, in rapport, that’s all; that you should be able to listen, that’s all; that for a moment you should not judge. Who bothers to judge poetry or music? If one enjoys it, one remains there. Otherwise one leaves.The poet requires only a momentary participation with him. The mystic wants you to come so close to him that your boundaries start disappearing, melting. That is the relationship between a master and a disciple: by and by they become one. Only when they become one can the truth be shared. Then that which has happened in the innermost core of the master can be delivered to the disciple. But it is not a thing, so it cannot be delivered if you are separate. It is a feel: it can only be delivered when you become one, when there is an inner contact.It is not possible to deliver it in a relationship, it is only possible to deliver it when there is a unity – not just a relationship. The poet needs a relationship, the politician does not even need a relationship. The master, the mystic, needs unity.The politician does not even want a relationship – politicians don’t have friendships, they only pretend. They don’t allow people to come very close; it is dangerous to allow people to come very close. The politician remains far away, aloof. He never comes close and he will not allow anybody to come close. He has to be constantly defensive. When people come close you cannot dominate them so easily. Politicians don’t like to fall in love.Adolf Hitler never allowed a single woman to sleep with him in his room. He was so afraid. There was not one man in the whole of Germany who had a friendship with Adolf Hitler. Adolf Hitler could not afford it; the distance had to be maintained. He was far away. And people were just people, the masses.The politician needs no relationship; the poet needs a relationship. But the poet and the admirer remain separate. The mystic needs unity – the master and the disciple become one.The politician is always judging, continuously judging. He is a moralist. Whatever your morality is he will follow it, he will fulfill it. And sometimes beautiful games are played.In India it happens every day. India is a very, very ancient country with a long history of morality and moral ideas. In India, politicians still try to fulfill those moral ideas. If some politician fulfills it he becomes a great saint and a mahatma. He is not going to solve any problem of the country, but if he can just show some gimmick… For example, just now the president of India has decided that because the country is so poor he will move into a smaller house. A beautiful gesture! But how is the country going to become rich by your moving into a smaller house? And the whole country is happy. This is how people are stupid. The whole country is happy, they are saying, “This is how the leader should be.”Now, the real problem is not touched at all. The real problem is how people should get more food. Just the president moving into a smaller house is not going to help anybody. But that’s how people are – so stupid they will praise it like anything. Now this man is almost like a mahatma.They will reduce their salaries but how does that matter? Not a single problem is solved, and they will be praised like mahatmas. The president receives ten thousand rupees per month, now he has decided that he will receive only three thousand rupees per month. Perfectly good. But what are you doing just by giving seven thousand rupees to the country – a country of six hundred million people? But the country feels good, the country feels perfectly at ease: that this is how things should be done. These are tricks to manipulate. Ugly, basically ugly. But on the surface they look beautiful.The politician goes on pretending that he is a moralist because the people follow a certain kind of morality. He has to show, at least. There are other ways to get money – through the back door – so there is no trouble. You can drop seven thousand rupees from here and you can get seventy thousand from other sources. And nobody will suspect because a mahatma who is living in a small house and has reduced his salary and moves in a smaller car…and like this. Nobody will ever suspect that something totally different is going on through the back door. If you really want your back door functioning, then you have to show a great moralistic mask at your front door.India is poor and the politicians have been doing these tricks for thirty years – the same tricks. One prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, seeing that the country was very poor, used to fast one day every week. But how is this going to help? Impotent gestures. Just befooling people. Just putting people’s minds to some other nonessential things. Just diverting their minds from the real problems.People are not interested in solving the real problems either, because to solve the real problems they will have to change their minds. They don’t want to change their minds; they want to remain as they are. They want to solve their problems and they want to remain as they are. And the problems arise out of their being as they are, so the problems cannot be solved unless they change, unless their minds start taking new ways of being. But that is hard, and it hurts.The politician lives through a mask, he never relates. He never relates to people, he never relates to real problems. He only creates false problems and false challenges and he starts showing that he is fighting hard and he is doing great good to people – and the good never happens.The poet is not concerned with the other at all. His only concern is like a flower – he is a flower, he blooms. Yes, good, whatever he has he shares; it is better to be a poet than to be a politician. To be a poet is far better. It is higher, spiritually higher.The real thing happens through the mystic because he is ready to dissolve himself into the other and he is ready to absorb the other into himself. He is ready to stake all. He really changes people’s minds because he gives them a new quality of consciousness, a new dimension. But he is not a moralist.So people are never for the mystic, they are against the mystic. They are always for the politician because the politician is a moralist. The politician looks as if he is their leader and the mystic always looks dangerous. Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, they are all dangerous people – because the mystic is really ready to change the whole quality of your consciousness and through that revolution all your problems will disappear.Your problems are created by you, and unless you change they cannot be solved. Your misery is created by you; it cannot be changed unless you are radically changed. A radical change is needed.But the mystic is not a moralist. Sometimes he may look like an immoral person because he will not follow the old morality. He will have his own morality that comes out of a moment-to-moment response to reality. He will look into reality and from there his life will arise. He may look immoral. Jesus looked immoral, the Sufis have always looked immoral.This has to be understood. The politician looks perfectly moral, the mystic looks perfectly immoral and the poet is amoral – he has nothing to do with morality or immorality. He is neither orthodox nor revolutionary, he is a flower. You can enjoy or not enjoy. He is not there to solve any of your problems. He neither promises nor solves. The politician promises, but never solves; the mystic never promises and solves; and the poet is just in between the two. These are the three approaches.Now this small story:Hassan of Basra relates:“I had convinced myself that I was a man of humility, and less than humble in my thoughts and conduct toward others.”“I had convinced myself,” says Hassan, “that I was a man of humility…” He was a man of morality, not a man of humility. A man of humility cannot know that he is humble. Humility never becomes self-conscious, otherwise it is not humility at all. Once the self has entered, how can you call it humility? If you start thinking that “I am the most humble man in the world,” then you are still pretending to be the first in the world. It is again an ego trip.“I had convinced myself that I was a man of humility…” You can convince yourself. If you follow dead, rotten rules you can convince yourself that “I am now following all the rules. And I am suffering so much and I am torturing myself so much, and I am being so much of an ascetic and I am sacrificing so much life, that I am a man of humility.”Sufis have great respect for humbleness, but a true humbleness is unaware of itself. It knows not. It has no idea. How can you know your humbleness? To know, you will have to compare with others, and to compare with others you will need an ego. Only an ego can be compared.I can say that I am a man of knowledge if I compare my knowledge with somebody. If I am left alone in the world, I cannot claim that I am a man of knowledge. If I say I am a man of morality, a moral man, but I am alone – then? If the whole world disappears and I am left alone, how can I claim that I am a moral man? There will be nobody to be compared with.Real humbleness is non-comparative. You can be humble even if there is nobody. A humble man is simply humble. Whether somebody is there or not makes no difference. If somebody is needed for you to be humble, then your humbleness depends on him. It is a dependence. And if that man tries to become more humble than you, then what will happen? He can do that. If you can be humble, he can be more humble than you. If he becomes more humble than you, then again… It is relative.I have heard…The young fellow was a chronic speed offender who picked up two tickets a day from the motorcycle cop, one going to work and the other returning home.Finally he bought a souped-up foreign car, capable of traveling a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Traveling home in it, at a speed of around seventy miles per hour, he was again accosted by the speed cop who pulled up alongside to flag him down. Quickly stepping on the gas he pulled away from the motorcycle cop and started traveling at a hundred miles per hour. Eventually he slowed down, waiting for the cop to catch up with him again. As the motorcycle pulled alongside, he pushed the pedal all the way down and took off at a hundred and forty miles per hour.Becoming worried because he couldn’t see the cop following him, he turned the car around and went back to look for him. To his surprise he found the cop crawling out from under his machine in the ditch.“What happened to you, officer?” he asked the bruised and bleeding cop.“Well,” explained the police officer, “when you pulled away from me the last time I thought my motorcycle had stopped, so I stepped off.”It is relative. If your humbleness is relative it is not true humbleness, it is still egoistic. All comparison is of the ego.Hassan says, “I had convinced myself…” It is very easy to convince yourself. You can convince yourself of anything.That’s how people go on living. Somebody has convinced himself that he is a lover and somebody has convinced himself that he is humble and somebody has convinced himself that he is a meditator – and so on, so forth. That’s why you are constantly coming in conflict with reality. You have convinced yourself that you are a lover, but every day there is a problem. And you cannot convince your woman that you are a lover, that’s why there is conflict.It is very easy to convince yourself – and to convince yourself about good things is naturally more easy. Who does not want to be humble, pure, innocent? Who does not want to be a saint, a sage?This Hassan says:“I had convinced myself that I was a man of humility, humble in my thoughts and conduct toward others.“Then one day I was standing on the bank of a river when I saw a man sitting there. Beside him was a woman and before them was a wine flask.“I thought, ‘If only I could reform this man and make him like I am instead of the degenerate creature which he is.’”Now, this is what goes on happening in everybody’s mind. You have a certain idea of yourself and with that idea you go on looking at others. You are continuously condemning, judging, continuously throwing thoughts around yourself, interpreting. And it feels very good whenever you see somebody who is degenerate; it feels very good. On the surface you show much concern, but deep down you feel very good because that degenerate man makes you feel bigger than you are.Now Hassan is even more convinced that he is a man of humbleness, morality, purity. He is pious. Remember, a real man of God has no condemnation. If he sometimes finds you doing something wrong he has no condemnation. And if he tells you that “This is wrong,” his statement is concerned only with the act, not with you. If he says that something is wrong, he is only saying something about the action and nothing about you. You remain untouched by your action.And if he says something is wrong, he is concerned because he loves you, not because he loves a moral principle. It is not that drinking is bad, but if he says “Don’t drink,” he is concerned with your health, not with any principle that drinking is bad. It may not be bad in all cases. Sometimes it may function as a medicine, then it is perfectly good. Sometimes it may be needed, it may be a requirement, then it is good.His condemnation does not exist; there is no condemnation. If he sometimes says that something is wrong, he does not make it look like a sin. It is wrong only in the sense of a mistake, an error. You think two and two make five and I say, “No, this is wrong.” But I am not saying that you are a sinner, I am simply saying that your mathematics has to be put right. You are perfectly good, you are just committing a mistake. See the difference. In fact, for a religious man there are no sins, only mistakes.Then too he will not enforce it on you. He will simply say it to you – it will be advice, not a commandment. If you don’t follow it you don’t become a criminal and you won’t be thrown into hell. You are not to be punished for it. Your freedom remains intact.I would like my sannyasins to remember: whatever I say to you, remember always that it is not to destroy your freedom, not even to touch it. If you feel it to be right, you can do it; if you don’t feel it to be right, you need not do it. And never feel guilty because of not doing it. I am the last person in the world to make you feel guilty in any way. I respect you. My respect is absolute. And whenever I say something to you, that “This is not right,” I am simply saying that it is an error. But still you remain free to follow my advice or not to follow it.Sometimes it happens that a sannyasin will come to me and he will say, “I have not followed your advice and I am feeling very guilty.” That is wrong, that is absolutely wrong. Then you are doing something to yourself unnecessarily.You need not feel guilty – it is worse than the wrong thing you have done. Guilt is the last wrong that you can do to yourself. There is no need. If you decided to do otherwise, you are perfectly free to do otherwise.And don’t be worried that you will go far away from me because you are not following my advice. No, you will go far away from me only if you start feeling guilty. My love is unconditional – whether you follow me or not does not matter, it has no relevance to my love. In fact, you will be closer to me the freer you are from me.Let it be remembered always – my whole interest in you is to make you free, as free as a human being can possibly become. My whole interest is to liberate you. So the more liberated you are, the closer you are to me.If you find that my advice is good – not because I have given it to you but because you find that it is good – then follow it. Then you are not following me. That’s what Buddha said to his disciples, “Don’t follow me. Don’t follow because Buddha has said so, because it is written in the scriptures, because all the sages are agreed upon it, no. Unless your intelligence says ‘Yes, this is right’ don’t follow it.” And I would like to say the same to you.“I thought, ‘If only I could reform this man and make him like I am instead of the degenerate creature which he is.’” Now, this is not a spiritual standpoint at all. A spiritual person never wants you to become like him, never. How can he desire to make you like him? Then you will be false, then you will be a replica, a carbon copy. A spiritual person wants you to be yourself – an original, not a copy. His whole effort is to help you to become yourself. His whole effort is to help you to attain your destiny. If you are a roseflower you have to become a roseflower; if you are a lotus you have to become a lotus; and if you are a marigold you have to become a marigold. The concern of the spiritual master is that you should flower, not that you should become a rose or a lotus or a marigold – that is not his concern. You should flower, you should bloom. See the difference.The moralist always wants you to become a replica. If he is a roseflower he would like everybody to become a roseflower. Then what will he do with the marigold? He will paint the marigold like the rose, he will cut the marigold like the rose. He will destroy a natural beauty. A marigold is as beautiful as any rose. Or, if you are a lotus and he wants a roseflower just like himself, he will cut you utterly. He will destroy you. Or, if he is a lotus and you are a roseflower, he will try to extend you, pull you apart. He will force you. And whatever happens will be wrong. You will become a false thing.The real master helps people to bloom – to bloom in their own way, to bloom into whatever they can become, into whatever they are carrying in themselves. Their hearts should become open, their petals should open; they should not die like seeds or buds, they should bloom.“I thought, ‘If only I could reform this man and make him like I am instead of the degenerate creature which he is.’” In fact, the people who try to make you like themselves are great egoists. They want their carbon copies. The more carbon copies they have, the more joyful they feel. Then they become the criterion, the ideal.And, of course, nobody can fulfill that ideal, so they are always on the top, remember. Nobody can fulfill it. Even if I want to become like you I cannot fulfill it, it is impossible. It is not in the nature of things to be like somebody else. So if I try to be like you, I will always fall short and you will always remain higher. If you want to be always higher, then the best trick is to help people to be like yourself.That’s what parents do to the children. They try to make the children be like themselves. They can never be. So parents can always feel good that they are higher, superior beings, and these degenerate children, this generation, has gone wrong.Nobody has gone wrong. Parents have always felt about their children that something has gone wrong. And the parents themselves are the culprits, they are the real criminals because they tried to force the child to be like the father. And it is impossible. It is not possible in the very nature of things, so the child cannot do it wholeheartedly. Even if he tries he will never succeed and he will never become like his father. So the father will always feel good; he is something so superior that nobody can become like him.And that’s what your so-called gurus go on doing. Beware of such gurus. The real master is one who is interested in you as you are and as you should be, or you could be – he only helps you. His work is that of support. He does not reform you, remember. He neither reforms you nor informs you, he simply supports you. Information is knowledge; reformation is trying to manipulate your character. He never informs, never reforms, he simply supports. And his support is unconditional. He says, “Be thyself. My whole support is there, unconditional support is there.”He is like a gardener who goes on watering the rose plant, the marigold, the lotus – he goes on watering every plant. When the lotus blooms he is happy, when the rose blooms he is happy, when the marigold has bloomed he is happy. But he is not trying to force any pattern on anybody.“At that moment I saw a boat in the river beginning to sink. The other man at once threw himself into the water where seven people were struggling, and brought six of them safely to the bank.”Hassan is standing on the bank and seven people are dying – but his compassion has not arisen. And he thinks he is a man of humility, religiousness, morality. And he wanted to reform this man. This man has compassion.Compassion is the criterion; when you act in compassion you show who you are. Hassan has not even thought about it. Those people are dying. That idea had not occurred to him. And this man saved six men.“Then the man came up to me and said, ‘Hassan, if you are a better man than me, in the name of God save that other man, the last remaining one.’”The other man is no ordinary man. It is a special Sufi idea. Sufis say that there is a messenger of God, Khidr, who goes on working on people. He is a master of masters. He goes on coming to the earth like Jesus comes, like Krishna comes, an avatar, but in a different way. Wherever he is needed, wherever he sees that something is potential and has to be helped, he appears. Down the ages he appears.This is a very beautiful idea. The meaning has to be understood. It is just a symbol. It simply means that whenever a man is really ready to grow, hankers to grow, God comes and helps – that’s all. This man is Khidr.He comes to Hassan and he says: ‘Hassan, if you are a better man than me’ – he has read the thought – ‘in the name of God save the other man, the last remaining one.’ What are you doing standing here? People are dying and you don’t have any compassion for them? Now one is left. Go and save him. In the name of God, try.Sufis have another idea – that when a man who has any glimpse of God does anything, he always succeeds. It has to be so. God has to succeed. If you are a man of God you have to succeed. It is not your success; it is God’s success through you. If you are instrumental, then it will happen.Says Hassan:“I found that I could not even save one man. He was drowned.”This was just to show Hassan, “You are not yet an instrument of God.” What kind of humbleness is this? A humble man is a hollow bamboo. God flows through him. What kind of humbleness is this? You are too full of your own ego. You could not save a dying man, you could not be used as God’s instrument.“Now this man said to me, ‘This woman here is my mother. This wine flask has only water in it. This is how you judge and this is what you are like.’”Now he says, “Don’t judge from appearances. Appearance is not the reality. Don’t be deceived by appearances.”The meaning is that whenever you see somebody, what you see is only the outer core, the behavior. You never see the inner man. Please don’t judge. The inner man may be totally different. Never judge a man by his behavior – and there is no other thing to judge by. You only see the behavior.Hassan has seen this man sitting with a woman. In Mohammedan countries the faces of the women are covered, so it is very difficult to see whether the woman is old, young, beautiful, ugly. It is difficult. Whether the woman is a woman, that too is difficult. And Khidr has thrown the veil away from the woman’s face and says, “Look, this is my mother. But just by seeing me sitting alone on this bank with a woman, the idea flashed into your mind that I am womanizing. And look, this flask has only water in it. The flask gave you the idea that there must be wine in it – ‘What is this man doing here? Whose woman has he got? What kind of debauchee is he?’ A drunkard, a womanizer…and all kinds of ideas flashed into your mind, just seeing something from the outside. Is this the way to judge?”And this is what you are like. Never judge because all that you can see is only the appearance. You only see the surface, the inner man remains hidden. Unless you are capable of seeing the inner man, don’t judge. And remember, those who are capable of seeing the inner man never judge. They never judge because the inner man is always pure. The inner man is purity itself, it is innocence. The inner man has never been impure. So when you can’t see the inner, don’t judge; and when you can see the inner, there is no way to judge. Judge ye not.“I threw myself at his feet and cried out, ‘As you have saved six of these seven in peril, save me from drowning in pride disguised as merit.’“The stranger said, ‘I pray that God may fulfill your aim.’”This is how a real master is. He has not even pretended that he will help you. He says: ‘Okay. I pray that God may fulfill your aim.’ A real master functions only as an instrument. A real master effaces himself completely. It is only God that functions through him.Hassan has thrown himself at the feet of this strange man. Hassan is a seeker – that’s why Khidr has appeared to help him. Hassan is a sincere seeker but on the wrong path, a sincere seeker but he has become clouded with erroneous ideas – hence the appearance of Khidr. When there is sincerity, even if you are wrong, you will find a master. And if there is no sincerity and you are right, then you will not find a master because the master can contact only a sincere man.This man Hassan is a great seeker. He went from one master to another, he roamed all over the Sufi countries trying to find out… And he was ready. When somebody said something, he was ready to understand. He could immediately see the point that, “This man has saved six and I could not save even a single one. God has given his statement about me, that I am not yet instrumental.” Then he didn’t resist. He fell down at Khidr’s feet and said, “Save me. You have saved six and I am drowning in my pride. Save me also otherwise I will be drowned.” Khidr said: “I pray that God may fulfill your aim.”And this is what I say to you too. I pray that God may fulfill your aim.Enough for today.

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

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-1-14/

The first question:Osho,I want to become enlightened. Why don't you help me?What do you think I am here for?As far as my own work is concerned, it is finished. I am here just for you. And all that I can do, I am doing, and all that you can do to prevent it, you are doing. It is a tug-of-war. It is a conflict between the master and the disciple.Remember, it is a conflict. The disciple remains contradictory in his desire. He wants to become enlightened, but he wants to become enlightened as he is. He does not want to change, that’s the contradiction. You would like to go to heaven, but as you are. That is impossible.As you are, you cannot become enlightened. Great chunks of your being will have to be cut and thrown away. It will be almost like committing suicide. It is painful, it is immensely painful, because you have always thought of those chunks that have to be chopped away as your being. You have become so identified with them that you shriek and scream, that you escape: you shrink, you close yourself.I understand the question and the desire. Yes, you would like to become enlightened, but you would like to become enlightened very cheaply, without going through any pain, any suffering. And growth comes through suffering. It comes through great pain, it is arduous, one has to pay for it. And the payment is not in money; the payment is very deep. The payment is your innermost sacrifice. The disciple has to disappear.I go on helping, but a little cooperation is needed from your side.A man met a pretty girl and fell in love with her. He took her rowing one day and she fell overboard. He grabbed her hair and a wig came off in his hands. He reached for her arm and an artificial arm came off likewise.He said, “Listen, sweetheart, if I’m going to be able to help you, you must cooperate a little.”That’s what goes on happening between me and you. You must cooperate a little. And I know that sometimes you cooperate, but your cooperation is also only cooperation in appearance. Deep down you remain resistant. Even while you surrender you go on watching from the corner of your eyes – how far to go? You go only so far, and you go with such absolute control so that if it is needed you can go back. Your surrender is not a journey of no return. And unless it is a journey of no return, it is impossible for me to help you.And it is not that I don’t want to help you. There is no other reason why I am here. My work is complete, nothing is going to happen to me if I live twenty years, thirty, forty or a hundred years or a thousand years. All that had to happen has happened. Time has disappeared for me and so has the so-called life disappeared.I am in this body so that you can see me. Even in the body very few can see; when I am not in the body, those who can see me will become even rarer. But you don’t cooperate. And you go on misinterpreting me.For example, just two days ago a French sannyasin told me that she was confused, that she could not decide whether to go back to France or to stay a little longer. I looked into her…something would be possible if she could stay a little longer, maybe four to six weeks. She would have taken a great step toward satori. But if I had said to her, “Be here for four to six weeks because something is going to happen,” then my very prediction would have prevented it because then she would have become greedy, then she would have started expecting. And not only that, she would have started demanding, “Why is it not happening?” And that very idea: “Why is it not happening? When is it going to happen?” would have created a tension in her being and the happening would have become impossible.So I cannot predict it because the very prediction will change the whole situation. I cannot say directly, “Remain here for four to six weeks, something is going to happen.” That is not possible; nothing will happen. Even if I say, “Be here for four to six weeks, it will be good for you,” a subtle desire may start in her being, a subtle hope. No, I cannot say anything to her directly, I have to be very indirect.So I told her, “Be here for a few weeks” – she is a group leader – “run two or three groups here.” That had nothing to do with her own growth; I did not say anything directly about her own growth. She agreed, but I was watching and saw that the agreement was only fifty percent, not more than that. Just…just enough to stay. There was no joy in it; there was no happiness in it, that I had asked her to stay. She could not feel the gift and the blessing. Because the joy was not there, the possibility was cut almost to half.Now, that which was going to happen could happen only in a celebration. Now she would not have been really here – she would have only been here because I said so. Now almost fifty percent of the possibility for the happening had disappeared.Then yesterday morning I said that if you want to do something, even if it goes against me you need not feel guilty. She suddenly felt joy. She left! Now, there was no need to feel guilty – it was as if she was just waiting for something to be said. And although I had particularly said to her to stay she didn’t even wait to ask me, she didn’t even inform me. She simply left. She said to people, “Osho said that if you do something even against his advice, you need not feel guilty. So why should I feel guilty? I am going.”Only one thing is good about it: she will never know what she has missed. How can you know? Many of you go on missing, but you will never know what you are missing. I only feel sad for you, I only feel great compassion when I see somebody missing. He may not even be aware that he is missing. He may have missed by just a few inches – home was very close. But he will never become aware, he will never be able to look back. How can he?Now she has left. I could not say it directly to her, I had to be indirect. She could not understand my indirectness and she found a rationalization – that now Osho has said… What I said was simply to help you so that you don’t become burdened with guilt. I have not said to start doing whatever you want to do; I have not said to go against my advice. I simply said that if you sometimes feel like going and it is impossible for you to follow my advice… I am not saying that by not following my advice you will gain something, I am saying you will miss something – but there is no need to feel guilty. Missing is enough punishment. Why make it more with guilt?Now she has missed, that is enough punishment. And she will never become aware of it, she will remain oblivious. She will become aware only one day when she comes to an understanding, to a window that opens the door – then she may be able to see that this window was very close, but that time she missed. Right now she will never be able to see. Only when she finds that this moment of growth has happened will she be able to see.It is good that she will not feel guilty; but what about that which she has missed? I made that statement particularly for her, but there are also other fools who realized it as if it is a blessing. One dropped from the Enlightenment Group. “Now there is no need. Osho has said do it, but now there is no need. He has said you have to go on your own.”And I will not be surprised if somebody even drops sannyas. There are always great fools everywhere. You go on misunderstanding, misinterpreting. Your ego is there; it is just watching. This French sannyasin has been listening to me for almost one month and this is the only thing that she has followed.And you ask me, “I want to become enlightened. Why don’t you help me?” What else am I doing here? You don’t receive the help, that is true, but that is your responsibility. I can give, but if you refuse it that is your responsibility. I go on giving, I give unconditionally – I don’t put any conditions on you.This is the first time in the whole history of human consciousness that sannyas is being given unconditionally. I don’t ask whether you are worthy or not. I am in such a hurry to give! I have so much to share. I don’t care a bit whether you are worthy to receive it or not. I am simply giving it to you because I have so much and I have to unburden myself. The cloud is so full that it wants to rain; it does not matter whether it is a desert, or it is wasteland, or it is fertile soil – it does not matter. The flower has bloomed and the fragrance is heavy on its heart, it has to be released. Whether somebody will appreciate it or not does not matter. I am giving sannyas to you without any conditions.You are the most fortunate people ever. But that may not be of help, you can go on missing. You will have to learn new ways of being. You will have to learn how not to miss. You will have to learn how to keep your stupid mind from coming in and interpreting.Little Danny, aged eight, came home with the often-repeated complaint, “Teacher is picking on me again!”“Is that so!” said his mother angrily. “Enough is enough! She has been picking on you all year. Now it is going to stop! Tomorrow, Danny, I will go to school with you and we will have it out with her.”The following morning the mother arrived with Danny and demanded an explanation from the teacher.“That’s ridiculous,” the teacher replied in answer to the mother’s tirade. “Accusing me of picking on your child? I have never picked on any student. Besides,” she added, “you might as well know the truth. Your Danny is not very bright, and when I use the word bright I am being excessively kind. Let me show you what I mean. Danny,” she called, “tell us how much five and five is.”“You see, Mom,” cried the boy, “she is picking on me again.”Your interpretation… You will have to learn how to keep your stupid mind from coming between me and you. And there are a thousand and one ways for this mind to come in. And it is the only mind you have.By being a disciple, what really happens? What really should happen? What is expected to happen? Being a disciple simply means that now you will start functioning from the master’s mind and not from your mind. And yes, that statement of yesterday remains right in its own way. I don’t make any impossible demands on you, but sometimes there are situations and you have limitations where it is possible that you may not be able to do something.For example, this French sannyasin really had nothing to do back there in France; there was no responsibility waiting for her there. There was no problem. It was not a great demand on her to be here for four weeks – she had money, she had everything. There was no problem there that she had to go and solve – her father was not dying, her mother was not ill – there was no problem. So it was simply stupid.I understand that sometimes your mother may be ill and dying and I told you to stay, but you have to go. But then you go with tears in your eyes. What I have said is only this: don’t create any guilt in yourself. Yes, man has limitations. Sometimes you may not be able to fulfill my advice – it’s okay. But it is only for the exceptional cases when you cannot fulfill my advice, and that too just to help you so that you don’t become burdened with guilt. Otherwise there is nothing… You have to feel that you have not been able to fulfill, that something has been missed, but it is not a question of guilt. You have missed something, that is enough punishment.So if it happens sometimes, it’s okay, but it should not be the rule, it is just the exception. But whenever something feels good to your ego, you immediately jump upon it; otherwise you go on listening – completely deaf! You don’t listen to what I am saying, you only listen to that which you want to hear. And then you are very clever at twisting it.From your very childhood you have been a twister. You have learned how to deceive, how to be pseudo; you have learned how to interpret things in such a way that they are always according to you. From the very childhood, somewhere near the age of three, a child starts learning to twist. He becomes a follower of Saint Twistopher. Twistopher – you may not have heard the name of the saint – is the patron saint of go-go girls and all kinds of twisters!Twisting is one of the deep-rooted things in you: diplomacy, politics, cunningness. And once a child has learned twisting, he goes on twisting. And by and by it becomes his whole paraphernalia, his whole mechanism. Then he listens only to that which he wants to hear; he does not see that which he does not want to see; he becomes a chooser.Scientists say that out of a hundred things, you only listen to two percent. And out of a hundred things, you see only two percent. But remember, then you live only two percent. To live only two percent is almost not to live at all. What kind of life is this? And this happens every day. I say something: you are sitting there with all your prejudices intact, all your cunningness intact, all your stupidity intact. Something enters you – immediately the twisting starts. Your mechanism starts functioning, clicking. By the time it reaches your consciousness it is no longer what was said, it is absolutely something else.This is why it is difficult for you to receive help. Help is given all the time, it is showering on you, but you will have to become better receptors. You change, you try to change, but the change remains very superficial.When I give sannyas to people sometimes they ask, “Why should one change one’s name, why should one change one’s clothes? Is not the change of the heart enough?” I also know that the change of the heart is enough, but I cannot expect that from you right now. Even to expect the change of clothes is more than enough. Even in that you will find cunning ways. You will find tricks.Just a few days ago an Indian sannyasin came and I asked him, “What happened to your clothes?”He said, “But this is orange.”Then I had to look again because it looked white. Yes, it was orange, but so faint – my eyes are perfectly okay – that I had to look very, very carefully. Then I recognized that yes, a little tinge of orange was there. If a man of my sensitivity and vision cannot see it, then nobody will be able to see it! I was surprised. I asked him, “How do you manage to see it? You are so dense, I don’t think you can see it. You are so thick.”I know that by changing the name or by changing the clothes nothing essential is happening, but you live in the nonessential. What can I do? I have to start from where you are.It happened…A young man made an application to change his name according to the provision of the law.“What is your name?” the judge asked him as he appeared before the court.“Bill Stinks, sir,” said the applicant.“Well, I can understand why you want it changed, Bill,” said the judge laughing uproariously. “And what do you want it changed to?”“William Stinks, sir,” replied the applicant.But Bill Stinks or William Stinks, what does it matter? You remain stinking.I know names don’t make much difference, but I take so much trouble to explain to you what your name means because I know that that’s where you exist – name and clothes and the form. The formless you have not seen even in your dreams. I have to start from where you are. And even there you deceive me. Stop deceiving, because deceiving me you are just deceiving yourself. And stop your mind from interfering between me and you. Let there be a communion.Enlightenment is possible. If it is possible that it has happened to me, it is possible that it can happen to you. If it has happened to one human being, it is everybody’s potentiality.The second question:Osho,What is love?It is unfortunate that we have to ask this question. In the natural course of things everybody would know what love is. But I understand that nobody knows – or very rarely somebody knows – what love is. Love has become one of the rarest experiences.Yes, it is talked about, filmed, stories are written about it, songs are composed about it, films are made, on the TV you will see it, on the radio, in magazines – a great industry goes on continuously supplying you with the idea of what love is. Many people are continuously involved in it, helping people understand what love is. Poets, authors, novelists, they all go on.But still love remains an unknown phenomenon, and it should be one of the most known. It is almost as if somebody comes and asks, “What is food?” Would you not be surprised if somebody comes and asks, “What is food?” If somebody has been starved from the very beginning and he has never tasted what food is, the question would be relevant. So is this question.You ask, “What is love?” Love is the food of the soul. But you have been starved. Your soul has not received love at all so you don’t know the taste. Your question is relevant, but it is unfortunate. The body has received food so the body continues; but the soul has not received food so the soul is dead, or is not born yet, or is always on its deathbed.When a child is born he is fully born, he is fully equipped with the capacity to love and to be loved. Each child is born full of love and knows perfectly what it is. There is no need to tell the child what love is. But the problem arises because the mother and the father don’t know what love is. No child receives the parents that he deserves – no child ever receives the parents that he deserves. Those parents simply don’t exist on the earth. And by the time this child becomes a parent he will have lost the capacity to love.It is almost like: in Mexico there is a small valley where children are born and within three months they all become blind. It is a small, primitive society. A fly exists there which is poisonous to the eyes, so the whole community is blind.Every child is born with perfectly functioning eyes – but within three months there is an attack of the fly and the poison enters the system and the eyes go blind. Now, somewhere later in his life the child will ask, “What are eyes? What do you mean when you use the word eye? What is vision? What is seeing? What do you mean?” And the question will be relevant. The child was born with eyes, but they were lost somewhere on the way of so-called growth.That’s what has happened to love. Every child is born with as much love as one can contain, with more love than one can contain, with overflowing love. A child is born as love; a child is made of the stuff called love. But the parents cannot give love. They have their own hangovers – their parents never loved them. The parents can only pretend; they can talk about love. They can say, “We love you so much,” but whatever they do is very unloving. The way they behave, the way they treat the child is very insulting; there is no respect.No parent respects the child. Whoever thinks of respecting a child? A child is not thought to be a person at all. A child is thought to be like a problem. If he keeps quiet, he is good; if he is not a screamer, a primal therapist – good. If he simply keeps out of the way of the parents – perfectly good. That’s what a child should be.But there is no respect and there is no love. The parents have not known what love is. The mother has not loved the husband, the husband has not loved the wife. Love does not exist there. Domination, possessiveness, jealousy, and all kinds of poisons are there which destroy love. Just as a certain poison can destroy your vision, so the poison of possessiveness and jealousy destroys love.Love is a very fragile flower. It has to be protected, it has to be strengthened, it has to be watered; only then does it become strong. And the child’s love is very fragile – naturally – because the child is fragile, his body is fragile. Do you think a child left on his own will be able to survive? Just think how helpless man is. If a child is left on his own, it is next to impossible that he will survive. He will die. And that is what is happening to love. Love is left alone. The parents can’t love, they don’t know what love is, they have never flowed in love.Remember your own parents. And remember, I am not saying that they are responsible. They are victims just as you are victims – their own parents were the same. And so on… You can go back to Adam and Eve and God the Father.It seems that even God the Father was not very respectful toward Adam and Eve, was not respectful enough. That’s why from the very beginning he started commanding them, “Do this” and “Don’t do that” and he started doing all the rubbish that all parents do. “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree.” And when Adam had eaten the fruit, the father, God, was so angry in reaction that he threw Adam and Eve out of heaven.That expulsion is always there, and each parent threatens to expel the child, to throw him out. “If you don’t listen, if you don’t behave, you will be thrown out.” Naturally a child is afraid. Thrown out? Into the wilderness of this life? He starts compromising. The child by and by becomes a twister. He starts manipulating.He does not want to smile, but if the mother is coming and he wants milk, he smiles. Now this is politics – the beginning, the ABC of politics. Deep down he starts hating because he is not respected; deep down he starts feeling frustrated because he is not loved as he is. He is expected to do certain things and only then will he be loved. Love has some conditions. He is not worthy as he is. First he has to become worthy, then the parents’ love will be possible.So he starts becoming worthy and starts becoming false; he loses his intrinsic value. His respect for himself is by and by lost, he starts feeling that he is unworthy, that he is guilty. Many times the idea comes to the mind of the child, “Are these my real parents? Is it possible they have adopted me? Maybe they are deceiving because there seems to be no love.” A thousand and one times he sees the anger in their eyes, the ugly anger on the faces of the parents, and for such small things that he cannot see the proportion of it. Just for very small things he sees the parents’ rage. He cannot believe it. It is so unjust and unfair. But he has to surrender, he has to bow down, he has to accept it as a necessity. By and by his love capacity is killed.Love grows only in love. Love needs a milieu of love – that is the most fundamental thing to be remembered. Only in a milieu of love does love grow. It needs the same kind of pulsation around. If the mother is loving, if the father is loving – not only to the child, if they are loving to each other too – if the home has a love atmosphere where love flows, the child will start functioning as a love-being. He will never ask the question, “What is love?” He will know it from the very beginning, it will become his foundation.But that doesn’t happen. It is unfortunate, but it has not happened up to now. And you learn the ways of your parents – their nagging, their conflict. Just go on watching yourself. If you are a woman, watch. You may be repeating, almost repeating, the ways your mother used to behave. Watch yourself when you are with your boyfriend or your husband: What are you doing? Are you not repeating? If you are a man, watch. What are you doing? Are you not being your daddy? Are you not doing the same nonsense that he used to do? One day you were surprised: “How can daddy do this?” – and you are doing the same. People go on repeating: people are imitators; man is a monkey. You are repeating your daddy or your mummy, and that has to be dropped. Only then will you know what love is, otherwise you will remain corrupted.I cannot define what love is because there is no definition of love. It is one of those indefinables like birth, like death, like God, like meditation. It is one of those indefinables – I cannot define it.I cannot say that this is love; I cannot show it to you. It is not a visible phenomenon. It cannot be dissected, it cannot be analyzed; it can only be experienced. And only through experience do you know what it is. But I can show you the way to experience it.The first step is: get rid of your parents. And by that I don’t mean any disrespect toward your parents, no. I will be the last person to say that. And I don’t mean get rid of your physical parents, I mean get rid of your parental voices inside, your program inside, your tapes inside. Efface them. And you will be simply surprised that if you get rid of your parents from your inner being, you become free. For the first time you will be able to feel compassion for your parents – otherwise not; you will remain resentful. Every person is resentful toward his parents.How can you not be resentful when they have done so much harm to you – although not knowingly? They wished only good for you, they wanted to do everything for your well-being. But what could they do? Just by wanting, nothing happens; just by good wishes, nothing happens. They were well-wishers, that is true; there is no doubt about that. Every parent wants the child to have all the joys of life. But what can he do? He has not known any joy himself. He is a robot and, knowingly or unknowingly, deliberately or not, he will create an atmosphere in which the child will sooner or later be turned into a robot.If you want to become a man and not a machine, get rid of your parents. And you will have to watch. It is hard work, arduous work; you cannot do it instantly. You will have to be very careful in your behavior. Watch when your mother is there, functioning through you – stop that, move away from it. Do something absolutely new that your mother could not even have conceived of.For example, your boyfriend is looking at some other woman with great appreciation in his eyes. Now watch what you are doing. Are you doing the same as your mother would have done in the case of your father looking at another woman appreciatively? If you do that, you will never know what love is, you will simply be repeating a story. It will be the same act being played by different actors, that’s all; the same rotten act being repeated again and again and again. Don’t be an imitator, get out of it. Do something new. Do something that your mother could not have conceived of. Do something new that your father could not have conceived of. This newness has to be brought to your being, then your love will start flowing.So the first essential is getting rid of your parents. The second essential is: people think that they can love only when they find a worthy man – nonsense! You will never find one. People think they will love only when they find a perfect man or a perfect woman. Nonsense! You will never find them because perfect women and perfect men don’t exist. And if they exist, they won’t bother about your love. They will not be interested.I have heard about a man who remained a bachelor his whole life because he was in search of a perfect woman. When he was seventy, somebody asked, “You have been traveling and traveling from Kabul to Kathmandu, from Kathmandu to Goa, from Goa to Pune; you have been searching. Could you not find a perfect woman? Not even one?”The old man became very sad. He said, “Yes, once I came across one: once I came across a perfect woman.”Then the inquirer said, “Then what happened? Why didn’t you get married?”He became very, very sad. He said, “What to do? She was looking for a perfect man.”Remember, when two beings are perfect, their love need is not the same as your love need. It has a totally different quality.You don’t even understand the love that is possible for you, so you will not be able to understand the love that happens to a buddha or the love that is flowing from me toward you – you will not be able to understand it. First you have to understand the love that is a natural phenomenon. Even that has not happened. First the natural, and then the transcendental.So the second thing to remember is: never be in search of a perfect man or a perfect woman. That too has been put into your mind – that unless you find a perfect man or a perfect woman you will not be happy. So you go on looking for the perfect, and you don’t find the perfect, so you are unhappy. And you have a reason to be unhappy.To flow and grow in love needs no perfection. Love has nothing to do with the other. A loving person simply loves, just as an alive person breathes and drinks and eats and sleeps. Exactly like that a really alive person, a loving person, loves. You don’t say, “Unless there is perfect air, unpolluted, I am not going to breathe.” You go on breathing even in Los Angeles; you go on breathing in Mumbai. You go on breathing everywhere where air is polluted, poisoned. You go on breathing. You cannot afford not to breathe just because the air is not as it should be. If you are hungry you eat something – whatever it is.In a desert, if you are dying of thirst, you will drink anything. You will not ask for Coca-Cola, anything will do – any drink, just water, even dirty water. People are known to have drunk their own urine. When one is dying, one does not bother what it is: anything to quench the thirst. People have killed their camels in the desert to drink water because camels store water inside them. Now, this is dangerous because they will have to walk for miles. But they are so thirsty that first things first – first the water, otherwise they will die. Even if the camel is there – what are they going to do? The camel will take the corpse to the town. They will not be alive.An alive man simply loves. Love is a natural functioning.So the second thing to remember is: don’t ask for perfection, otherwise you will not find any love flowing in you. On the contrary, you will become very unloving. People who demand perfection are very unloving people, neurotic people. Even if they can find a lover or a beloved they demand perfection and the love is destroyed because of that demand.Once a man loves a woman or a woman loves a man, demands immediately enter. The woman starts demanding that the man should be perfect, just because he loves her. As if he has committed a sin! Now he has to be perfect, now he has to suddenly drop all of his limitations, just because of this woman. Now he cannot be human. Either he has to become superhuman or he has to become pseudo, false, a cheat. Naturally, to become superhuman is very difficult, so people become cheats. They start pretending and acting and playing games. In the name of love, people are just playing games.So the second thing to remember is: never demand perfection. You have no right to demand anything from anybody. If somebody loves you, be thankful, but don’t demand anything because he has no obligation to love you. If somebody loves, it is a miracle. Be thrilled by the miracle.But people are not thrilled. They will destroy all possibilities of love for small things. They are not so interested in love and the joy of it; they are more interested in other ego trips. Be concerned with your joy, be utterly concerned with your joy, be only concerned with your joy. Everything else is nonessential.Love as a natural function, as you breathe. And when you love a person don’t start demanding; otherwise from the very beginning you are closing the doors. Don’t expect anything. If something comes your way, feel grateful. If nothing comes, there is no need for it to come, there is no necessity for it to come. You cannot expect it.But see people – see how they take each other for granted. If your woman prepares food for you, you never thank her. I’m not saying that you should verbalize your thank-you, but it should be in your eyes. But you don’t bother, you take it for granted – that is her work. Who told you? If your man goes and earns money for you, you never thank him. You don’t feel any gratitude. That’s what a man should do. That’s your mind.How can love grow? Love needs a climate of love; love needs a climate of gratitude, thankfulness. Love needs a nondemanding atmosphere, a non-expecting atmosphere. This is the second thing to remember.And the third thing is: rather than thinking how to get love, start giving. If you give, you get; there is no other way. People are more interested in how to grab and get. Everybody is interested in getting and nobody seems to enjoy giving. People give very reluctantly, they give only to get; if ever they give, they give only to get, and they are almost businesslike. It is a bargain. They always go on watching that they should get more than they give: that it is a good bargain, good business. But the other is also doing the same.Love is not a business, so stop being businesslike. Otherwise you will miss your life and love and all that is beautiful in it – because all that is beautiful is not at all businesslike. Business is the ugliest thing in the world, a necessary evil. But existence knows nothing of business. Trees bloom, it is not a business; the stars shine, it is not a business and you don’t have to pay for it and nobody demands anything from you. A bird comes and sits at your door and sings a song and he will not ask you to give a certificate or something. He has sung the song and then happily he flies away, leaves no traces behind. That’s how love grows. Give, and don’t wait to see how much you can grab.Yes, it comes, it comes a thousandfold, but it comes naturally, it comes on its own. There is no need to demand it. When you demand, it never comes. When you demand, you have killed it. So give. Start giving. In the beginning it will be har, because your whole life you have been trained not to give but to get. In the beginning you will have to fight with your armor. Your musculature has become hard, your heart has become frozen, you have become cold. In the beginning it will be difficult, but each step will lead to a further step, and by and by the river starts flowing.First get rid of your parents. With getting rid of your parents you get rid of the society, with getting rid of your parents you get rid of civilization, education, everything, because your parents represent all that. You become individual. For the first time you are no longer part of the mass, you have an authentic individuality; you are on your own. This is what growth is. This is what a grown-up person should be.A grown-up person is one who needs no parents. A grown-up person is one who needs nobody to cling to or lean on. A grown-up person is one who is happy in his aloneness – his aloneness is a song, a celebration. A grown-up person is one who can be happily with himself. His aloneness is not loneliness. His solitariness is solitude, it is meditative.One day you had to come out of your mother’s womb. If you had remained there longer than nine months you would have been dead – not only you, your mother would have also been dead. One day you had to come out of your mother’s womb. Then one day you had to come out of your family atmosphere – another womb – to go to school. Then one day you had to come out of your school atmosphere – another womb – to go into the bigger world. But deep down you are still a child. You are still in the womb; layers upon layers of womb are there. That womb has to be broken.This is what in the East we have called the second birth. In the East a person who has become independent is called a dwij, twice born. He has attained a second birth; he is completely free of parental impression. And the beauty is that only such a person feels grateful to the parents. The paradox is that only such a person can forgive his parents. He feels compassion and love for them, he feels for them tremendously because they have also suffered in the same way. He is not angry, no, not at all. He may have tears in his eyes, but he is not angry, and he will do everything to help his parents to move toward such a plenitude of aloneness, such a height of aloneness.Become individuals, the first thing. The second thing: don’t expect perfection, and don’t ask and don’t demand. Love ordinary people. Nothing is wrong with ordinary people. Ordinary people are extraordinary. Each human being is so unique; have respect for that uniqueness.Third: give, and give without any condition – and you will know what love is. I cannot define it. I can show you the path, how to grow it. I can show you how to put in a rosebush, how to water it, how to give fertilizers to it, how to protect it. Then one day, out of the blue, comes the roseflower and your home is full of the fragrance. That’s how love happens.The third question:Osho,How can a disciple know that he has been chosen by a master? Where are his freedom and responsibility?It is a difficult question. “How can a disciple know that he has been chosen by a master?” The moment you start feeling an urge to surrender, an urge to bow down, an urge to fall in love, an urge to efface yourself… In the beginning it is a very, very small, still voice. You will have to be very silent and quiet to hear it, but it is there. Once the master has chosen you, something deep inside starts vibrating. But you may be full of the noise, clamor, of the constant chattering of your mind, and you may not hear it.Sit silently. Calm down. Look within, and you will find a new kind of vibe in the heart, a new kind of thrill. It has never been there before. It is almost like falling in love. When the master has chosen you, you are falling into a love affair. It goes higher than your ordinary love affair, it goes deeper than your ordinary love affair; it goes far out.But in the beginning it is almost like a love affair. How do you know when you fall in love? Can it be answered? How do you know? You pass a woman, a stranger – you have never seen her before, she has never seen you before. For a single moment you look into each other’s eyes and something has become aflame. How do you know about it?It happens exactly the same way when you look into the eyes of a master, and it can happen even with a photograph. You can ask Aneeta. She has been in love with me, without seeing me, for months – just by looking into the eyes of my photograph. That’s why I go on sending as many of my photographs as possible to the far corners of the world. I’m not going anywhere, but my eyes can travel, and wherever somebody has the capacity to listen to his heart or her heart, looking into my eyes something will start happening. I may be thousands of miles away, that doesn’t matter.You look into my eyes, you feel my vibe, and if you feel like falling… It will be mad! All love is mad! It will be crazy. If you are very, very rational then you will miss it. You will rationalize it away, you will explain it away.That is my feeling about the questioner. It has happened to the questioner, but the questioner is trying to avoid it, he is trying not to see it. It has happened. The questioner has not yet become a sannyasin. I have chosen already, now it is for you to listen. Sit silently and listen, and it comes very loud and very clear. It is a still, small voice, but if you are silent it is very clear and very loud. You cannot deny it.“How can a disciple know that he has been chosen by a master?” If you start feeling like going crazy around a man; if you start feeling that something clicks; if you start feeling that you are falling into a kind of new rhythm, a new wavelength; if doors start opening, new dimensions open, new flowers bloom; if you feel the unknown at the door, if you feel the strange unknown knocking at the door, then the master has called you, the master has chosen you. Now it is for you to open the door.Courage will be needed. Religion is only for the courageous, for the brave. It is not for cowards. And cowards can always rationalize easily, they can find ways and means to avoid, but the real reason is fear. And remember, with a master there is going to be fear.Just the other day a young man came and he said that he had been interested in Gurdjieff, but he was always afraid. I looked into his eyes and I asked him, “Are you not afraid of me?”For a single split-second he looked into my eyes and he said, “Yes, I am afraid of you too.”Then I told him, “I have chosen you, and a courageous man…”He immediately bowed down, surrendered, and said, “Osho, give me sannyas.”Fear is bound to be there; one has to go in spite of the fear. Fear is bound to be there because a master is going to be your death. A master is going to kill you utterly. Only then when you are burned completely does the new arrive; on the ashes of the old the new arrives.Enlightenment is a phoenix phenomenon. You have to burn yourself completely – the master will be your fire. So there will be fear; and sometimes you will start listening for the knock, for the whisper, but the fear will be louder. Naturally, the fear will be yours, the knock will be of the master. If you are too afraid and cowardly you will close and shut yourself down so that the whisper is no longer heard.And then you ask, “Where are his freedom and responsibility?” You are not, and right now you cannot have any responsibility and any freedom. These are only just whimsical ideas. One who has arrived at his center can have freedom and can have responsibility; one who has become awakened can have freedom and can have responsibility. They are part of being integrated. You cannot have any responsibility and you cannot have any freedom; your freedom is just a wish and your responsibility is just an idea.But these ideas can go on befooling you. B. F. Skinner has written a book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I am in total disagreement with him. Whatever he is saying is utter nonsense, but it is true about ninety-nine percent of people. He is wrong only about a few people, rare people – a Buddha, a Jesus, a Mohammed, a Mansoor, a Jalaluddin Rumi. Yes, he is wrong about these people, but these people are rare; you don’t find them every day, in every nook and corner of life. They are very rare flowers – incredible when they are, but unbelievable when they are gone. They look like metaphors, not real, like myths, not historical.Skinner is right about you – about ninety-nine percent of the people he is right. Ninety-nine point nine percent, I should say. There is no freedom and there is no dignity; you function as a machine.How can a machine be responsible? And whatever you think is your responsibility is just a trick of the society implanted in you. The man who was in charge of burning the Jews in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and who burned millions of Jews, was doing a responsible job – that’s what he said before the court. “I was a responsible man, and whatever order was given to me I obeyed with full responsibility. I followed the order. I have not done anything on my own, I was simply obedient. That was my responsibility.”I can understand – a machine is a machine, it can only follow orders. How can it be responsible? When I use the word responsible, I mean able to respond. Now, you are going to burn ten thousand Jews – and those big ovens where the Jews were burned, those concentration camps, were made with such scientific accuracy that within a second ten thousand people would simply evaporate. And they were surrounded by glass walls. They could not see out, but from the outside you could see them. And the men who were responsible for burning them were standing around and watching. Ten thousand Jews – small children, women who had not done anything wrong to anybody, were just evaporating.And a person is doing a responsible job. What kind of responsibility is this? Can’t he see the point that these ten thousand people are simply dying for nothing, for no reason? They have committed no crime. To be a Jew is not a crime. They were punished unnecessarily, for nothing. And he thinks he is responsible? To whom is he responsible? – to Adolf Hitler, not to this rare situation where ten thousand people are being burned. He can stop, he can say, “No, I will not do this! I would rather like to be killed myself if that is going to happen. Or if I am thrown out of my job that is nothing, but I am not going to kill these ten thousand innocent people.”That would have been responsibility: ability to respond. What kind of responsibility is this? An order comes that you should burn these people, and everybody is doing “his responsibility.” The typist who typed the order, the one in charge who signed the order, the man who will push the button – they are all doing their jobs responsibly. And nobody seems to be really responsible – just machines. This is what I call robopathology.And you ask me, “Where are his responsibility and freedom?” You can’t have any freedom because you are not yet. Freedom is only when you are, and you are only when you are awake. You are fast asleep: What kind of freedom can you have? You can dream about it.You don’t have any freedom. Your whole life is just accidental – just accidental. You go on thinking that you have chosen out of your freedom. All nonsense.Just the other day I was reading about a poet, a famous poet who was writing about his life, and he remembered his father telling him a story. His father told him: “When I was young, unmarried, I was traveling in a train. I felt an urge to smoke, so I searched for the cigarettes in my pocket. There were five other people and there were only six cigarettes. I offered the cigarettes to everybody, the five people took one each and thanked me. Then I put the empty packet into my pocket.When I reached the station where I was to get down, I left the station and was about to hire a taxi. Then suddenly I again felt an urge to smoke. I looked into my pocket. It was empty. So I went back into the station to purchase some cigarettes and at the counter, at the cigarette counter, I fell in love with a woman – the woman who was selling the cigarettes.” And that became the poet’s mother – they became married.Now the poet says, “If one of the passengers in the compartment had been a nonsmoker, I would not have been born at all. Just one cigarette was enough to prevent me from being born because my father would not have gone back if there had been one cigarette left. Then my mother and my father would never have met.”Of course he would have become married to some other woman. But from some other woman this poet could not have been born. This poet needed this man and this woman to meet, otherwise he would never have been born.How many poets are not born? Do you know? It is difficult to say. Life is just like that – accidental. What freedom, what responsibility are you talking about? To be free, you first need to be, then your every act is conscious. Then you are not a victim of unconscious, accidental situations. Then whatever you do there is consciousness, witnessing. Then life is no longer accidental, then life has a sense of direction, then life has integrity. And from that integrity, from that center of integration, you respond.You need to become a disciple because you don’t yet have that integrity. Otherwise, what is the point of becoming a disciple? To become a disciple means to come close to a man who is integrated and whose integration can also function as a catalytic agent for your integration. It means to come close to a man, to come into the presence of a man who is no longer a machine, who is awakened – so that his awakening can create ripples of awakening in you. To become receptive to such a man, to remain available to such a man, is all that is meant by becoming a disciple.But right now don’t go on deceiving yourself that you have any kind of freedom or responsibility. It hurts when I say this. It hurts your ego, you don’t feel good. You, and not free! You, and not responsible! What nonsense is Osho talking about? I know it hurts, but if you try to understand, if you try to be sympathetic to what I am saying to you, if you look without prejudice and without ego, you will see the point of it. And that very seeing will become a transformation in your life.And the last question:Osho,Why do I remember God only when I am suffering?You don’t remember God. When you are suffering your remembering God is just meaningless. Just because you want to avoid suffering, you remember God as a protection. You are not interested in God, you are only interested in how to avoid the suffering. So that’s why when you are happy you forget all about God. But know well, only when you remember God in happiness is there remembrance, otherwise not. In suffering everybody remembers God – even an atheist. That’s why even atheists start becoming theists as they become older. And at the point of death almost every atheist becomes a theist; when the real suffering of death comes then all your philosophy of atheism disappears. But that is not real, authentic prayer, authentic remembrance.Religious people are those who remember when they are happy because they remember in gratitude. When you see a roseflower, that will be the right moment to remember God. The roseflower is enough proof to remember him, enough of an indication, enough of a cause, an occasion.When you see a child smiling, or when a bird flies into the sky, when a bird is on the wing or the sun rises or a lonely star in the morning is just on the verge of disappearing – if you know what beauty is, you will remember God in beautiful moments. If you know what love is, you will remember God when you make love. If you know what joy is, you will remember God when you are full of joy – because those are the moments in which to thank him. Then even if you remember him in your suffering it will be a true remembrance, otherwise not. If you remember only in suffering, you don’t remember God; you simply want to get help from him. You simply want to use the word God, you want to use God, that’s all.I have heard…There was a man whose wife had a pet parrot – and a very religious parrot – but it died. She was very upset. Her good-natured husband went off to the pet shop to get another bird, but nothing the man had on offer would do. One was too expensive, one was too dull, another too big. Finally the pet shop man was fed up and the customer made for the exit. In the doorway he saw a parrot he really fancied.“How much for this chap?” he asked.“That’s a very special parrot. I don’t really want to part with it, but if I do, it is two hundred pounds.”“What is so special about it?”“Well, you see sir, she is the only parrot in Great Britain that lays square eggs.”The caller was not disposed to believe this, but the vendor took him into the back room and showed him a dish of eggs, each a perfect cube.“It’s a deal. I will be taking the bird with me,” he said.While the shopkeeper was making out the bill an uneasy thought struck the man, thinking of his wife, and he said, “I suppose the parrot can talk as well? Does he know anything religious, prayer or something?”“Well, sir, she can… She knows how to call to Christ. But so far she only seems to have one expression.”“Ah, indeed. What is that?”“Ooo-ooo Kee-rist!”In suffering, your remembrance is like that. It has nothing to do with Christ, nothing to do with God. Drop it; it is meaningless. Start a new approach. While you are full of joy, dancing, singing, then remember! Let God be associated with your positive moments first. It is from there that it will sink deep into your heart. Let God be not a sad affair but a celebration. Let God be a blessing, a benediction.Enough for today.

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

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-1-15/

A certain man who was fond of studying all kinds of systems of thought wrote to a dervish master, Abdul Aziz of Mecca, asking whether he could talk to him in order to make comparisons. The dervish sent him a bottle with oil and water in it, and a piece of cotton wick. Enclosed in the package was this letter:Dear friend, if you place the wick in the oil, you will get light when fire is applied to it. If you pour out the oil and put the wick in the water, you will get no light. If you shake up the oil and water and then place the wick in them, you will get a spluttering and a going out. There is no need to carry out this experiment through words and visits when it can be done with such simple materials as these.Sufism is existential, though not existentialist. “Existentialism” is a contradiction in terms. The whole approach of existentialism is that existence is not a system and cannot be converted into a system; that existence remains an experience. There is no way to make a philosophy out of it, and yet existentialism itself has become a philosophy.The Western mind is so addicted to speculation and philosophizing that even something which is basically nonphilosophic eventually turns into a philosophy. Something which is fundamentally a nonsystem by and by becomes a perfect system.The German mind is more systematic in that way. In Germany, Karl Jaspers made a great system out of the existentialist approach toward reality. It is amazing! The whole standpoint is that systematization is not possible. But you can systematize even this approach, this attitude. You can philosophize against philosophy, you can create a philosophy of no-philosophy, but then you are again lost in the mire of words, theories, hypotheses, propositions, logic. It is nonending.That’s why I say that Sufism is existential, not existentialist. It has no “ism.” It has no philosophy to teach, it has no proposition to propose, it has no doctrine to indoctrinate people with. It is just a finger pointing to the moon. It is an indication – an indication toward reality, not toward words. It is experience and experiment. It abhors all kinds of philosophies because philosophy is the deepest cause of man getting lost in language and linguistic patterns. Life has no language, life is silent; or, silence is its only language, it speaks only through silence. So when you are silent you are in communion with it.Life is meditative. It is not a kind of thinking, it is a state of no-thinking. When you are in that state of no-thinking, suddenly there is communion; all barriers between you and life disappear. You are no longer separate from it, no longer standing against it and thinking about it – you are it! And you know only when you are it, you know only when the knower is no longer there, you know only when all knowledge has disappeared. You know through being, not through knowing.So Sufism down the ages has been very condemnatory about philosophizing. Sufism is not scriptural, it is not logical; it is very realistic, it is very pragmatic. Hence its appeal to the modern mind, to the mind which is trained more in the ways of science than in the ways of philosophy.Science is experiment. You can’t trust speculation, you have to experiment with reality. You have to see reality as it is, not through a certain prejudice of your mind. You need not have any belief; you can simply go into reality without any belief and the reality will conclude. Reality is conclusive. The conclusion comes not by thinking, but by looking into reality. And if you have a certain a priori idea, that very idea becomes a distraction. It won’t allow you to see that which is.So Sufis say: Don’t have any ideas, don’t have any beliefs. There is nothing to believe. Yes, there is much to know, but there is nothing to believe. There is no need to believe. All kinds of beliefs are fear-oriented.I have heard…An old gentleman suddenly felt that the time had come to be taken into the bosom of the church.“Abraham,” warned his parson, “you must have faith. Do you believe everything in the Bible?”“Yes sir,” insisted Abraham.“Do you believe the story of Jonah and the whale? And Daniel and the lions – those hungry African lions that had not had a single thing to eat? Daniel, you know, walks right into their den and slaps them in the face and they don’t do anything to him?”“If that is what the Bible says, I believe it.”“And do you believe the story of the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace? They walk right into that furnace, step on the hot coals, and they aren’t even singed?”“Not even singed? A regular fire?”“Right! Not even singed!”“Deacon,” said Abraham, “I don’t believe in that.”“Then you can’t be taken into the bosom of the church.”Abraham sadly picked up his hat and shuffled toward the door, “And parson,” he added, “I don’t believe that story about Daniel and the lions either!”Nobody really believes these stories, not even those who pretend to believe, not even those who say they have great faith. No, it is impossible. By the very nature of consciousness, it is impossible to believe unless you know – all belief is against nature. And all belief is just a repression of your doubts. Yes, you can repress your doubts if there is great fear, you can repress your doubts if there is great greed – if you are offered heavenly pleasures in paradise and you are threatened by hellfire and devils who are going to torture you. If these things are put into your mind you start believing, but you know all the time, underneath, that you doubt.How can one believe? How can anyone believe unless one has known oneself? Unless you have faced reality as it is, there is no possibility of having faith. Faith does not come by fear, faith does not come by greed, faith comes only through experience.Sufis teach a different kind of world view – not based on beliefs, but based on experiments, experience, and the conclusions that come naturally through those experiments and experiences. Then there is a totally different kind of faith: no doubt is repressed in it, it is total. It does not divide you, it does not split you. Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans and all kinds of believers are split personalities, schizophrenic. Schizophrenia is one of the commonest traits of man. And why is man schizophrenic? The reason has to be found in the so-called religious teachings, indoctrinations.When you tell somebody to believe in something you are creating a neurosis in him, you are creating a division. Now he will never be one, he will be two. One part, the real part, will go on doubting, and the unreal part, the superficial part, will go on believing. And this rift will go on becoming bigger and bigger, this rift will always create great anxiety.Look into any of your beliefs: you believe in God, and look – you know that you doubt.I have heard…A little boy came home from Sunday school and his father asked, “What did you learn today?”“Well,” said the youngster, “two thousand years ago the Jews wanted to escape from the bad Egyptians. So Moses had the Jews build this suspension bridge across the Red Sea. Then they loaded it down with dynamite. The Jews escaped across the bridge, and when all the Egyptians chased them they blew up the bridge and all the Egyptians were drowned.”“Is that what the teacher told you?” asked the surprised father.“No,” said the boy, “but you would never believe the crazy story he did tell us!”He has improved upon the story.All your so-called scriptures are full of nonsense. But you go on believing just because you are afraid, because you are not grounded in your being, because you are not rooted in reality.The father was a Christian Scientist and always carried a copy of Mrs. Eddy’s works in his pocket. Accompanied by his little son he had an occasion to cross a lot where a good-sized goat was feeding. As they approached the goat the boy showed fear, whereupon his father told him to think that it was not possible for the animal to harm them. But the boy, remembering previous encounters with the goat in which he had come out second best, did not grow any braver.“Poppa, you are a Christian Scientist all right,” he said, “and so am I, but the goat does not know about it.”Reality has never heard about your beliefs, your philosophies, your religions. It is completely unaware of all that nonsense that you go on carrying in your head. It has no concern with your head trips, it is simply innocent. It is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian. It has no adjectives, it has no scriptures, no likes, no dislikes. It is simply there, naked.To know this reality you will have to be naked of all your beliefs. Those beliefs function as your clothes, spiritual clothes – yes, that’s what they are. And because of those clothes you never come into contact with reality. One has to be naked to come into contact with the sun rays. One has to be naked to be in contact with the wind. One has to be naked if one wants to dance in the rain and to feel it showering on one’s being and body. Exactly so, one has to be spiritually naked and nude if one wants to have any participation with reality as it is.Sufism is an effort to denude you of all your belief systems, of all words. That’s why in Sufism the master is not a teacher. The master is more like an artisan, an artist, a painter, a carpenter maybe, a weaver. The master is more like one who knows a certain skill which cannot be taught through words, which can only be taught through experience. So in Sufism there is no teacher. There are masters, but no teachers. And in Sufism the disciple is not a student, the disciple is an apprentice.Take note of that great distinction: the master is not a teacher and the disciple is not a student. The master is an artisan who knows a certain art, who has the knack of doing a certain thing, and the disciple is an apprentice who lives in the presence of the master so that by and by, slowly, slowly he can drink more of the presence of the master and can become aware of the knack that he has. It is not an ordinary thing to be transferred because it cannot be put into words.If you ask somebody who is a great swimmer, “How do you do it? Can you teach me? Can you give me a few lessons?” it will be difficult for him to teach you swimming while you are sitting in your room. He will ask you to come with him to the river or to the swimming pool. Swimming is an art, there is no way to teach it.Or bicycling… You know how to ride a bicycle, but if somebody asks you, “Explain it philosophically. How do you manage to do it?” no bicyclist has been able to explain it. How do you manage to do it? It is a kind of knack. You do it! You manage to do it, but you cannot explain how. The only way is to tell the person who is inquiring to come with you and to help him to manage himself, then he will know. But when he comes to know he will also not be able to convey his knowledge through words. It is only conveyed through actions.A Sufi master has no teaching, he is his teaching. A Sufi master does not philosophize about reality, he exposes his heart to the disciple. Even if he sometimes uses words, those words are just indicators like arrows being used on milestones – just indications that you have to go on and on. As the disciple becomes more and more attuned with the master, then fewer and fewer words are needed. Then the presence of the master is enough.The master teaches by two things: one is his presence and, very paradoxically, the other is his absence. The master teaches by his presence and by his absence. In one sense he is utterly present, in each moment he is totally there. Each moment is luminous with his presence, his every gesture and every act is full of his presence; it is never absentminded. He is utterly there and then.The disciple learns much from the master’s radiant presence. He starts learning to be more present, to be more alert, to be more total. And on the other hand the master is absolutely absent because he has no ego. Nothing like the idea of “I” exists in him anymore. There is absolute silence, no-selfness – what Sufis call fana. The master has disappeared.First the disciple learns his presence, and by and by he becomes capable of entering his absence.This is a kind of art – of being present and absent simultaneously. It is the greatest art because it is the greatest paradox: to be present and yet to be not present – present in the sense of presence, of awareness, consciousness, and absent in the sense that there is no self, no ego. This emptiness and this light which fills the emptiness cannot be conveyed, communicated through words. The disciple has to be with the master as an apprentice. He has to taste the being of the master.This small parable will throw much light.A certain man who was fond of studying all kinds of systems of thought wrote to a dervish master, Abdul Aziz of Mecca, asking whether he could talk to him in order to make comparisons.Pay attention to each word. Sufis are very, very particular about words. They don’t use many words – if they do, they use them very telegraphically. A certain man who was fond of studying all kinds of systems of thought wrote to a dervish master, Abdul Aziz of Mecca, asking whether he could talk to him in order to make comparisons. This is what millions of people go on doing in the name of seeking and searching for truth.First there are the worldly people who don’t bother about truth, who never seek and never search. Out of millions of these worldly people who go on and on doing the nonessential, sometimes somebody becomes a little fed up. Seeing the futility of all these things that he has been doing, he starts seeking for truth. He wants to know the meaning of life or who he is. But again there is a great trap. The trap is that he may start looking into scriptures, into philosophical systems. First he was lost in the world of things, now he will be lost in the world of thoughts. And the second is far more dangerous than the first! Let me repeat it, because ordinarily you think the second is better than the first. It is not so.It is very easy to awaken from the first because it is so stupid. If somebody is really stupid and thick, only then will he go on and on seeking money and power and prestige and respectability, and he will never become aware that he is seeking rubbish – for it you need a really dense head.If you are a little intelligent, if there is just a little intelligence, it will be enough to become alert of the phenomenon that you can accumulate as much money as you want but when you will be dying this money is not going to help. This money is not going to be with you, you cannot carry it to the other shore. It is such a simple fact: you may become very respectable, but what is the point? Unless you become joyful, what is the point?You can see very respectable people who are absolutely joyless. You can see very rich people who have not known a single moment of celebration. You can see famous people, celebrities, but they know nothing of celebration. In fact, they are looking in a direction which is simply futile, irrelevant.What is a person looking for when he starts looking for fame, when he wants to become a celebrity? What is he looking for? This man has missed love. He could not get love from a single human being because he could not love a single human being. He could not give love, so love has not flowed toward him. He has missed love. That joy has never happened to him. Now he lives through a substitute, he lives through people’s respect and fame: “So many people know about me!”This is a vicarious way of fulfilling one’s desire for people to love you. But those people who know you don’t love you. They may even hate you. And even if their sympathy is for you or if they respect you, it can’t fulfill that unfulfilled gap in your being, that hole in your being that can only be fulfilled by love. It is not a substitute. No substitutes help. All substitutes are plastic.So, one can go on and on earning fame, money, power, and deep down one remains very, very poor – a child. One knows that one has not bloomed, because there is no blooming except through love. Money becomes the substitute, or power or prestige. But it is as if you have misunderstood the menu for the food. You can have beautiful menus, but they are not going to satisfy. Real food is needed. Real food means love. And a single human being’s love is enough to fulfill you; there is no need to have the whole world love you. If a single human being has loved you, there is fulfillment. And I would like to tell you that even if you have loved yourself, it is enough.But you don’t love yourself and nobody has loved you, and you have never allowed anybody to love you – because you cannot give, because you don’t know how to share, because you are a miser and a hoarder. So you go on hoarding money, and money becomes your beloved and power becomes your god. Or, if you are a little intelligent, these things will be finished with, then there will be knowledge, philosophy, thought – a far bigger realm of illusion than things.When you are chasing a woman, you are at least very close to reality. When you are hankering for a beautiful house, that house is at least a real house; at least it has a material, concrete existence. But when you start roaming in the world of thoughts, dreams, projections, God, paradise – just palaces made because you can dream and imagine – then you are completely lost.So sometimes intelligent people become aware of the futility of the world of things, but they are then trapped in the world of thoughts. Thoughts are your inventions. You can have beautiful thoughts, but they are not going to fulfill. If even things cannot fulfill, how can thoughts? Even if things prove futile, thoughts are going to prove futile too.But with thought there is one possibility – there are millions of systems so you can move from one system to another. And there is a great possibility of creating your own system; just by choosing, borrowing a few thoughts from here and there, you can create your own system. And reality will never give you any resistance because reality does not bother about what you think. Nobody takes any note of your thinking. It is private, it is your business. It is nobody else’s concern, so you can go on and on thinking.It is not accidental that great philosophers tend to become insane. It is not a coincidence that all the great philosophers in the West one day or other have to be hospitalized for insanity. When you go to the very extreme of thought you lose all contact with reality, you become insane.What is insanity? It is losing contact with reality, becoming so absorbed in your thoughts that you think that it is the only reality there is.A certain man who was fond of studying all kinds of systems of thought wrote a letter to Abdul Aziz, asking whether he could talk to him in order to make comparisons. Now, coming to a master like Abdul Aziz and saying to him that he wants to have a little talk, a conversation, a discussion with him so that he can make comparisons with other systems… This is absolutely foolish. It is as if you are thirsty and you have been reading about water, great poetry about water, and you have been seeing great paintings about water, and then you ask a river, “Can I come and have a little talk with you so that I can compare my thoughts about water with your idea of water!” The river will simply laugh at your ridiculousness, at your stupidity. The river is there; you can drink and you can quench your thirst.To ask a master like Abdul Aziz, “I want to come and talk to you so that I can make comparisons,” is just the very extreme of foolishness. One comes to a master not to talk but to see. One comes to a master not to discuss because discussion will create a barrier, it will create smoke and vision will become impossible – one comes to a master to have a taste of how it tastes to be realized. One comes to a master to have a sip out of his cup. One comes to a master so that one can see through the master because he has become open. He is a window, he is no longer a wall. If you come close enough you can see through his eyes and you can hear through his ears and you can smell through his nose and you can have a little glimpse through his heart.One comes to a master to come close. One simply asks for blessings, not for anything else. In the East it has been a long tradition, one of the ancientmost traditions.When Westerners come to the East they cannot understand what is happening. In India, or in Iran, or in Arabia, people travel thousands of miles to see a master, just to see a master. They will not ask a single question, they will simply come. And it is a long, arduous journey. Sometimes people will travel on foot for thousands of miles just to have a glimpse of the master. The Western mind cannot understand what the point is: “If you don’t have anything to ask, why are you going? For what?” The Western mind understands how to converse, but it has forgotten how to “be with.” It knows how to ask, but it has forgotten how to drink. It knows the intellectual approach, it does not know the door of the heart – that there is a way to connect and to relate beyond words, that there is a way to participate beyond words. So Westerners have always been puzzled about Eastern people walking thousands of miles, making a long, arduous journey, sometimes dangerous, and then coming to a master just to touch his feet and ask for his blessings. Then they will go away fulfilled, happy.Many people have asked me why when I give sannyas to Westerners I talk to them, and when I give sannyas to Indians I don’t. What is the matter? Am I not interested in Indians? Why don’t I talk with Indians? Why don’t I try to convey something through language?The reason is not that I am not interested in Indians, the reason is that Indians know how to “be with.” Sometimes I talk to an Indian who has become almost Westernized, and sometimes I don’t talk to a Westerner if I feel that his heart is Eastern. It depends. When somebody from the East comes, he comes for a totally different reason. He comes just to be there with me for a few seconds. Those few seconds are of great joy. He has not brought a question with him, he has brought a quest. A question is superficial; the real thing is the quest. The question is in the head, the quest is in the heart. “What is there to ask? What is there to ask that I cannot understand looking into your eyes? What is there to ask that I cannot see the moment you enter my arena of vision? And why waste time asking about some futile thing – about whether God exists or not?”For centuries the East has known a different kind, a different quality, of communication – it is of communion. A man will come, he will touch the feet, he will bow down, he will look at the master, he will just sniff the air around the master – just the fragrance – and he feels fulfilled. He has come to see if the impossible happens. He has heard that it happened in Buddha’s time, he has heard that it happened in Mohammed’s time. He has heard about great masters like Abdul Aziz. He has heard great stories – and he wants to see whether it still happens, whether a buddha is still alive, whether he can find a man of the quality of Mohammed so that the scriptures will become valid again. Each master goes on revalidating, each master is again and again a witness to the eternal truth: that truth can be realized.In the East people travel and make faraway journeys just to see with their own eyes – because you cannot see Buddha now. Twenty-five hundred years have passed; it is past, it is part of history, you can only read about it. You cannot see Krishna now, he is myth. In the East people want to see somebody who is a Krishna or a Buddha or a Mohammed or a Christ. They want to look into those eyes so that they can again become confident, so that they can again gain trust that it still happens, that God has not forsaken the world yet, that it is not just a story of the past, that it is part of reality.I have heard…One evening several of Rabbi Hayyim of Kosov’s disciples – Hasidim – sat together in his House of Study, and told one another stories about the old ancient masters – zaddiki – above all about the Baal Shem Tov.Baal Shem Tov is the founder of Hasidism – one of the greatest souls that has ever walked on earth.And because the telling and the listening were very sweet to them, they were even at it after midnight.Yes, it is beautiful, it is one of the most delicious experiences in life to talk about people who have attained, to tell stories about them. That’s what in the East we call satsang – talking about godliness, godly people, talking about those who have realized. Small anecdotes, parables: stories that stir your heart, that help you to sing a song, that make you aware of the unknown which is just by the corner, that fill you with desires and longings for God, that make you feel that the superhuman has happened in the past to human beings and is possible for to you too. And in Hasidism it is one of the most fundamental things to talk about masters, to enjoy, to cherish and to be nourished by that talk – in Sufism too, and in Zen. All the old stories… Those stories go on gathering and becoming more and more refined as time passes. The concern is not about historic facts. The concern is more about the essential phenomenon that godliness happens.So it came to pass that half the night was lost.Then one of them told still another story about Baal Shem Tov. When he had ended, another sighed from the bottom of his heart. “Alas!” said he, half to himself, “Where could we find such a man today?”Yes, when you hear about Kabir, Nanak, Dadu, when you hear about Meera, when you hear about Mansoor, when you hear about Jalaluddin Rumi, Omar Khayyam, it is natural that a sigh will be released from your heart and you will say, “Alas! Where could we find such a man today?”In the East, that’s why people travel. If they hear that a master has happened, they travel. People are very poor; they don’t have enough money even to travel. They save their money for years just to go to a place of pilgrimage where they can find somebody who has attained. In the East, to help these poor people, we managed a certain kind of gathering. You must have seen it happening in the Kumbha Mela in Allahabad.India is poor and millions of people cannot go to the masters, so in the past it was agreed upon that once in a while the masters would gather together in one place so the whole country could come there – because it is difficult for poor people to go searching all over the country. Out of compassion, the masters decided that they would gather in one place so the whole country could come. Millions of people come to a Kumbha Mela because there they will be able to see many saints, many sages.The idea was of tremendous utility – but now it is only an idea. There are not so many sages anymore. There are still masters, but not like in the ancient days. Something has so utterly changed in the world that people no longer seek God, or fewer and fewer people seek God. God has become almost irrelevant; people bypass him. People are so indifferent about God that they are not even against him, they are neither for nor against. They say, “Okay, don’t waste time. Don’t talk about useless things.” They are not even interested in denying. For the first time in the world the theists and the atheists have both become irrelevant. The world has become indifferent to both.“Alas!” said he, half to himself. “Where could we find such a man today?”At that instant, they heard steps coming down the wooden stairs which led from Rabbi Hayyim’s room. The door opened and Rabbi Hayyim appeared on the threshold, in the short jacket he usually wore in the evening. “Fool,” he said softly, “he is present in every generation.” Then he closed the door and went back up the stairs. The disciples, the Hasidim, sat together in silence.Yes, masters are always there – sometimes more, sometimes less. That depends on the receptivity of a certain age, on the receptivity of a certain consciousness, on the receptivity of the time. But it has never happened that they are not there. More or less, right; but they are always there. It cannot happen in the very nature of things that out of millions of people not even a single person will not be realized.So if there is someone, and rumor spreads, people start traveling. But they go to see with their own eyes, they go to touch. They want to see how it feels to touch a God-realized man. They want to have a concrete experience. They want God to be tangible, visible, and God is not tangible and not visible. It happens only rarely that he descends in a man. When a man becomes utterly empty God descends in him, then he becomes tangible, visible. You can look into his eyes and you can hold his hand and you can walk with him and you can sit by his side. In the East, people come not to talk but to listen, not to talk but to see, not to talk but to feel.This man must have been a very, very Western man – sophisticated, educated in the ways of philosophy. He wrote to Abdul Aziz asking whether he could talk to him in order to make comparisons. What comparisons? With whom?No master is comparable to any other master. Each master is so unique that he’s incomparable. You cannot compare Buddha with Mohammed. If you compare, it will be sheer stupidity, and whatever you conclude will be wrong. You cannot compare Buddha even with Mahavira. Both were contemporaries and lived in the same province, moved in the same towns. They sometimes stayed in the same city, and once stayed in the same dharmsala, but you cannot compare them. They are poles apart. Mahavira is Mahavira, Buddha is Buddha. They are so unique that not even a single point of comparison exists. If you start comparing you will miss the whole point, you will miss their reality. That reality is unique. Masters cannot be compared.If you look into them with no comparison in your mind you will find the same reality – hence darshan. A master’s darshan is enough. To see him is enough. You should look deep into his being – not with thoughts to compare, not with prejudices, not with a priori ideas; just silently, with no thoughts flickering in your mind, with no clouds. You should just look into him, and then you will be surprised. Masters are unique in their manifestation and they are one in their innermost core. Buddha, Mahavira, Krishna, Christ, Lao Tzu, Zarathustra – they are all one in their innermost core. Their circumference is really very, very unique, and their center is one. But to see the center you will have to be utterly silent.Now, this man says, “I want to make a comparison.” If you want to make a comparison, how can you be silent? If you want to make a comparison, you will have to carry all the thoughts that you want to compare. You will have to carry all your scriptures, your memory. You will have to have logical criteria about how to compare. You will have to carry scales to compare. You will be so burdened with your idea of comparison that you will not be able to see into the reality.Each master is unique, and yet represents the universal.The dervish sent him a bottle with oil and water in it, and a piece of cotton wick. Enclosed in the package was this letter…Sufis are known to do such things, things which look absurd on the surface. The man has asked one thing and the master is doing something else. The man wanted to come to him to have a philosophical understanding about what his message was, so that he could compare it with other messages. He wanted to have a look into his systems of thought so that he could compare it with other systems of thought and could decide which is better, which is good, which is to be followed.Now, this Abdul Aziz: …sent him a bottle with oil and water in it, and a piece of cotton wick. Enclosed in the package was this letter… All scriptures, Sufis say, are like this letter. They have certain instructions, not certain dogmas. They have certain instructions. If you follow those instructions you will have a door opened to you. But they are not theories to be believed in. They are just like “how to do” books – manuals, instruction manuals. They don’t preach any philosophy, they simply give you instructions: “Do this and this will happen. Do this and this will happen. Don’t do this, otherwise this will happen.”Buddha used to say, “My whole concern is to give you a few instructions through which buddhahood can happen to you. If you ask anything else I am not interested.” And he used to say, “I am an instructor. I simply give you a few instructions. Follow those instructions and things will start happening. I don’t say anything about truth, I only say something about the way – how it is reached. Follow the way and you will reach the truth. And truth is indefinable. Nothing can be said about it.”Sufis say that all real scriptures are not philosophical, they are instructive. They simply give a few instructions like this letter.Dear friend, if you place the wick in the oil, you will get light when fire is applied to it. If you pour out the oil and put the wick in the water, you will get no light. If you shake up the oil and water and then place the wick in them, you will get a spluttering and a going out. There is no need to carry out this experiment through words and visits when it can be done with such simple materials as these.Now, this philosopher must have laughed at this whole ridiculous letter. What nonsense is this Abdul Aziz talking about? And what does it signify? He had asked something else, and this Abdul Aziz sends a bottle with oil and water in it, with a wick. This is absurd!Many times the master’s answer will look absurd because you cannot understand the significance of it. First try to understand what the significance of it is.The first thing he says is, “There is no need to come to me. Why travel so far away? If you really want to see reality, it is within you. Just do a few experiments and you will enter yourself, and there you will find me too!”Just the other night a sannyasin was saying to me, “I feel that it is very difficult to surrender to you.” I can understand. It is always very difficult to surrender. But I told him that it is difficult because he doesn’t understand. By surrendering to me you are really surrendering your false self to your real self. I am nobody in it, it is just an excuse. Via me, your false self disappears and you reach your real self. If you can do it directly, if you can short-circuit, you can. But if it is not possible then you can do it via me. The master is just a via media. When the master says, “Surrender to me,” he does not mean surrender to him. He simply means, “Whatever you are right now is not the real you. Put aside this whole false idea of yourself, give it to me. Give this poison to me!”By surrendering your false, you become the real. And the real can never be surrendered so the master is not worried about the real. The real can never be surrendered, there is no way to surrender it. Only the unreal can be surrendered. Or let me say it in this way: you can surrender only that which you really don’t have; you cannot surrender that which you really have. You cannot surrender that which you are, which you really are. That is impossible to surrender. You can only surrender that which you have come to believe you are, but you are not. The master only takes the false.When you come to a master, you in fact come to yourself. And this should be the criterion to judge whether you have come to a real master, or you are fooling around with a cheat, a fraud. If the master tries to overpower your reality, then beware. That man is your enemy. If a master simply takes your unreality and helps your reality to grow in your uniqueness…The real master always goes on throwing you to yourself. Yes, he will snatch away all that is unreal, he will pluck away all that is unreal. He will take all the weeds out of your being so that the roses can grow. But he’s not going to take the roses; the roses cannot be taken away. It is impossible to surrender your essential self. It cannot happen; it is not in the nature of things.The master sends him a simple letter with a very absurd thing: a bottle with oil and water and a wick. Now first try to understand what he signifies.If the man was really a man of some intelligence he would have understood, but the story does not say anything about him. So there is every possibility that he didn’t understand, otherwise the story would have mentioned it. He must have laughed at the foolishness of this man, Abdul Aziz, and he must have thought, “It is good that I never went, it would have been futile.” He must have told other people, “Look! This foolish man is pretending to be a master. I inquired about a subtle thing – a comparison of his system with my system or other systems – and this is what he sends as a reply. This man is either mad or a fool!”First, try to understand what Abdul Aziz’s message is: Dear friend, if you place the wick in the oil, you will get light when fire is applied to it – first. Second: If you pour out the oil and put the wick in the water, you will get no light. Third: If you shake up the oil and water and then place the wick in them, you will get a spluttering and a going out. First these three things have to be understood.Man is a trinity – body, mind, soul – and that’s what those three things represent. The bottle represents the body, the water represents the mind, and oil represents the mind if it becomes meditation. So the mind has two possibilities: either it can be water or it can be oil. If it is with thoughts, it is water; if it is with no thoughts, it is oil. And the soul is the fire. These are the three things.We have the bottle and we have the possibility of filling it either with oil or with water. Both are possibilities of the mind. With thoughts the mind becomes water – then you can go on applying fire to it and darkness will remain there. That’s why you live in darkness – your mind is water, and the fire is continuously being put out.With a mind too full of thoughts the spirit disappears, the fire disappears, the soul is no longer there. Unless the body is filled with no-mind, unless the body is filled by thoughtlessness, or a thoughtless mind, you will not be enlightened. Once the mind is no longer watery, once thoughts have disappeared and there is silence, purity, innocence, it becomes oil – and suddenly you will see a light arising. The fire is there; just the oil is needed. The bottle is there, the fire is there, but between the two there is water. And with water there is no possibility of fire. You live without fire and without light.Abdul Aziz says: …if you place the wick in the oil… Remember, in the oil. If the soul is placed in the oil – in a meditative state, in samadhi – you will get light. Then there will be no trouble; you will become enlightened. So don’t bother about coming here or going anywhere else. Do a simple thing: let the mind disappear, let no-mind arise. If the body and the soul are connected by no-mind, they are in tune. And suddenly there is song and there is dance and there is celebration. There is joy, there is eternal joy, what Hindus call sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss – all are there.Once your trinity is in tune… If the trinity is not in tune you will remain in darkness. If the mind is there continuously creating more and more thoughts, you are filled with water. This is the state of the worldly man, the man who continuously thinks, day and night, day in, day out, from birth to death – he continuously goes on thinking. He lives without fire, he lives without light, he lives without joy. In fact, he lives a very dead life.Or, there is one further possibility: the state of the so-called religious people, the otherworldly people. You can have a mixture of the mind and no-mind. Then there will be a spluttering and a going out. Then sometimes you will have a few glimpses, but they will go. Nothing will really be yours. Just like dreams they will come and go.The mind can have these three states: the ordinary state of thinking, the extraordinary state of contemplation… This is the state of contemplation: a water–oil mix. And in the West people have never searched beyond contemplation. All their words for dhyana or zikr mean only contemplation; even the word meditation simply means to think in a better way, to meditate. Contemplation means to think in a better way, but thinking remains. It just becomes more concentrated, it is less zigzag. It has a direction, it has a goal. It is not insane, it has a certain purpose and meaning, but it remains thinking. It is no longer mad, so something of the no-mind enters it, but it is only “something.” Water and oil are mixed. And sometimes there will be a spluttering and a going out. Sometimes the fire will be there and sometimes it will not be there. There will be lightning experiences.That’s what has happened to Christian saints. Their experiences about God are not like Mansoor or Abdul Aziz or Buddha. Their experiences of God are just glimpses – they come and they disappear. They are better than nothing, but they are nothing compared with that experience which comes and never goes again, they are nothing compared with enlightenment.So these are the three possibilities: either the water and oil are mixed, or there is only water, or there is only oil. The worldly man remains with water, the religious man remains with a mixture, and the spiritual man starts seeing the point and fills his being with no-mind, with dhyana, with a thoughtless awareness, with a contentless consciousness. He is simply alert; not alert of anything in particular, just alert. He is awake.This wakefulness is all that one has to do. That is the message of Abdul Aziz. But you have to decode it. And I feel sorry for the man to whom Abdul Aziz sent this. I don’t think he was able to decode it, otherwise the story would have mentioned it – that’s how Sufi and Zen stories go. If something happens they certainly mention it, it has to be mentioned. But the story says nothing.Dear friend, if you place the wick in the oil, you will get light when fire is applied to it. If you pour out the oil and put the wick in the water, you will get no light. If you shake up the oil and water and then place the wick in them, you will get a spluttering and a going out. There is no need to carry out this experiment through words and visits when it can be done with such simple materials as these.Sufism is existential, experimental, experiential. It insists that God can be known by simple methods, that there is no need to philosophize.Many times people come to me, people who are knowledgeable, and they say – particularly Indians: “What is the meaning of dancing? How can one attain God by dancing?”Dancing is an experiment, an experiment to bring your body, your mind, your soul, in tune. Dance is one of the most rhythmic phenomena. If you are really dancing there is no other activity which creates such unity. If you are sitting, the body is not used; then you use only your mind. If you are running very fast – your life is in danger – then you use your body and you don’t use your mind.In dance you are neither sitting nor running for your life. It is movement, a joyful movement. The body is moving, the energy is flowing, the mind is moving and flowing. And when these two things are flowing they melt into each other. You become psychosomatic. A certain alchemy starts happening.That’s why you see a new kind of grace on the face of the dancer, it is alchemical – the body-mind meeting, merging, the body-mind becoming one tune, one rhythm, one harmony. When this harmony has happened then the third, the soul, starts entering it. The soul can enter your existence only when your body and mind are no longer in conflict, when your body and mind cooperate, when your body and mind are deep in love, embracing, hugging each other. That’s what happens in dance. Then immediately you will find the third entering also. When the body-mind is really in harmony, when the two are no longer two, the third enters. For the first time you become a trinity, a trimurti. Those are the three faces of God.And while you are dancing something is happening. It is an experiment. It is not just contemplation – just sitting and thinking about God – it is allowing God to enter you, it is opening yourself to God. It is like a flower opening in the morning. When the flower opens, suddenly sun rays start dancing on its petals. When you open, God starts dancing in you. God can be met only through dance. There is no other activity which is more harmonious than dance. That’s why all the primitive religions were dance-based, and all the modern religions – the so-called civilized, sophisticated religions – have nothing like dance in them; they are dull affairs.A church looks more like a cemetery than like a temple. You can’t dance there, you can’t be joyous there, you cannot – it is not allowed. You have to be serious. You have to be very, very serious, sad, as if you are doing something wrong. The joy is missing. The joy is missing because people are just sitting, not doing anything. The preacher in the church talks about God and the people listen to it; the preacher and the congregation think that God is a thought, not an act.Here in this place God is not a thought; it is an act, it is a dance. And the dance has to be of the total: body, mind, soul. Nothing has to be denied because if you deny anything, something will be missing, something will certainly be missing. And then your synthesis will not be the highest possibility, it will remain somewhere low, it will not reach the ultimate Everest.These people who come here to watch and see people dancing or doing the Kundalini or Dynamic meditations, they become very puzzled because they have an idea that one should sit and read the Gita and think about God. That is all nonsense! By reading the Gita and thinking about God you are not going to go anywhere. If you really want to go somewhere you have to be experimental, you have to use a method.Sufism has a method and has no philosophy.There is no need to carry out this experiment through words and visits… Because how can you carry out an experiment through words and visits? Yes, words can be used for instruction – that’s what I go on doing every morning. These are just instructions. Then for the whole day words disappear from this ashram. Then you dance, then you hum, then you shake, then you sit, then you watch, then you love, you pray, you meditate.Every morning I start with instructions, and then the whole day is for you to experiment in. Words can be used, but only as instructions, not as propositions. Here I am not creating any belief system in you. I am destroying all belief systems. I am simply giving you a few methods, a few techniques. If you know how to use them, and you are really interested in the search and you use them, there is no reason why you should not attain. There is no reason at all why you cannot become God-realized. If it has happened to me, it can happen to you.If you cooperate with me it is going to happen to you. A master goes on taking everything from you. First he teaches you to become a disciple, and then one day he will take your disciplehood also – because a master cannot be satisfied unless you have become masters in your own right. A satguru is one who creates satgurus.A master goes on creating masters. First he teaches you to surrender so that all that is false disappears. Once the false has disappeared he will tell you to surrender too. Once the false has disappeared he will now tell you to surrender your disciplehood too. A master is satisfied only when he has created another master.In the vicinity of a master a chain starts working – one flame jumps into other lamps and they start burning. Then they in their own right will start jumping into other unlit lamps, and then many more will be burning. People come to me and ask why I am not going into the world. I need not go. I will create many satgurus, I will create many masters, just sitting here. They will be traveling, they will be my ambassadors; they will go around the world to share their light.But one has to go deep into experimentation because only through experimentation is there experience.Through philosophizing people avoid taking risks.I have heard…An old couple were listening to a radio broadcast church service. Both sat in deep contemplation and half an hour went by. Then suddenly the old man burst into a fit of laughter.“Sandy,” exclaimed his wife in a horrified tone, “why this merriment on the Sabbath?”“Ah,” said Sandy, “the preacher has just announced the offering, and here I am safe at home.”People want to remain safe, uninvolved, uncommitted. They want to grow, but they don’t want to commit themselves; they want to grow, but they don’t want to sacrifice anything. They want to grow for nothing, they don’t want to pay. These people never grow. Growth is through sacrifice. One has to put all one has at stake. Growth is a gamble, it is a risk.So if you are trying to save yourself – let me warn you, if you are trying to save yourself you may be successful. You may succeed in saving yourself, but then nothing will happen. You have to be open; you have to be ready to lose yourself, not save yourself.Philosophy is very good because it never touches your reality, it simply goes on like a cloud, hovering around your mind. You can enjoy it. It is an easy-chair thing. You can go into great thoughts, there is no fear. You are always safe – anchored in your home, anchored in your security, safety. That’s why I insist on sannyas. Sannyas means that now you are becoming committed, now you are getting involved, now it is not just a philosophy with me. You are ready to go into danger, into the unknown, into the insecure.Many people ask, “If we listen to you and we meditate, will it not help? Why is there a need to become sannyasins?” The need is to be committed, the need is to get involved. The need is that you should not stand aloof, saving yourself, and then trying something – if you can grab something by trying, good. But you don’t want to get into anything. You don’t want to get into any trouble. But these people are the losers. Their cleverness is not going to help them, their very cleverness will prove to be their doom.Philosophy is simply a mind journey; you don’t go anywhere, you remain where you are. It is a dream projection; you can sit here and close your eyes and you can be in Kolkata or in Chicago. You can close your eyes and you can be anywhere you like, but whenever you open your eyes you will find yourself sitting here in Pune. That’s what philosophy goes on doing. You can think great thoughts and while you are thinking, you are thrilled. And whenever you come back and open your eyes, you are exactly the same as you have always been. Nothing ever changes through philosophy because philosophy is an avoidance. It simply goes on labeling things: this is this, that is that. Philosophy is labeling. And remember, you are not kidding anybody but yourself.It happened…Two lions were in a zoo. One of them had been there for several years, while the second one was a newcomer.At feeding time the new lion noticed that he received a few figs, nuts, and bananas, while the older one was given a luscious, juicy chunk of meat.After this had gone on for several weeks, the young lion plucked up courage enough to inquire why this was so.“I know you have the seniority around here, but why do you always get the meat while I get fruit and nuts?” he asked.“Well,” explained the older lion, “the zoo manager is a philosopher, and the zoo is so poor that he only has room for one lion, so he has listed you as a monkey.”Now, by listing a lion as a monkey, a lion does not become a monkey. But the old lion says, “Because he is a philosopher…he thinks that by labeling, things are finished. He treats you as a monkey.” That’s what philosophy goes on doing. You go on labeling things. Once you have labeled them you start treating them that way.Beware of this habit. Everybody has it. You are sitting by the side of somebody and you inquire, “Who are you? Where are you going? What is your religion?” This and that. This is just an effort to label the man. If he says he is a Jew, you have labeled him. Then you know that you have to protect your pockets – he is a Jew. Now you have labeled him. And he may not be a man that you can label as a Jew – Jesus was also a Jew. Even if Jesus was sitting by your side he would have said, “I am a Jew.” How are you going to label him? Would you have labeled him a “Jew”? He was the least Jewish man in the world.Or the man says, “I am a Mohammedan,” and you think that he is dangerous. Or the man says, “I am a Hindu,” and you think he is a hypocrite. People have universal labels. And once they have labeled someone, they behave with the label, they don’t think about the person at all. Each person is so unique; he represents nobody else, he represents only himself. So nobody can be labeled. No label is good.Philosophy goes on doing that. It goes on labeling the whole of existence. Once the philosopher has labeled everything, he thinks he is finished, he has accounted for everything, and he starts living in a very comfortable, labeled world. God is in heaven, and hell is underneath the earth and heaven is high in the sky and this earth is just in the middle. He has made a map and he knows what is right and what is wrong, and if you do right you will go to heaven and if you do wrong you will go to hell – everything is categorized, finished! Now he knows all. And a philosopher knows nothing.To know, philosophy is not the door; to know, experimentation, religion, is the door.It happened…A hospital secretary moved to a new post, and decided immediately to tighten up on security. He set up a man in the gatehouse with very strict instructions to challenge all comers. Those not on business were to be turned firmly away. The man who was put on the door was a great thinker.Quite soon a young woman marched up, seeking to enter. “Hi, wait a bit, what is your business?” shouted the gatekeeper, the thinker.“I’m a maternity patient,” said the girl.“Can you prove it? Are you pregnant?”“Don’t be daft. I have not seen anything for six months.”“Ah, I thought so, you’ve come to the wrong place, the Eye Hospital is further down the road.”The people who are addicted to thinking have their own logic; they don’t listen, they don’t see. They are always garbed behind their own thinking. The woman says, “Don’t be daft. I have not seen anything for six months.” And the thinker concludes. “Right. I thought so. You have come to the wrong place, the Eye Hospital is further down the road.” He has missed the whole point.Thinking is like that – it goes on missing the whole point. If you really want to have any contact with reality then thinking is not the bridge, it is the barrier.Just within three hundred years science has touched great heights. And the reason? The reason is simple. The reason is that Bacon introduced the experiment to the world of science. In just three hundred years so much has happened – it did not happen in three thousand years or even in thirty thousand years. It is because of one man, Bacon. He changed the whole course of science and the whole course of human consciousness just by creating a new door of experimentation. He said, “Speculation is not going to help. People have speculated down the ages and nothing has happened. They go on quarreling about theories and those theories don’t mean a thing.” He introduced the experiment.You will be surprised to know from where Bacon obtained the idea of experimenting. You will not believe it! He obtained it from Sufism. He was a great reader of Sufi books, he was immensely interested in Sufi books, and from the Sufi ideas he had the idea that if the experiment is the door to the inner world, why could it not be the door to the outer? Science owes much to Sufism because of this. If the right sources are searched for some day, then the real fathers of science will be the Sufis, not the Greek philosophers, Aristotle, Plato and others, no. They were all speculators.From where did the idea of the experiment enter the mind of Bacon? It entered from Sufism. He may have read this story or something else, but it entered from Sufism, because Sufis are very persistent on experiment.And if religion is also going to grow, then experimenting has to become its very foundation. Just as science has reached such a great height within such a small time limit – three hundred years – so religion can also have great possibilities if it becomes experimental. Religion has much to learn from Sufism. Sufism is the essential-most religion – that’s why I say it is existential, experimental, experiential.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 1, 01-16Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 1 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-1-16/

The first question:Osho,Why do we forget our divinity? What is the meaning of this?You have not forgotten it. You have never known it, so how can you forget it? Forgetfulness is possible only once you have known it – and once known, it is never forgotten.You are divine, but you have not known it yet. In fact, it is because you are divine that it is so difficult to know it. It is at the very heart of your being. If it were something outside of you, you would have encountered it by now. If it were something objective, you could have seen it. But it is not outside and it is not an object – it is your subjectivity. It is not something to be seen, it is hidden in the seer. It is a witnessing. Unless you go behind yourself you will not be able to know it.There are three things in the world. One is the world of the object – the things that surround you. Closer to it, when you come toward yourself, is the world of thoughts, dreams, and desires. That too surrounds you. That’s what you ordinarily call the inner world. It is not inner, it is still outer.There are two kinds of outsides; one that you see with open eyes and one that you see with closed eyes. But both are outside because whatever can be seen must be outside. To be seen, it has to be outside; it has to be different from you. The object has to be different from the subject.And then there is the third, the world of your innermost core, your subjectivity – from where you go on seeing. To come to that is to realize one’s divinity. One has to become a witness to objects and to thoughts, and by witnessing, by and by a moment comes when the turning happens. When there is no object and no thought left in your consciousness, when your consciousness is pure, it takes a turn – a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. When there is nothing to be seen, the seer starts seeing itself.Remember, I am only using words, and they are not adequate any more. “The seer starts seeing himself” are not the right words because again, the words indicate a division – the seer and the seen – and now there is no division, there is only you and you and you; there is not something that is seeing and something that is being seen. It is pure consciousness.Divinity means pure consciousness. First you will first have to go from the world of objects to the world of thoughts, and then you will have to take another step – you will have to drop thinking, let thoughts disappear, let there be nothingness. In that nothingness the turning happens. You cannot do it. You can do only two things: you can close your eyes to the world and you can close your consciousness to the constant traffic of thoughts. That is all you have to do. Then the third thing happens on its own. Suddenly you are aware that you are a god. Awareness is what “God” is.But when you are aware, in a sense you have disappeared, you are no longer there. The old ego is no longer there. You cannot even say “I” because the I depends on things and thoughts, the I is constituted of things and thoughts. When all the bricks of things and thoughts have disappeared, the building of the I also disappears. There is pure emptiness. That’s what Buddha calls anatta, no-selfness. At the very core of the self, at the innermost shrine, you will not find yourself – and that’s how one finds oneself. When the self is lost, the self is found.That’s why at this point all great masters become contradictory and paradoxical. Jesus says, “If you want to find yourself, lose yourself. If you want to lose yourself, then go on clinging to yourself.” It is very paradoxical. Those who cling will lose and those who are ready to lose will attain.You ask me, “Why do we forget our divinity?” No, you have not forgotten, one never forgets – you have not known it at all in the first place. Once known, it is known forever. But I am not saying that you are not divine. You are divine.When we say that one has forgotten, the word forgotten is used metaphorically. It is not very true, factual. Nobody can forget. A buddha can never become anything else other than a buddha. He cannot forget. He knows. He knows even while he is asleep. There is no way to forget it. Once known, it is known eternally. But we have never known it – and we have been it always and always. From the very beginning we have been it. But we have not allowed our energy to turn upon itself.You must have seen old symbols – there is an Egyptian symbol – of a snake turning upon itself, a circle of a snake. The snake has its own tail in its mouth; that’s what knowing is. The snake has its own tail in his mouth, it is a complete circle, the two ends meet.When you turn upon yourself the circle is complete. That’s why in many mystery traditions the circle is the symbol of ultimate attainment. Right now you are not a circle, you are a line. You go from yourself, but you never come to yourself. The ray of your consciousness goes on and on, it is linear, one dimensional. This is what the samsara is – the world, the linear consciousness. Your consciousness goes on and on moving in a line, moving in a line; it has been moving that way for millions of years.When it starts becoming a circle, starts moving backward, starts moving back home and one day suddenly strikes itself, falls upon itself, then there is knowing. And that knowing is never forgotten.You are gods, but you have not recognized the fact. The recognition is missing, it is not that you have forgotten it.The second question:Osho,Why do I feel fear when somebody comes close to me?Everybody feels fear, more or less. That’s why people don’t allow others to come very close; that’s why people avoid love. Sometimes in the very name of love they go on avoiding love. People keep each other at a distance – they allow the other only so far. Then the fear arises.What is the fear? The fear is that the other may be able to see your emptiness if he comes too close. It has nothing to do with the other. You have never been able to accept your inner emptiness – that’s the fear. You have made a very, very decorated surface: you have a beautiful face and you have a good smile and you talk well and you are very articulate and you sing well and you have a beautiful body and a beautiful persona. But those are on the surface. Behind them is simple emptiness.You are afraid that if somebody comes too close he will be able to see beyond the mask, beyond your painted face and your smile, he will be able to see beyond your words, and that frightens you. And you know that there is nothing else. You are just a surface – that is the fear. You don’t have any depth.It is not that you cannot have depth; you can have it, but you have not taken the first step. The first step is to accept this inner emptiness with joy and to go into it. Don’t avoid your inner emptiness. If you avoid your inner emptiness you will avoid people coming closer to you. If you rejoice in your emptiness you will be completely open and you will invite people to come close to you and to have a look into your innermost shrine. Because accepted, the emptiness has a certain quality; rejected, it has a different quality. The difference is in your mind. If you reject it, it looks like death; if you accept it, the same thing becomes the very source of life.Only through meditation will you be able to allow others to come close to you. Only through meditation, when you have started feeling your inner emptiness as joy, as celebration, as song. When your inner emptiness no longer freaks you out, when your inner emptiness no longer frightens you, when your inner emptiness is a solace, a shelter, a refuge, a rest. Whenever you are tired you simply drown in your inner emptiness, you disappear there – when you have started loving your inner emptiness and the joy that arises out of it, thousands of lotuses flower in that emptiness. They float in the lake of emptiness.But you are so afraid of being empty that you don’t look at it. You make every effort to avoid it. You will listen to the radio, you will go to see a movie, you will look at the TV, you will read a newspaper, a detective story, something – but you will be continuously avoiding your inner emptiness. When tired you will fall asleep and you will dream, but you never face it, you never hold it close to you, you never hug it. That’s the reason.You ask, “Why do I feel fear when somebody comes close to me?” It is a great insight that has happened to you. Everybody feels fear when somebody comes very close to them, but very few people are aware of it.Closeness is not liked. You allow closeness only very conditionally – she is your wife, then you allow her to sleep in your bed, to be with you in the night. But still you keep an invisible wall between you and the wife. The wall is invisible, but it is there. If you want to see it, observe it, you will find it – a very transparent wall, a glass wall, but it is there. You remain private to yourself, your wife remains private to herself; your privacies never meet. You have your secrets, she has her secrets. You are not really open and available to each other.Even in love you don’t allow the other to really come into you, you don’t allow the other to penetrate you. And remember, if you allow the other to penetrate you there is great bliss. When two lovers’ bodies penetrate each other there is a physical orgasm, when two minds penetrate each other there is a psychological orgasm, and when two spirits penetrate each other there is a spiritual orgasm.You may not have even heard about the other two. Even the first is a rarity. Very few people attain the real physical orgasm, they have forgotten about it. They think that ejaculation is orgasm. So many men believe that they have orgasm and, because women don’t ejaculate, not at least visibly, eighty percent of women think that they don’t have any orgasm. But ejaculation is not orgasm. It is a very local release, a sexual release: it is not orgasm. A release is a negative phenomenon – you simply lose energy – and orgasm is a totally different thing. It is a dance of energy, not a release. It is an ecstatic state of energy. The energy becomes a flow. And it is all over the body; it is not sexual, it is physical. Each cell and each fiber of your body throbs with new joy. It is rejuvenated, and great peace follows it.But people don’t know even the physical orgasm, so what to say about, how to talk about the psychological orgasm? When you allow somebody to come very close to you – a friend, a beloved, a son, a father, a master, it does not matter what kind of relationship – when you allow somebody so close that your minds start overlapping, penetrating, then there is something so beyond the physical orgasm that it is a jump. The physical orgasm was beautiful, but nothing compared to the psychological orgasm. Once you have known the psychological orgasm, physical orgasm by and by loses all attraction. It is a very poor substitute.But even psychological orgasm is nothing compared to the spiritual orgasm, when two spirits – by “spirits” I mean two emptinesses, two zeros – overlap. Remember, two bodies can only touch; they cannot overlap because they are physical. How can two bodies be in the same space? It is impossible. So at the most you can have a close touch. Two bodies can only touch; even in sexual love two bodies only touch. The penetration is very superficial; it is not more than a touch because two physical objects cannot exist in the same place. If I am sitting here in this chair then nobody else can sit in the same place. If a stone is lying in a certain place, you cannot put another thing in the same place. The space is occupied.Physical objects occupy space, so two physical objects can only touch – that is the misery of love. If you know only physical love you will always be miserable because you will only be touching, and the deep desire is to become one. And two physical objects cannot become one. It is not possible.A better communion happens with two psyches. They can come closer. But even then two thoughts cannot occupy the same space because thoughts are subtle things. They can touch far better, they can get intertwined far better than two things; things are very solid, thoughts are very liquid. When two lovers’ bodies meet it is like two stones coming together; when two psyches meet, it is like water and oil coming together. Yes, it is a better meeting, but still there is a subtle division.Two thoughts cannot occupy the same space. When you are thinking one thought you cannot think another thought at the same time – the first thought will have to go, only then will you be able to pay attention to another thought. Only one thought can be in your mind at one time and in one space. So even friendship, psychological friendship, misses something, lacks something. It is better than the first, but nothing compared with the third.Spiritual penetration is the only possibility of really being one with someone because spirit means emptiness. Two emptinesses can be together. And why two? All the emptinesses of the world can be together in one space. They can occupy the same space simultaneously, at the same time, there is no problem because they are neither concrete like objects nor liquid like water, thoughts. They are simply empty of themselves. You can bring as many emptinesses together as possible.That’s what happens around a master. When a buddha exists in the world, thousands of people will become disciples. And sometimes disciples become worried.Just today there is a question from Nirgun: “Now that people are coming from faraway places and the ashram is becoming more and more crowded, how will you be able to give your love to your disciples? There are so many.”The question seems relevant, it seems relevant from the physical point of view – but not from the spiritual point of view. I am not giving my love to anybody, I am simply love. If I am giving, then it must be a kind of thing, a quantity. Then certainly I can give only to so many and others will not be able to get it.It is not a quantity, it is simply a quality. It is not confined, it is not defined. It does not occupy any space. I am just emptiness. So whether one disciple is here or one million disciples are here it will not make any difference. The difference it makes will depend on the disciple: if he is not ready to dissolve with my emptiness then he will miss.When you start feeling your emptiness – joyously, remember – then you will be able to allow people to come close to you. Not only will you be able to allow them, you will be always welcoming, inviting – because whenever somebody can come into you, the only way is if he allows you to come into him. There is no other way. If you want to come into me, the only way is to allow me to come into you. There is no other way.Sometimes it happens…Once a young man was with me for two years. He was deeply in love with a woman. They used to live together. Their parents were against it, that’s why they had taken shelter with me. I gave them a meditation, a simple meditation to do. The meditation was just to sit every day at least twice – morning, evening, at a fixed time, regularly – and look into each other’s eyes and feel that they are going into each other.After the six-month experiment one day they went crazy. It happened. After six months of regular experimentation, twice a day, it happened that the man went into the woman spiritually and the woman went into the man spiritually. And then they became very afraid – now what would happen? The man started feeling like a woman and the woman started feeling like a man. Their whole personalities changed. Even their voices, the way they used to walk, suddenly changed. The man started walking like a woman and the woman started walking like a man. The woman’s voice became coarse, harsh, and the man’s voice became very, very feminine.Naturally, they became very afraid and I had to give them an antidote technique to come back to themselves. For three days they had to be confined in a room and not go outside. And they had to look into each other’s eyes continuously so that they could come back home. After three days it happened – but those three days were crazy days. They could not understand what had happened. They became so disoriented.They missed a great blessing. And they became so afraid of me that after three days when they came back home to their own selves, they simply escaped without informing me. I have not seen them since then.Yes, it is a crazy phenomenon to feel that you have become the other, that you are no longer the same person, that you are being possessed by the other, that your soul has left your body and somebody else’s soul has entered. You can imagine. But they could not accept it, that’s why it became bizarre. If they had accepted it they would have learned the way to come back. Then they would have slowly, slowly learned the way to go into each other each day and to come back. By and by the passage would have become very, very smooth and they would have known the knack of it. And I was giving them a great experiment that would have made the ultimate in orgasm possible for them, the spiritual orgasm. But they missed.That goes on happening around here every day. Whenever something starts happening you become afraid, you start escaping. Remember, when something is very frightening, this is the time not to go anywhere, this is the time to be here. When something frightening is happening, then something is happening. The moment is very pregnant and you have to be here and you have to go into it.This is a good insight that you ask, “Why do I feel fear when somebody comes close to me?” You are becoming a little bit aware of your emptiness. Now let this awareness increase; let this awareness become a great experience. Go into this emptiness and soon you will be surprised that this emptiness is what meditation is, this emptiness is what I call divinity, godliness. And then you will become a temple – open to every stranger who wants to come in.The third question:Osho,Why are you not a woman?But I am. Man and woman – that duality – does not exist for me anymore. And if you go on working and go on moving inward, one day it will not exist for you either. Man and woman are only superficial things, biological. They don’t go very deep. They are just skin deep. Deep inside there is only one thing – consciousness. And consciousness knows nothing of man, nothing of woman. It is simply conscious.But you become too identified with the body, that’s why the problem arises. Then you start thinking that you are man or you start thinking that you are woman, and you start thinking you are young or old, beautiful or ugly, healthy or ill.These are all misunderstandings. You live in the body, but you are not the body. The body is just your abode, your dwelling place. It is your nest. One day you will fly out of it. You will take shelter in some other nest. You have had many nests in the past, you will have many more in the future. You have lived in many, many bodies, and you will live in many, many bodies in the future. You constantly go on changing your houses. When one house becomes rotten, dilapidated, you have to go and to find another younger house, more alive, with more potentiality for growth.I am no longer identified with my body. So when you ask, “Why are you not a woman?” you are asking an absurd question. I am neither man nor woman, nor both. I am a transcendence. And that’s what I would like you to become also – a transcendence. The body will remain man if you are a man and the body will remain woman if you are a woman, but that is only the shape of your house. Once you know that you are the witness of it all, you have transcended. That transcendence is freedom.But I understand. The questioner is Madira. Her question is relevant in some other sense. She is asking why all enlightened people are men. Why are they not women? There have been enlightened women too, but history does not record them. For a certain reason: the reason is that history has been written by men. The reason is that it has always been against the male ego to think of a woman as an enlightened woman. It was impossible for the male chauvinistic mind to think of a woman as a master. Very rarely, they had to accept it. Because the phenomenon was so radiant they had to accept it.In a Meera or in a Rabiya or in a Theresa they have accepted it – but very reluctantly, very, very reluctantly. Sometimes the reluctance has been so much – for example in the Jaina tradition one of the great masters was a woman. Mallibai was her name. But Jainas have changed her name – they have made it Mallinath. They have changed her identity from she to he. There are twenty-four tirthankaras, twenty-three are men, one is a woman, but they could not even tolerate that. They have changed the history. They say that she too was a man.It happens every day that history is changed. In this century, when Joseph Stalin came to power, he changed the whole history of revolution in Russia. Leon Trotsky’s pictures were removed from everywhere, from all photographs. His name was removed from all the history books. He was so completely removed that if anybody wanted to search he would not have found a single reference anywhere that this man, Leon Trotsky, had ever existed. And he was one of the most important men of the revolution, next only to Lenin. Stalin was nobody, not at all important. But when he came into power and murdered Leon Trotsky, he changed the whole history.Then again it happened. When Stalin died and the power came to other people, they changed the history again. Now Stalin no longer exists. In Russian history books, Stalin no longer exists, not even in footnotes. It is as if he never happened.Down the ages this has always been happening. People go on changing the history. When they are in power they change the history, and whoever is in power manages to have the certain kind of history that he wants to have. So the whole of history is bunk. It has nothing to do with truth, it is all false. It is as fictitious as any fiction.For example, a man like Mahavira existed in India, but Hindus have not even mentioned his name in their books – not even his name. Why? Such a great man, not even mentioned? If Jainas had disappeared from the earth then Mahavira would have disappeared. And because Jainas are very few – only thirty lakhs, three million, it does not matter as far as their number is concerned – Mahavira remains a very secondary figure. He is as important as Christ, as important as Buddha, as important as Krishna, as important as Mohammed, but he is not mentioned anywhere because the number of followers is so small, they are in such a minority. Who bothers about them?Christ looms large because half the earth is Christian. Buddha also looms large because the whole of Asia is Buddhist. Krishna also looms large because there are millions of Hindus – and so is the case with Mohammed. Mahavira is as important as any of them. But still at least his name continues – a footnote somewhere, a reference here and there.But there have been other masters of the same caliber whose names have completely disappeared because they never left a following behind them. In the days of Mahavira there was a great teacher, Goshalak, an opponent of Mahavira. He was almost like J. Krishnamurti. He did not believe that there should be any following. He did not believe in being a master or initiating people. He did not believe in creating a religion. So when he died everything disappeared. Now his name does not exist anywhere except in the references made by Mahavira against him. Naturally, you cannot trust those statements. They were made by Mahavira, or by those who were recording Mahavira’s statements. But they were recorded by the enemies. They cannot be trusted.It is like Joseph Stalin making statements about Trotsky. Just think, if Adolf Hitler had won, the whole concept of history would have been different. Because he was defeated there is a totally different kind of history – written by Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, written by the enemies of Hitler. There exists no history which is impartial because there exists no historian who is impartial.And particularly about women masters… There has always been a conflict between man and woman. Man has never allowed woman to have her say in anything. Even if it has happened sometimes that a woman became a master, became enlightened, she has not been recorded. And it was very against the male ego to follow a woman, it was impossible, so a great following never gathered together.And one more thing. You know women. We can say that no man would follow Rabiya – but what about women? Why didn’t they follow her? Women are so much against each other that it is very difficult. They can follow a man very easily, but to follow another woman? That is impossible. Women are so jealous of each other. Women cannot believe that another woman has become enlightened. No woman can believe that another woman can be beautiful. Women always talk about other women. They cannot understand a man falling in love with some woman; no woman can understand what he sees in her: “I don’t see anything.” And they all agree on it: “What does he see in her?” That constantly jealous state of mind has been another barrier.So Rabiya could not gather women followers, and naturally she could not gather men followers. She was as important a person as Buddha, Mohammed, Rumi, Kabir, Nanak, but this has been a misfortune.This should not be so in the future if you become a little more alert.The fourth question:Osho,If life is an interdependence and an organic whole, how can one awaken while the rest of humanity is fast asleep?Never ask any question that starts with “If” – because that is just a made-up question, meaningless. You ask, “If life is an interdependence and an organic whole, how can one awaken while the rest of humanity is fast asleep?” The question is knowledgeable, it is not innocent.First, when one awakens one finds that one is not. When one awakens, one awakens out of the idea that one was, out of the idea that one was separate – when one awakens, one disappears, and then there is no point in saying “the rest of humanity.” That’s why Buddha has said, “The day I became enlightened, the whole of existence became enlightened.” Yes, that is how it is for Buddha, that’s how it is.For you existence has not become enlightened because you are fast asleep. In your sleep you think you are separate. The very idea of separation is part of sleep. In your sleep you think you are separate and the rest of humanity is separate from you, and in your sleep you have heard me talking about the organic unity of existence, so in your sleep a question arises: “If life is an interdependence and an organic whole, how can one awaken if the rest of humanity is fast asleep?”Yes, one can still awaken. But in the very awakening, one disappears. One does not awaken as one, one awakens as the whole. Asleep you are only one, awake you are the whole. Lost in your dreams and desires and thoughts you are separate; those thoughts and dreams and desires create the separation. Once those thoughts and dreams and desires have disappeared there is no separation, nothing to divide you. And in that moment you see that all is already awakened.Existence is already enlightened. That’s why Bodhidharma is said to have laughed for years when he became enlightened – a very strange laughter. People used to ask him, “Why do you go on laughing?” and he would say, “It is so ridiculous that everybody is enlightened and everybody is seeking enlightenment, and everybody is already where they want to reach. It is so ridiculous! Everybody is already happy but they are searching for happiness, and just because of the search they are missing their happiness that is already there. Everybody is running here and there looking for something that he has inside himself. It is so ridiculous,” Bodhidharma used to say, “That’s why I go on laughing.”There have been other masters who will hit you if you ask them how to become enlightened. Rinzai hit a man because he asked how to become a buddha. When he hit him, the man was puzzled: “Have I asked something wrong?” he said. And Rinzai said, “What more can there be? What more wrong is possible? What greater absurdity can one ask? You want to become a buddha? You are already a buddha. How can a buddha become a buddha? The very effort is futile. Hence I have hit you so that I can give you a little piece of awakening, a shock. Maybe in that shock you can see that you are a buddha already.”The whole of existence is one. If you think it is separate, that is just an idea. If you think you are not enlightened, that too is just an idea. Enlightenment is already the case because only God exists.So rather than asking how it is possible, try to awaken. Just a little bit of awareness, a little gap, a little interval of being conscious and suddenly you will see, “Yes, that is how it is. I am not and there is no division between me and the whole. All is one, intertwined, interdependent.”But I can understand your difficulty. When you see millions of waves on the surface of the ocean, and if those waves are conscious like you, then each wave will think that it is separate from the other waves. And it will be as logical as your question is logical – because each wave will say, “I am separate. I can see it.” And it can prove it also. The wave can say, “When the other wave disappears I remain, so how is it possible? If we were together and the same, in the disappearance of the other I would also disappear.” Or, “I disappear but other waves remain, so how can we be together?”That’s what you are asking. A man dies. Now you can ask, “If he is one with the whole of existence, then how can he alone die? The whole of existence should die.” A child is born and you can ask, “This child is born, but the whole of existence is not born with him. It has been there already. So how is it possible?”Just watch the ocean. Go and sit on the shore and watch the ocean. One wave arises, but it does not make all the waves arise. One wave disappears, but it does not mean that the other waves disappear. But can’t you see that all waves are one in the ocean? They are joined together. They are interdependent. Can you make it happen that there is only one wave on the surface of the ocean and all the other waves have disappeared? Can you make it happen? One wave cannot exist alone. It will need millions of waves around it to keep it afloat, otherwise it will disappear. Waves don’t come alone, they don’t come in a great crowd. Have you ever seen a single wave? Nobody has ever seen a single wave on the ocean. Whenever they exist, they exist in multiplicity. One wave means many waves because a wave is a waving, it is a process. When there is one wave, many ripples will arise around it and they will become waves.But all waves are joined in the ocean; they are one and organic. Can you take a wave away from the ocean? Can you bring it home? It will no longer be a wave. You can bring water – but water is not a wave. The moment you take the wave off the ocean it is just water, the wave has disappeared. That shape, that roaring quality, that dance, that form, that beauty, that sound – all have disappeared. You cannot take the wave away from the ocean and you cannot have the ocean without the waves; they are together, they are a togetherness. Even to say that they are together is not right because the word together again gives the idea of them being two. They are not two. It is the same energy. That is the meaning when I say life is organic – it is one. We are waves; God is the ocean.But we can look at ourselves in two ways. One is that we can think of ourselves as separate – that’s what I call sleep. Or we can think of ourselves as one – that’s what is known as enlightenment.To know the truth is to become enlightened; to cling to a lie is to remain unenlightened. For one who becomes enlightened, everybody has become enlightened in the same moment. Then for him, the whole of existence is made of the stuff called enlightenment.But you have your private fantasies; you can go on remaining in them. I declare to you that in my enlightenment you have become enlightened. It can’t be otherwise. In my enlightenment the whole of existence has become enlightened. Since that moment I have never thought of un-enlightenment for a single moment; I cannot. It is impossible to conceive of anybody as unenlightened.But you can have your private fancies and fantasies, and you can go on believing that you are unenlightened. That much freedom is yours. You can go on being deluded – but that is your private creation, your invention. Reality is not in support of it that’s why you are so miserable. You are without support in your ideas. You know the proverb, it exists in all the languages of the world in some form or other, in which people say, “Man proposes and God disposes.” Your propositions are so foolish, absurd. It is not that God disposes of them. Just because they are foolish, stupid, irrelevant to reality, you yourself dispose of them in the very proposal.You say “I am.” You are saying something so utterly nonsensical that it is disposed of by its very statement. You are not. Now, God is not at fault. Don’t say God disposes of it. Your statement was so utterly false that it will not find any support from anywhere. It is against the truth. So if you want to keep it you will have to struggle hard, you will have to be continuously fighting for it – then too it will go on slipping again and again and you will think God is against you and disposing of your idea. Nobody is disposing.It is as if the trees are green and you have a fantasy that they are red. Now whenever you open your eyes they are green, so you will have to keep your eyes shut. Only with closed eyes can you go on imagining that they are red. But whenever you open your eyes for a single moment you will think, “God is against me and he goes on disposing of my idea. I say that trees are red, and he goes on insisting that they are green.” God is not doing anything. Trees are simply green. Your idea is just your idea, your invention. And your invention is such a lie that it can’t have any support.The greatest lie is the ego. To think that “I am” is the greatest fiction ever invented. Just go into it and try to find out where is this “I.” Watch. Where is it? You will never find it anywhere. Nobody has ever been able to find it. If you go in and search for it you will be very puzzled. It is not there at all. It simply does not exist.But you can go on creating props for it. You can have much money and then you can have a bigger I; and you can have a bigger post and you can have a bigger I; and you can create a great kingdom and you can have a bigger I; you can become very knowledgeable and you can have a bigger I; or you can become an ascetic, a mahatma, and you can have a bigger I – but these are all supports that you are making. And God will go on disposing; disposing in the sense that truth cannot support the lie. Your very idea is so inauthentic that it cannot have any nourishment from existence. That’s why you will be miserable, you will be in misery. You will continuously feel, “I am defeated. Defeated again and again.” And there is frustration.But you are creating your frustration. In your very expectation you sow the seeds of frustration. In your very desire to be, you create death. In your very desire for that “I am,” you create an enmity with existence.See, go in, watch. Try to find out where it is. Nobody has ever been able to find it. Buddha went in and could not find it. He came out and said to people, “There is no self.” And from that moment there was no misery because he was no longer holding any lie against the truth of existence. So now there was no conflict, now there was only harmony. And in harmony is happiness.Those who have gone within themselves have without exception declared that there is no “I” to be found anywhere. It has no foundation, and it creates misery. To be in a lie is to be miserable; to be in truth is to be blissful.The fifth question:Osho,Your words are such a delight in my heart, how can they be lies?First, lies can be very delightful and delicious. In fact, lies are more delightful and delicious than truths. So that is not the point. Truth is more shocking, truth is more annihilating. Truth is like a fire; it will burn you.But that is not the meaning of what I have said to you. What I am saying is truth, but when you hear it and interpret it, it becomes a lie. I am not saying that Buddha has been telling lies or Mohammed has been telling lies – but people have been hearing lies. When I say something it is my experience, if you believe it, it is a lie. Unless you experience it on your own it will remain a lie. All beliefs are lies.Belief is a hindrance. That is the whole approach of Sufism, the basic approach – that all beliefs are lies. Experiment, experience, and then, and only then, do they become true. They become true only when you have lived them. Through your life they attain the quality of truth.I am saying something – I have known what love is and I am saying something to you. You will only be hearing it; it will not be a lived experience. Yes, you may feel delighted with the very idea, with the very poetry, with the very vision of love. You may feel delighted. It may start great dreams in you, it may become a great ideal in you, it may put you back again into a world of hope, it may help you to be less depressed, it may help you to be less in despair, it may give you dreams, it may be a delight, you may feel it as beautiful – but that is not going to help.When I am talking about love, there are two possibilities. One is that you simply hear my words. They soothe, they console, they fall like light rain and you feel joyous. Then you have heard only my poetry, and this is not going to help much. It will be a kind of drug. You enjoyed my words, you enjoyed the rhythm of those words, you enjoyed the vision contained in those words, but that will be a kind of spiritual entertainment – nothing of much value.The other way is that when I am talking about love, watch where you are and you will find yourself full of hate. When I am talking about love, let that love become an indication of your hate. Let that idea of love provoke all that you go on carrying on in the name of love. Let it be a challenge. Then it will hurt, it will not be so delicious. Then it will hurt, it will be painful. It will open your wounds. But then it will be helpful because then a change has started, a transformation has started.Don’t listen to me as if you are listening to poetry or music. Listen to me as one would listen to death. Listen to me as one would listen to transformation. I bring you a message of transformation, not a drug to soothe you. I don’t bring you a tranquilizer.So when my words hurt you it is far better, because then there is a possibility of some change happening. When my words become painful to you, unbearably painful, then something really good is going to happen. Because those words will make you aware of your reality, where you are, and those words will make you clear about where you should be – how things should be and how things are.And the gap, when you recognize it, will hurt you, will open your wounds. You live in hate and you go on talking about love. Your love is just a façade; behind it is hidden jealousy, domination, possessiveness and all kinds of illnesses. Your love is neurotic. It kills you, it kills the other. It is not love at all. You don’t know what love is. So when I talk about love, listen very carefully so that it can make you aware of your fact, your reality.Don’t start thinking that you have understood what I am talking about. You cannot understand unless you experience it.There is no other understanding than experience. Yes, intellectually you will be able to understand what I am saying because I am speaking a very simple language, the simplest possible. Everything is clear, whatever I am saying. But what I am saying is so profound that unless you dive deep into it through experience it will remain only an intellectual idea in the mind.You say, “Your words are such a delight in my heart, how can they be lies?” The question is from Arup. She certainly listens from the heart. There are very few people who listen from the heart. People listen from the head. Even the very idea of listening from the heart seems to be very unscientific and absurd. How can one listen from the heart? The ears exist in the head, the heart has no ears. How can one hear from the heart?But to hear me, the only way is to hear from the heart. And if you hear me from the heart then you can enjoy both the pain of it and the joy of it. Then you can enjoy both the shock of it and the promise of it. Then the promise will thrill you with joy – that’s what must be happening in Arup’s heart. The promise, the possibility, the opening of the door; that you need not remain a hopeless state; that God happens; that love happens; that prayer is not nonsense, there is a sense in it; that life is not meaningless, there is a significance in it, one has to search for it and discover it. Yes, there are a thousand and one thorns, true, but still roseflowers bloom. That very possibility becomes a thrill, an adventure in the heart. In the head it will become just a concept, in the heart it will become a dance.So if you can hear from the heart then this question takes another meaning. Then it is right. “Your words are such a delight in my heart, how can they be lies?” They are not lies if you hear from the heart.First I said that they will be lies if you hear from the head. Now there is this other possibility, a rare possibility, that if you hear from the heart, with great sympathy, in rapport with me, almost one with me, your heart pulsating with my heart, heart-to-heart, if you hear in that way then they are no longer lies. Because then you have heard them with the same meaning and sense that I am uttering them, then you have not interpreted them.The heart cannot interpret. The heart is so innocent that it cannot interpret. The heart knows no knowledge. That the heart is so utterly ignorant is its beauty – it cannot be corrupted by knowledge. Then it remains truth. If you hear me from the heart then my truth becomes your truth because your heart becomes my heart.But if you hear from the head, then whatever I say immediately turns into a lie. Your head is a great mechanism to make lies out of truths. It is a converter. It immediately puts anything into the slot-machine of the head and it simply corrupts it, colors it, changes it, makes something which was not there, creates something which was not there – and destroys something which was there. And something absolutely different arises in your mind; that’s what interpretation is.If you can listen from the heart then certainly your question is relevant. Then you will be very, very joyful. Yes, the pain will be felt, but even that pain is a growth pain. That too is a joy – to feel it is to feel that one is alive, to feel it is to feel that one is on an adventure. Yes, all adventures are dangerous, all adventures are risky, all adventures are insecure; only through that insecurity and risk does life take on a grandeur, a splendor. Only through that risk does life remain fresh. Only through that challenge does one go on being alive. When the challenge dies, how can you remain alive? You fall asleep. There is nothing to keep you awake.Listen from the heart – there will be a great delight. In fact, when you listen to my words from your heart they are no longer words: when you listen from the heart you listen to my wordless message. Then words are irrelevant. The heart cannot listen to the words, there is no mechanism. Words go into the head. They are sorted out in the head, interpreted, classified, condemned, appreciated, criticized, believed in or disbelieved in – all that work happens in the head. Words go into the head.But if the word has something wordless in it, if the word has been uttered by a man who is beyond words, then something of his silence goes on hanging around the words. Then something of his silence, like a flavor, a fragrance, goes with the word. The word goes into the head, the fragrance goes into the heart; the word goes into the head, the flavor goes into the heart; the word goes into the head, the wordless message goes into the heart; the container goes into the head and the content goes into the heart. Then there is great joy, great delight.And Arup is right. “Your words are such a delight in my heart, how can they be lies?” If you hear from the heart you cannot hear a lie because the heart has no way to interpret. The heart simply trusts. The heart is shraddha, trust, faith. If you listen from the head you are a student, if you listen from the heart you are a disciple. If you listen from the head you will go on missing me, if you listen from the heart there is no way to miss me. Then you have arrived.The last question:Osho,What to do when you die? Stay together and run the risk that the movement will turn into a stale sort of religion, or dissolve and be open for the call of another living master?First, have you heard my call yet? The living master is confronting you – have you heard my call yet? And if you cannot hear my call, what hope is there that you will hear some other living master’s call?The very idea shows that you are missing me – otherwise who bothers about death? If you have heard me, there is no death. If you have heard me at all, in that very hearing death has disappeared. Why are you concerned about my death? How can I die? I am no more. Death is possible only to the ego. Yes, the body will disappear, but I cannot disappear.Ramana Maharshi was dying and a disciple started crying. Ramana opened his eyes and asked, “What is the matter? Why are you crying?”The disciple said, “Bhagwan, you are leaving us. It is unbearable.”And although in great pain – because he was suffering from throat cancer, it was very difficult even to speak – Ramana laughed and he said, “But where can I go? I will be as much here as I am right now. Where can I go? You tell me. There is nowhere to go. There is no one to go.”And I say the same to you, “How can I die?” The one who could die has already gone, and the one who cannot die is here confronting you.But it seems you are missing me. Because you are missing you think, “What will happen to me when Osho is gone?” Rather than being concerned with that, be concerned right now with what is happening to you when Osho is here. That should be the concern. When I am here and you are here then let there be a meeting, let there be a dissolution, let there be a communion. What nonsense you are asking – what to do when I die? Do something while I am here.I don’t care a bit what you will be doing when I am gone. If you cannot do anything while I am here, what can be hoped for you? If you go on missing me while I am alive, naturally you will go on missing me when I am dead. It will not make much difference to you.And it will not make much difference to others who are not missing me right now. They will never miss me. Even when I am gone I will be there in their hearts, as alive as ever. Once you are really in contact with a living master, that living master becomes your living master forever. Then there is no need.But if you are not in contact, naturally you will have to find somebody else. In fact, you are already looking. This very question shows that you are already worried and the search has started. In fact, you are asking me, “Osho, die soon so I can find another living master.” That’s what your question really means. If you want, I can do that. Just for your sake I can die so you will be free to find another master.But you are free right now. Have I to die to make you free? You are free. If you do not feel any contact with me, then who is holding you here? Don’t deceive yourself. You are absolutely free. I am nobody’s bondage. I am here to liberate you, not to create a prison for you. If you cannot make a heart-to-heart contact with me, then escape from here. This place is not for you.Your question is very clear. It says, “What to do when you die? Stay together and run the risk that the movement will turn into a stale sort of religion, or dissolve and be open for the call of another living master?” If you have heard me, there is no need to worry. If you have not heard me, then there is every need to escape from here. Then I am not for you. But think of this moment. Don’t be worried about the future – that is none of your concern.The second thing: each religion becomes a church by and by. It has to, by the very nature of things. While the master is alive it is one thing; when the master has gone it is quite another. But for those who loved the master, the master is always there. For the people who loved Ramana Maharshi, the master is there. They still have the same feeling. When they go to Arunachal, his place, his mountain, and when they sit near his samadhi, it still has the same fragrance, the same freshness, the same presence, the same radiance. And Ramana still answers and Ramana still instructs and Ramana still comes into their dreams, into their visions. For them there is no need to go anywhere; they have found their master.There are others also who go to Ramana’s place – but he is no longer present there. They think that he is dead, they know that he is dead. It is only a graveyard now, an old temple, relics. They cling to the sect. They still cherish the idea that they are followers of Ramana. They are the dead people. It is good if they find some new master – because with the old they missed. They should find a new master.So I cannot make a categorical statement about what you are to do when I am gone. For those who have contacted me I will never be gone and for those who have not contacted me, I am already gone. They should leave right now. They should not wait for my death. Yes, after death they have to leave – but I am saying they should leave right now. Don’t waste your time.It depends on you whether my religion will remain alive or not when I am gone. It depends on you. To a few it will be dead; to them it is dead now. To a few it will remain alive; to them it is alive now and it will be alive forever. So each one has to decide for himself. When I am gone if you feel that I am there to help you, I will be there to help you. If you feel I am no longer there to help you, naturally you have to choose another master.And I am saying that you have to choose right now. Why wait for that moment? I may not die so soon. People like me are unpredictable. I may die tomorrow or I may not die so soon. So don’t depend on that. Just listen to your own heart. If your heart is growing with me, blooming, new foliage is coming, new buds are opening, then I am your master. If it is not happening, then seek and search somewhere else with all my blessings.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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There was once a woman who abandoned the religion in which she had been brought up. She left the ranks of the atheists too, and joined another faith. Then she became convinced of the truth of yet another. Each time she changed her beliefs, she imagined that she had gained something, but not quite enough. Each time she entered a new fold she was welcomed, and her recruitment was regarded as a good thing, and a sign of her sanity and enlightenment.Her inward state, however, was one of confusion.At length, she heard of a certain celebrated teacher, Imam Jafar Sadik, and she went to see him.After he had listened to her protestations and ideas, he said, ‘Return to your home, I shall send you my decision in a message.’Soon afterwards the woman found a disciple of the sheik at the door. In his hand was a packet from the master. She opened it, and saw that it contained a glass bottle, half full with three layers of packed sand – black, red and white – held down by a wad of cotton. On the outside was written: ‘Remove the cotton and shake the bottle to see what you are like.’She took the wadding out and shook the sand in the bottle. The different colored grains of sand mixed together, and all that she was left with was a mass of grayish sand.Man is a paradox. And man is the only animal, the only being, that is paradoxical – that is man’s uniqueness. Man’s special being is his innermost paradox. All other animals are non-paradoxical.A tree is a tree, and a dog is a dog, but man is never in a state of isness. He is always becoming, growing. Man is always surpassing himself; that is his paradox. And it is at his very core of being. It is not accidental, it is very fundamental. Once you understand this paradox you have your first glimpse about human-ness – what man is.Man is always a project, a becoming. His being consists of becoming – this is the paradox. He is always between that which he was and that which he is going to be. He is always between his past and future – a bridge hanging between two eternities, the past and the future. He is a surpassing, a continuous surpassing. Man is never content with that which he is; he is trying to go beyond, always trying to go beyond. Whatsoever he is doing, all his effort is basically how to become something more, something higher, something better.Man is a progress, a wayfarer, a pilgrim – and his life is a pilgrimage, a non-ending pilgrimage, that goes on and on. A dog is born, a tree is born…. The tree is born with all its tree-ness and the dog is born with all its dog-ness. Man is not a given fact; man is born only with a possibility, with a potential. Man is born as a blank, as a nothingness; nothing is written.All other beings have a certain essence, a certain soul. In man it is just the reverse. His existence comes first and then he starts seeking for his essence. In other animals essence comes first, then existence. They already bring a built-in program; they never grow, they remain the same. That’s why they look so innocent, so unworried, so non-tense. Look into the eyes of a cow – how peaceful, calm, tranquil she is. There is no anxiety no anguish, no clouds. Look into the eyes of a man. They are always cloudy. They always have anguish, there is always trembling: the trembling of. “Whether I am going to make it or not?” – the trembling of, “Whether I will be able to find myself or not?” – the trembling of, “Whether I will be fulfilled or remain unfulfilled?”The animals are at ease, relaxed; man is a tension. This is his glory and this is his anguish too. This is his dignity and this is his problem too. It is his glory because he is capable of creating himself – he is a god. And it is his anguish because the possibility is always there that he may fail, he may not be able to create himself. Who knows? It is glory because of freedom – he has not been programmed. He is the only animal who remains without a program. He has not been given a map, he has not been ordered.Man is the only being who is uncommanded. with no orders. He comes into existence empty and then he starts groping for his being. Then he starts groping and creating and searching. Man is an adventure.But with the adventure is uncertainty, insecurity, failure, fear. One can always go wrong. There is more possibility of going wrong, less possibility of being right. There are a thousand and one ways – which one is the right one? You are always anxious. And whatsoever you choose you choose with uncertainty because you can never be certain whether this path will lead to your goal or will end in a cul-de-sac somewhere – whether it will reach anywhere or will just end in a desert.Man’s glory is his freedom: that he can create himself, that he can be himself, that nothing is forced on him, that he is open-ended. And man’s misery is because he cannot be certain, can never be certain that he is on the right path, that whatsoever he is doing is meaningful or not.Man is the only animal who goes mad. He has problems to face, to solve, to grow beyond. This is the first thing I would like you to understand.There was a great Sufi master – one of the greatest in all the ages – Al-Ghazzali. He says: “On the path of human growth from man to God – from man the potential to man the actual, from possibility to reality – there are seven valleys.” These seven valleys are of immense importance. Try to understand them because you will have to pass through those seven valleys. Everybody has to pass through those seven valleys.If you understand rightly what to do with a valley you will be able to go beyond it, and you will attain to a peak – because each valley is surrounded by mountains. If you can pass through the valley, if you don’t get entangled in the valley, if you don’t get lost in the valley, if you don’t become too attached to the valley, if you remain aloof, detached, a witness, and if you keep on remembering that this is not your home, that you are a stranger here, and you go on remembering that the peak has to be reached, and you don’t forget the peak – you will reach to the peak. With each valley crossed there is great celebration.But after each valley you have to enter another valley. This goes on. There are seven valleys. Once you have reached the seventh then there are no more. Then man has attained to his being, he is no longer paradoxical. There is no tension, no anguish. This is what in the past we have called buddhahood. This is what Christians call the state of being a Christ. This is what Jainas call Jinahood – becoming victorious. There are many names, but the basic idea is that unless man becomes God he remains in anxiety. And to become God these seven valleys have to be crossed.And each valley has its own allurements. It is very, very possible that you may get attached to something and you will not be able to leave the valley. You have to leave it if you want to enter the second valley. And after each valley there is a peak, a great mountain peak. After each valley there is jubilation and the jubilation goes on becoming more and more intense. And then finally, in the seventh valley, you attain to the cosmic orgasm – you disperse. Then only God is.Listen to these seven valleys and try to understand them. And don’t think Al-Ghazzali is talking about something philosophical. Sufis are not interested in philosophy at all. They are very practical people. If they say something they mean it. If they say something, it is said for the seeker. It is not said for the curious ones, not for intellectuals, but for those who are on the path, those who are really working hard to have a glimpse of the truth. It is for the seekers.The first valley…. The first valley is called the valley of knowledge.Naturally, knowledge has to be the first because man starts by knowing. No other animal has knowledge; only man knows, only man collects knowledge. Only man writes, reads, talks. Only man has language, scriptures, theories. So knowledge has to be the first valley.The negative part of the valley is that you can become knowledgeable, you can get hooked on knowledge. You can forget the real purpose of knowing and you can become attached to knowledge itself. Then you will be accumulating more and more knowledge and you can go on for lives together accumulating knowledge. You will become a great scholar, a pundit, but you will not become a knower.The way of the knower is utterly different from the way of knowledge.There are two things when knowledge happens: the content of knowledge – you know something – and the consciousness, the mirror, you who knows. If you become too attached to the content of knowledge rather than to the capacity of knowing, you will be lost in the valley. That part which can make you entangled, hooked, attached, I call negative.If you become knowledgeable then you are lost; you cannot cross the first valley. And the more knowledge you have, the more confused you will become – because there is no way to decide what is true. Everything that you hear, if rightly put before you, logically placed before you, will look right. There is no other way for you to decide; there is no criterion. That’s why it goes on happening. You go to one master and you hear him, and he looks right. Then you go to another master and you hear him, and he looks right. You read one book and it looks right; you read another book – maybe just the opposite – and that too has its logic, and it looks right. There is no way to decide what is right. And if you go on accumulating you will go on accumulating contradictions – opposite statements. And there are millions of standpoints and sooner or later you will become just a crowd of many philosophies and systems. That is not going to help. That will become the greatest hindrance.So the first thing is that in the valley of knowledge one has to remain alert that one has to be emphatically concerned with the capacity of knowing – not with the object, not with the content. One should emphasize witnessing, one should become more and more alert and aware, then one becomes a knower. Not by knowing many things but just by becoming more aware, one becomes really a knower.The path of knowledge has nothing to do with scriptures. opinions, systems, beliefs. It has something to do with the capacity to know – you can know. You have this immense energy of being conscious. So be concerned with the container, the consciousness, and don’t be concerned with the content.Don’t be concerned with the known, be concerned with the knower. Knowledge is a double-arrowed phenomenon. One arrow points to the known, another arrow points to the knower. If you go on looking to the known you will be lost in the valley. If you start looking to the knower you cannot be lost, you will be able to transcend the valley. And once you transcend the valley of knowledge there is great, great joy – because you have understood something very essential in you, something that is going to remain to the very end, something that is very fundamental: the capacity to know, the capacity to be conscious.So if you look at the knower, if you become more alert about the knower, you have used the positive.The second valley is called the valley of repentance.When you start looking at who you are, naturally great repentance arises. Because of all that you have done wrong, all that you have done and should not have done. you start feeling repentance. So a great peak comes with consciousness – but suddenly, with consciousness, conscience arises. Remember, the conscience that you have is not the true conscience. It is a pseudo-coin; it is given by the society.People have told you what is right and what is wrong; what is moral, what is immoral. You don’t know exactly what is moral or what is immoral. But after crossing the first valley you will be able to know exactly what is right and what is wrong. And then suddenly you will see what wrong you have done – how many people you have been hurting, how sadistic you have been with others, how masochistic you have been with yourself, how destructive, violent, aggressive, angry, jealous, you have been up to now. All that will come to your vision. That is a natural by-product of becoming conscious – conscience arises.This conscience has nothing to do with the ordinary conscience that you have – that is borrowed. So you can have it and still it does not hurt; it does not give pain so real that you can be transformed through it. You only know so-so what is right, and you go on doing the wrong, you go on doing whatsoever you want to do. Your knowledge of the right does not create any difference in you. You know that anger is bad but you remain angry. On the one hand you know that anger is bad, on the other hand there is no problem, you continue to be angry. On the one hand you know that possessiveness is not good, and on the other hand you go on hoarding, you go on possessing – not only things but you even start possessing persons. You possess your wife, your husband, your children – as if they are things, as if they can be possessed. You destroy through your possessiveness, and you know it is wrong.This borrowed conscience does not help, it simply burdens you. With the first valley crossed, your own conscience arises. Now you know exactly what is wrong and it becomes impossible to do otherwise. This is the point where the Socratic dictum becomes meaningful – that “Knowledge is virtue.”Now the negative part of the valley of repentance…. The negative part is that you may become too worried about the guilt concerning the past – that you have done this wrong and that wrong, and you have been doing millions of wrongs. You have been unconscious here for so long that if you start counting all of that, it will create a kind of morbidness. You will become so guilty that, rather than growing. you will fall into great darkness.So if guilt arises and you become morbid and you become too troubled by the past, you will remain in the second valley. You will not be able to surpass it. If the past becomes too important, then naturally you will be continuously crying and weeping and beating your chest and saying, “What wrong I have been doing!”The positive part is that you should become concerned with the future, not with the past. Yes, you have noted that you have been wrong, but that was natural because you were unconscious. So there is no need to feel guilty. How could one be right when one was unconscious? You have taken note of it – that your whole past has been wrong – but it does not create a burden on your chest. You take note of it. That taking note helps you because you will not be able to do it again – you are finished with it. You feel sad that you have been hurting so many people in so many ways, but you feel joyous also, simultaneously, because now it will not happen any more. You are freed from past and guilt! You don’t become concerned about it, you become concerned about the future, the new opening.Now you have your own conscience; now the future is going to be totally different, qualitatively different, radically different. You will be thrilled with the adventure. Now you have your own conscience, and your conscience will never allow you to do wrong again. It is not that you will have to control – when the real conscience has arisen there is no need to control, no need to discipline. The right becomes the natural thing. Then the easy is the right and the right is the easy.In fact, once the conscience has arisen in you, if you want to do wrong you will have to make great effort to do it. And even then there is not much possibility of succeeding.Without your own conscience you have to make much effort to be right, and even then you don’t succeed. So one is thrilled. One feels sad for the past but one is no longer burdened, because the past is no more. That is the positive part – that one should feel that the transformation has happened, that the blessing has arrived, that God has given you the greatest gift of conscience. Now your life will move in a totally new dimension, on a new track.This is where real morality is born, virtue, sheela.The third valley…. The third valley is called the valley of stumbling blocks.Once the conscience has arisen you will now be able to see how many blocks exist. You have eyes to see how many hindrances there are. There are walls upon walls. There are doors too but they are few and far between. You will be able to see all the stumbling blocks.Al-Ghazzali says there are four: one, the tempting world – the world of things. They are very fascinating. Lust is created. Why have all the world religions been saying that one has to go beyond the temptation of the world? – because if you are tempted too much by the world, and you hanker too much for the worldly things, you will not have enough energy to desire God. Your desire will be wasted on things.A man who wants to have a big house, a big balance in the bank, great power in the world, and prestige, puts all his desiring, invests all his desiring in the world. Nothing is left to seek God.Things are not bad in themselves. Sufis are not against things, remember. Sufis say that things are good in themselves. but one who has started seeking for God and the ultimate truth cannot afford them. You have a certain quality and certain quantity of energy. The whole energy has to be put into one desire. All the desires have to become one desire, only then can God be attained, only then can you surpass this third valley.Ordinarily we have many desires. the religious person is one who has only one desire, whose all other desires have fallen into one big desire – just as small rivers, small streams, small tributaries fall and become the big Ganges – like that. A religious person is one whose all other desires have become one desire: he desires only God, he desires only transcendence.So the first is the tempting world; the second is people – attachments to people.Sufis are again, remember, not against people, but they say that one should not become attached to people. Otherwise that very attachment will become a hindrance, a stumbling block to God. Be with your woman and be with your man, be with your children, be with your friends, but remember that we are all strangers here and our togetherness is just accidental. We are travelers, we have met on the road. For a few days maybe we will be together – feel thankful for that – but sooner or later, ways part. Your wife dies, she goes on her own way, and you will never know where. Or, your wife falls in love with somebody else, and your ways part. Or you fall in love with somebody else. Or your son becomes grown-up and he takes his life into his own hands and moves away from you – every son has to move away from the parents.We are together on this road for only a few days and our being together is just accidental. It is not going to be forever. So be with people, be lovingly with people, be compassionately with people, but don’t become attached – otherwise your attachment will not allow you freedom enough to go beyond.So the second is people, attachments. The third Al-Ghazzali calls Satan, and the fourth, the ego.By Satan the mind is meant – the mind that you have accumulated in the past. Although conscience has arisen, although you have become more conscious than ever, the mechanism of the mind is still there lurking by the side. It will lurk a little longer still. It has been with you for so long that it cannot leave you suddenly. It takes time. And it waits and watches – if some opportunity is there it will immediately jump and take possession of you. It has been your master, you have functioned as a slave. The mind cannot accept that you have become a master so suddenly. It takes time.The mind is a mechanism, it is always there. For the seeker, the mind is the devil. All the stories about the devil are nothing but about the mind. The devil – or Satan, as Sufis call the devil – is just a mythological name for the mind.When the devil tempts Jesus, do you think some devil is standing there outside? Don’t be foolish! There is no devil standing outside. The temptation is coming from Jesus’ own mind. The mind says, “Now that you have become so miraculously powerful, why bother about other things? Why not have the kingdom of the whole world? You can have it! It is just within your reach. You can possess the whole world, you have so much power. You are so spiritually high. Your siddhis are released. You can have all the money and all the prestige that you want. Why bother about God and religion? Use this possibility!” Mind is tempting.And when Jesus says, “Don’t come in my way. Go away!” he is not talking to some devil outside. He is simply saying to the mind, “Please don’t come in my way. I am no longer concerned with the desires that you have, I am no longer concerned with the projects that you have, I am on a totally different journey. You know nothing about it, you keep quiet.”And the fourth is ego – one of the greatest stumbling blocks on the path of seeking. When you start becoming a little conscious, when your conscience arises, and you start seeing the stumbling blocks, a great ego – from nowhere – suddenly takes possession of you: “I have become a saint, a sage. I am no longer ordinary, I am extraordinary!” And the problem is that you are extraordinary! It is true! So the ego can prove it. That is the greatest problem, because the ego is not just talking nonsense. It is sensible. It is exactly so!Still one has to be alert that if you get entangled with the ego, with the idea that “I am extraordinary’ then you will always remain in the third valley. You will never be able to reach the fourth, and the fourth will bring more flowers and higher peaks and greater joys – and you will miss.This is the place where siddhis – spiritual powers – become the most hindering thing.The negative part is to start fighting with these stumbling blocks. If you start fighting, you will be lost in the valley. There is no need to fight. Don t create enmity. Just understanding is enough.Fighting means repression. You can repress the ego, you can repress your attachment to people, you can repress your lust for things, and you can repress your Satan, your mind, but the repressed will remain, and you will not be able to enter into the fourth valley.Only those who have no repressions enter the fourth valley. So don’t start repressing.The positive part is: take the challenge – that the ego is challenging you. Don’t take it as an enmity, take it rather as a challenge to go beyond. Don’t fight with it; understand it. Look deep into it. Look into the mechanism of it: how it functions, .how this new ego is arising in you, how this mind goes on playing games with you, how you become attached to people, how you become attached to things. Look into the how of it with cool observation, with no antagonism. If you become antagonistic in any way, then you are caught. If you become indulgent, you are caught. If you become antagonistic, you are caught. And these two are the easiest things. People know only two things: either they know how to become friends or they know how to become the enemy. That is the only ordinary understanding possible.The third thing will help. Be watchful, witnessing; neither inimical nor friendly. Be indifferent. Just see that they are there, because if you take any feeling attitude – for or against – the feelings will become bondages. Feeling means that you become attached. Remember, you are as attached to your enemies as you are attached to your friends. If your enemy dies, you will miss him as much as you will miss your friend – sometimes even more, because he was giving some meaning to your life. Fighting with him, you were enjoying a trip. Now he is no more. The ego that was being fulfilled by fighting with him will never be fulfilled again. You will have to find a new enemy.So don’t make enemies and don’t make friends. Just see. Be very, very scientifically observant. That is the positive thing to do. Explore what ego is, and explore joyously. Explore what lust is, and explore joyously.Then comes the fourth valley: the valley of tribulations.Entry into the unconscious happens in the fourth valley. Up to now you were confined to the world of the conscious. Now, for the first time, you will enter into the deeper realms of your being, the unconscious, the darker part, the night part. Up to now you were in the day part. It was easier. Now things will become more difficult. The higher you go, the more you have to pay. With each higher step the journey becomes more arduous and the fall becomes more dangerous. And one has to be more alert. On each step more awareness will be needed, because you will be moving on higher planes.The valley of tribulations is the entry into the unconscious. It is the entry into what Christian mystics have called “the dark night of the soul.” It is the entry into the mad world that you are hiding behind yourself. It is very weird, it is very bizarre. Up to the third a man can proceed without a master, but not beyond the third. Up to the third one can go on one’s own. With the fourth a master is a must.And when I am saying that one can go up to the third on one’s own, I don’t mean that one has to go and I don’t mean that everybody will be able to go. I am simply talking of a theoretical possibility. Up to the third it is theoretically possible that a man can go without a master. But with the fourth, the master becomes an absolute necessity – because now you will be sinking into darkness. You don’t yet have any light of your own that you can use in that darkness. Somebody else’s light will be needed – somebody who has gone into that dark night and for whom it has become possible to see in that darkness.The negative part of the valley of tribulations is doubt – great doubt will arise! You don’t know what doubt is you don’t know yet! All that you think is doubt is nothing but skepticism, it is not doubt. Doubt is an altogether different phenomenon.Somebody says, “God is”; you say, “I doubt.” You don’t doubt. How can you doubt? You are only being skeptical. You are only saying, “I don’t know.” Rather than saying “I don’t know’ you are using a very strong word doubt. How can you doubt? Doubt is possible when you are facing a reality.For example, you have never seen a ghost. And you say, “I doubt the existence of ghosts.” That is not doubt, that is just being skeptical. You are simply saying, “I have never come across one so how can I believe. I doubt.” That is not doubt. Doubt will be when one day, passing through the cemetery, you suddenly come across a ghost! Then your whole being will be shaken. Then you will be for the first time in a state where doubt arises: whether that which you are facing is true or an hallucination.Doubt is very existential; skepticism is intellectual. Skepticism is only in the mind; doubt enters into your very being, your whole body-mind-soul. Your totality is shaken.In this dark night of the soul, doubt arises. Doubt about God – because you were seeking for more light and this is happening, just the opposite. You were seeking for more bliss and you have fallen into the dark night. A great doubt arises about whether you are going right, about whether this seeking is worth it – because you were seeking for gold, you were seeking for great light and great enlightenment and nirvana and samadhi and satori, and instead of satori and samadhi, this dark night has overwhelmed you. Even those lights that used to be there are there no more. Even those certainties that used to be there are there no more.You used to know certain things; now you know nothing. You had some security. Even that is gone. The very earth underneath your feet has slipped away; you are drowning. Then doubt arises. Then you start feeling that maybe this whole religious trip is nonsense, maybe there is no God, maybe you were fooling yourself, maybe you have chosen something absurd. It was better to live in the world, to be of the world. It was better to have many more things: to enjoy power, to enjoy sex, to enjoy money. What have I done? I have lost all and this is the result!To every seeker this moment comes. And if this doubt arises, then naturally one starts defending oneself against the darkness. One creates an armor around oneself against the darkness, the invading darkness. One has to protect oneself. If you do that you will be thrown back again to the conscious part of your mind. You will miss the mystery of darkness. Light is beautiful, but nothing compared with darkness. Darkness is more beautiful, more cooling, more deep. Darkness has depth; light is shallow. And unless you are able to welcome darkness you will not be able to welcome death.So the first teaching is that you have to accept, welcome, relax. This darkness is the first glimpse of God. It is dark, but later on you will understand that it was not dark. It was really that for the first time you had opened your eyes towards God and it was too dazzling, that’s why it looked dark. It was not dark; darkness was your interpretation.Look at the sun for a few seconds and soon you will be surrounded by darkness. It is too much; you cannot bear it. A man can go blind by looking at the sun too long. Look at the sun for a few seconds and then go into your house and you will find the whole house full of darkness. Just a moment before you were there and you could see everything. Now you cannot see anything; you will stumble over things.That it is dark is interpretation. But it is natural. Later on when you have transcended the valley then you will be able to look back and see the reality. Only a master can hold your hand in this dark night of the soul and make you confident, can say to you and convince you – “Don’t be worried. It only looks dark, it is not dark. It is the first meeting with God. You are coming closer.”There are three things to be understood: sleep, death and samadhi.Sleep is like death. In the East we say it is the small death, the tiny death. We die every night and disappear into the dark night. Then comes death – a bigger death than sleep. The body disappears but the mind remains and is born again. Then comes the ultimate death – samadhi – where body disappears and mind disappears and only the innermost core, consciousness, remains. That is the ultimate death.In the fourth valley you encounter the first glimpse of how the ultimate death is going to happen to you. If you reject it, if you defend yourself against it, if you create an armor, you will be thrown back to the third valley, and you will miss. And once you have missed the fourth you will always remain afraid to go again into it.My observation about people is that people who have entered into the fourth valley some time in their past lives, and have become too frightened and escaped from it, are the people who are always afraid of anything deeper. Love – and they will be afraid. Orgasm – and they will be afraid. Friendship – and only so far; beyond that they will be afraid. Discipleship – and they will be afraid. Surrender – and they will be afraid. Prayer – they will be afraid. They will be afraid of all those things that can again bring them to that fourth valley. They may not be consciously aware of why they are afraid.The fourth valley is very important because it is just in the middle. There are seven valleys, the fourth is just in the middle. Three are on this side and three are on that side. The fourth is immensely significant; it is the bridge. The master is needed on this bridge because you pass from the known to the unknown, from the finite to the infinite, from the trivial to the profound.The positive part is trust, surrender; the negative part is doubt, defense. The master starts teaching you about trust and surrender from the very beginning so that by and by it becomes your climate – because it will be needed when you enter into the fourth valley.Sometimes people come to me and they say, “Why can’t we be here without surrendering? Why can’t we meditate and listen to you and be benefited as much as we want? What is the point of surrendering?”They don’t understand. In the beginning it may not look very relevant. Why? For what? You can listen to me without surrendering and you can meditate here without surrendering. You can pass through growth groups without surrendering. It seems perfectly okay. Surrendering does not seem to be needed at all. But you don’t know what is going to happen in the future. For that, preparation has to be made right now. You cannot wait for that moment. If preparation has not been made before, then you will miss. Then when the right time comes, when your house is on fire and you have not dug the well yet, and you start digging it, by the time it is ready, the house will be gone.One has to dig the well before the house catches fire! So right now it may not seem relevant. I can understand. Logically it is not relevant right now. Listening to me, what surrender is needed? Meditating, what surrender is needed? But when you enter the fourth valley, surrender will be needed. And you cannot suddenly learn the ways of surrender. You have to go on learning them before the need arises. Surrender has to become your climate.The fifth valley…the thundering valley.In the fifth valley you enter death. In the fourth you entered sleep, darkness; in the fifth you enter death. Or, if you like to use modern terminology for it: in the fourth you enter the personal unconscious; in the fifth you enter the collective unconscious. Great fear arises because you are losing your individuality.In the fourth you were losing light, day, but you were there. In the fifth you are losing yourself – you don’t feel as if you are, you are dispersing, you are melting. Your feeling that “I am a center” starts becoming vague, cloudy.With entry into death, entry into the collective unconscious, great fear arises, great anguish is felt – the greatest anguish that you will ever feel – because there comes the question: to be or not to be? You are disappearing; your whole being will hanker to be. You would like to go back to the fourth. It was dark, but at least it was good – you were there. Now, the darkness has become more dense. Not only that, you are disappearing into it. Soon not even a trace will be left of you.The negative part is clinging to the self. That’s why great teachers – Buddha or Jalaluddin Rumi – insist – “Remember, no-self, anatta.” Sufis call it fana – one disappears. And one should prepare for this disappearance, one should be ready – not only ready but in a deep welcome. It is going to bring great joy, because all your misery is contained in your ego. The very idea that “I am” is your ignorance. The very idea that “I am” creates all kinds of anxieties and problems for you. The ego is the hell.Jean-Paul Sartre has said: “Hell is other people.” That is not right. The hell is you, the hell is the ego! If other people feel like the hell, they feel like the hell also because of the ego – because they hurt it continuously. They go on pushing your buttons. Because you have this wound of the ego everybody seems to hurt you. It is just your idea that “I am special” and when somebody does not recognize it, it gives pain. When you don’t have any idea of being special – what Zen people call “to become ordinary” – if you become ordinary, then this valley can be crossed. If you become nobody, then this valley can easily be crossed.So the negative part is clinging to the self and the positive part is relaxing into no-self, into nothingness – being ready to die, willingly, joyously, voluntarily.Then comes the sixth valley – the abysmal valley.One disappears. In the fifth, one was disappearing; in the sixth, one is no more. One is a memory of the past, one disappears. In the fifth, one was entering into death; in the sixth, death has happened, one has died, one is no more. That’s why it is called the “abysmal valley.” It is the most painful, because it is the sixth – the last but one. One passes into the greatest pain of not being, of nothingness. One cannot believe it – because in a certain sense one is, and in a certain sense one is no more. The paradox has come to the ultimate peak. One is and one is not. One can see one’s own corpse – one is dead – and still one knows that one is seeing, so one must be in some way, in some sense. All the past ideas of the self have become irrelevant. A new idea of self arises.Death happens, one disappears. This is what Christians call crucifixion. Nothingness has arrived; one is just an empty sky. Hindus call it samadhi, Zen people call it satori.And the negative part complains. It will be good to remind you. At the crucifixion Jesus shows both attitudes. First he complains. He looks at the sky and says, “Why? Why have you forsaken me? Why have you abandoned me?” This is the negative part. He is complaining. He is dying and no help is arriving. He is on the cross – and deep down somewhere there must have been a lurking desire that God’s hand will arrive and everything will be okay and the cross will become a crown and he will descend with new glory. Somewhere there must have been a lurking desire in the very unconscious core of his mind – he may not have been aware of it. He had waited long enough, the last point had come. He had carried his cross on the hill, he had suffered all kinds of humiliation, but he had waited, patiently waited – waited for this moment. Now his hands have been nailed. Now it is a question of seconds and he will be gone. Now there is no time left to wait any more and the help has not come and God is not visible. Hence the cry, “Why have you forsaken me? Why have you abandoned me?” This is the negative part, natural even to a man like Jesus.If you think of your past and then complain – “I have been doing all that was asked of me to do, all that you have ordered me to do. I have followed you blindly, and this is the result? This is the fulfillment…?”The positive part is deep gratitude. With the second, the positive part, one forgets the past, one looks into the future and one trusts. The last test has come, the ultimate test, and one feels grateful that “If this is your will, let it be done.” That’s what Jesus did. He showed both the attitudes. First he showed the negative – which is very human. I love Jesus because he showed that. He was very human. That’s why he used to say again and again, “I am the Son of Man.” As many times as he says “I am the Son of God” he says “I am the Son of Man.”He was eternity come into time; he was the beyond come into the world. He belonged to both the world and the beyond. That’s how each master belongs – to both. One foot is in this world, the other foot is in the other. And on the crucifixion day, in that moment when all is disappearing, Jesus shows both attitudes. First, he shows the attitude of being “Son of Man.” He says, “Why? Why have you abandoned me? I have hoped, I have prayed, I have lived a life of virtue – and this is the fulfillment? This is the reward?”But then he immediately understands that he is missing the point. If this is the will of God then this has to be so. He surrenders. The positive is gratitude, surrender.With “Why have you abandoned me?” he recognizes his complaint, his humanity. He must have laughed in that moment, he must have seen his limitation as a human being, and he dropped it. Immediately he says, his immediate statement is, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.” Gratitude has arisen, surrender is total. Now there is nothing more.Jesus dies as Son of God. And the gap is very, very tiny. In just a split second he changed from being man into God. The moment complaint changes into trust, you change from human into God. He becomes prayer. “Thy will be done.” Now he is no more. Now he has no will of his own.And then comes the seventh valley, which is the last, the ultimate – the valley of hymns, the valley of celebration.Rebirth, resurrection, happens in the seventh valley. That is the meaning of the Christian idea of resurrection – that Christ is reborn, reborn in the body of glory, reborn in the body of light, reborn in the body divine. Now there is no positive, no negative. Now there is no duality. One is one. Unity has arisen – what Hindus call advait. The dual has disappeared. One has come home.The valley of the hymns…. Al-Ghazzali has given it a beautiful name. Now there is nothing left – just a song, a song of celebration, praise of God, utter joy. This is what I call the ultimate orgasm.If I were going to name this valley I would call it the valley of total orgasm. Only celebration is left. One has flowered, bloomed. The fragrance is released. Now there is nowhere to go. Man has become that for which he was seeking, searching, struggling.Man is a paradox. He is not what he is. He is that which he is not yet. But the day you realize the ultimate, you will have a laugh arising in your very heart, because then you will know that you were always this. It was just unknown to you. The future was contained in you, just hidden. You had to discover it. These seven valleys are the valleys of discovery.This is a beautiful map; this is the Sufi map.Now this story.There was once a woman who abandoned the religion in which she had been brought up. She left the ranks of the atheists too, and joined another faith. Then she became convinced of the truth of yet another. Each time she changed her beliefs. She imagined that she had gained something, but not quite enough. Each time she entered a new fold she was welcomed, and her recruitment was regarded as a good thing, and a sign of her sanity and enlightenment.Her inward state, however, was one of confusion.This woman was lost in the first valley – the valley of knowledge – and she got hooked to the negative. She became knowledgeable. She went to this school and to that; she went to this teacher and that; she studied this doctrine and that; and each time she started something new she would be thrilled. It would be a kind of honeymoon. And sooner or later she would be fed up with it and she would start moving and searching again.The total result was that she gathered much knowledge of diverse nature, much knowledge of contradictory systems. All those systems work, remember – never forget it! Each system works, but it works in its purity only. If you mix it with many systems it will never work. It will be like you take a few parts from a Mercedes-Benz and a few parts from a Rolls Royce and a few parts from a Chevrolet and a few parts from a Ford and a few parts from a truck and a few parts from somewhere else, and you put them together. They are all useful, but this mechanism that you have created out of them is not going to work. A part that was functioning in a certain mechanism will not be able to function with other kinds of parts. Each system is an organic whole. It is complete in itself. If you listen to Mahavira and find a few beautiful thoughts, and then you go to Buddha and listen and find a few beautiful thoughts. and you make a concoction – a kedgeree – you will become confused. Those fragments that you have taken from Mahavira were beautiful, but they belonged to a certain system; they were organic parts of a certain whole. They can function only in that whole, they cannot function with anything Buddhist. And the Buddhist fragments are beautiful, but only in a Buddhist system.Now this woman became more and more confused. And this woman is very representative of many people – many people here also – who have been going to this teacher and that, to this system and that, and go on gathering. And they think that just by gathering a few wise statements they are going to become wise. They are utter fools! They will simply go mad.Each system is perfect and works. But don’t mix it with anything else; let it function on its own.This woman …abandoned the religion in which she had been brought up. Then she became an atheist – she abandoned religion itself. Then she …joined another faith – she abandoned atheism too. And Then she became convinced of the truth of yet another. Each time she changed her beliefs, she imagined that she had gained something, but not quite enough.She was just collecting fragments, wise sayings. These wise sayings may look wise, may be useful to the system from which they have been taken, but they become useless the moment you take them out.It is said of a Hindu mystic that he went begging. And a woman looked at his eyes…. He had beautiful eyes. Saints have beautiful eyes, nobody can have eyes like a saint – the depth, the joy, the feeling that one has arrived, the relaxation, the rest, the compassion. The woman became immensely attracted to the eyes. She started following the mystic.One day the mystic asked, “What is the matter? Why do you go on following me? I don’t see any religious search in you.”The woman confessed. She said, “In fact, I don’t have anything to do with religion. I have simply become attracted to your eyes; you have beautiful eyes.”The mystic said, “You go home. Tomorrow I will come to your home.”She was very happy. She thought that the mystic was also interested in her. She took a bath, perfumed her body, decorated everything with flowers, cleaned the whole house. With great expectation and hope she was waiting. And then came the mystic. She could not believe it! He had taken his eyes out and he had brought them on a plate.And he said, “You keep them, otherwise you have to follow me unnecessarily. You keep these eyes. You can have them. I don’t have much use for them because whatsoever I needed to see I have seen. And it doesn’t look good that you go on following me just because of these eyes. You keep them.”But are these eyes, eyes any more? They are not. They were eyes only when they were in the organic unity of the body. Now they are nothing. Now you can look into them and you will not find any depth. You can look into them and you will not find any compassion or any love. There is nothing!. They are just ordinary pebbles, meaningless. The meaning is always in the totality.So never think that you can become wise by collecting wise sayings. That is not possible. In this age many people have tried that. In India, Mahatma Gandhi was trying it – take a few things from the Koran and a few things from the Bible and a few things from the. Gita and a few things from the Dhammapada, and collect them and make a concoction. That concoction he used to call the synthesis of all religions. This is just meaningless. You cannot create a synthesis of all religions. It will be like you cut off one of my hands and a leg of Krishnamurti and the head of Meher Baba, and put them all together and call it synthesis of all religions. It will not be of any use. It will stink! It will be ugly. That’s what Mahatma Gandhi has done.No synthesis is possible, and no synthesis is needed! No synthesis is needed between a rose-bush and the lotus – they are perfectly beautiful as they are. Lotus is lotus, rose is rose, Islam is Islam, Hinduism is Hinduism, Zen is Zen, Sufism is Sufism. And Judaism is Judaism, and Jainism is Jainism. They are perfectly beautiful as they are. They are not lacking anything.Each system is complete.Now this woman gathered something from everywhere. And each time she went to a new school…. Of course, whenever a new recruit comes, the people feel very good. It proves that they are right. This woman has been to that master and that master and that master – and she has left, abandoned all. And now she has come to their master! So their master must be the highest master, the greatest master. So they all welcomed her and they recruited her and regarded it …as a good thing and a sign of sanity and enlightenment.It was not sanity; she was going insane. And it was not enlightenment; she was getting farther away every day. But to know that, she had to come to a real master.Her inward state, however, was one of confusion.At length, she heard of a certain celebrated teacher, Imam Jafar Sadik….Only a real master can be shocking. All others who are just pseudo are never shocking. How can they shock? You are their customers, they have to persuade you – they cannot shock you. They have to adjust themselves to you. In fact, they always say what you want to hear, they never say that which will be shocking – otherwise you may leave them.I know. I have been in contact with millions of people in this country. And because I went on shocking them, by and by they left. They were not here to listen to the truth, they were here to listen to their truth – and they had nothing. they had no truth at all. If they had had truth, there would have been no need to come to listen to me in the first place. But they thought that they had the truth. If they go to a pseudo-master he will say the thing that they want to hear. He will accommodate himself to them. And whenever a master accommodates himself to you, beware – he is no master! Because if he is accommodating himself to you, how can he transform you? He is your follower. He is trying to console you. He cannot be a transforming medium.Transformation is painful. A master has to work with a hammer in his hand.This woman came to Imam Jafar Sadik. When she came to him….After he listened to her protestations and ideas, he said: “Return to your home, I shall send you my decision in a message.”That’s the way of the Sufis. They are very, very experimental people, and very practical and down to earth. Rather than saying anything, he says, “I will send a message. You go home.” He must have seen the reality of the woman – that she was already too confused. Saying anything to her would be confusing her more. Right now nothing could be taught to her. Right now she did not need to learn any more, she had already learned enough. She needed unlearning. So he didn’t say anything.Soon afterwards the woman found a disciple of the sheik at the door. In his hand was a packet from his master. She opened it, and saw that it contained a glass bottle, half full with three layers of packed sand – black, red and white – held down by a wad of cotton. On the outside was written: “Remove the cotton and shake the bottle to see what you are like.”She took the wadding out and shook the sand in the bottle. The different colored grains of sand mixed together, and all that she was left with was a mass of grayish sand.Sadik is trying to show her – “You have become just a confusion. You have become mixed with all kinds of colors, and the result is that you are just gray. You don’t have any color.”And these three layers of sands are very significant.Sufis say there are three ways to God: knowledge, love, action – just as Hindus say: dhyan marga, bhakti marga, karma marga. This is because man has three faculties: the faculty of cognition, the faculty of feeling, and the faculty of action. The body is the source of action; the heart is the source of feeling, love, devotion; and the intellect is the source of cognition, knowledge, knowing.Because of these three faculties in man, there are three doors. Through these three doors man can enter into the divine. Action is black because it is the lowest. Feeling, love, is white because it is the highest. And between the two is the intellect – red. The intellect is painted red because it is very aggressive, bloody; it has the color of blood. The heart is painted white by Sufis because it is innocent, pure. White is the symbol of renunciation.You can ask the physicists. The physicists say that the color white means that all the rays of the sun have been turned back. The color black means that all the rays of the sun have been absorbed. The red means that only the red is turned back; the green means that only the green is turned back. Each ray of light has seven colors. If a certain thing absorbs all the colors, it becomes black. If a certain thing renounces all the colors, it becomes white. So black is indulgence, white is renunciation.Love is sacrifice, love is renunciation. When you love you are ready to give all. By giving, you become white. Intellect is very aggressive, always in a fighting mood – argumentative; hence the color red. Action is the lowest – body-rooted. But all these three doors are there.There were three layers of sand in the bottle; the bottle was half full. And the master said, “Remove the wad, shake the bottle and see what happens. That is your situation. There is something from the people who talk about love and live in love; and something from the people who talk about knowledge and live through intelligence; and something about the people who talk about action and live through action – and they have all become mixed in you. and now you don’t have any color any more. You are just grayish – a confusion.”This must have been a great shock to the woman – because everywhere else she had gone before she had been welcomed, and everywhere they had told her that now she had become enlightened because she had chosen the right master. Now she had come to the right door. Now she had become sane. Up to now, wandering here and there, she had been mad. She was recruited with great welcome. But Sadik hammered her. He did not even feel it right to say anything to her. He sent a message – a very practical device to show her, her state of consciousness. She was lost in the first valley. She could not go beyond the first valley.The story is of great significance. Many of you are lost in the first valley. It you want to go to the second, you will have to drop all the rubbish that you have gathered in your mind. All kinds of thoughts you will have to drop. You will have to unlearn.Unlearning is the positive path. Through unlearning you will have a new attitude arising in you – you will be less concerned with the known, you will be more concerned with the knower. And once you have dropped all your knowledge it will be very clear to you whether it is action that is going to be your door, or it is love, or it is knowledge. Right now you are a grayish mass.Meditate over this story, and meditate over the seven valleys. Let me repeat it again: man is a paradox. Man is the only being who tries to surpass himself. Man is the only being who has a great longing to transcend. This is man’s glory, because this is God’s gift to man; and this is man’s anguish too.Now it depends on you whether you will make it into a blessing or into a curse.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I have often thought that if children were raised in a free and loving environment rather than the insane society that we grew up in, they would all mature into free, loving, enlightened beings. But if this were so, many of the primitive societies would be overflowing with enlightened beings. Why is this not so?The first thing: before you can get to yourself, you will have to lose yourself. The child is born in innocence, and if the child never loses his innocence he will never become enlightened. Enlightenment means that you have lost it and regained it – paradise lost and regained. It is part of enlightenment that first you must lose it.It is like a fish who has always lived in the ocean – it is impossible for the fish to know the ocean. It is very obvious to those who are standing outside but it is not so obvious to the fish. It has been born into it, it is part of it, it is like a wave. To know the ocean, a little separation is needed, a little distance is needed. The fish will remain unaware of the ocean and will die. But take the fish out, let the fish out, throw the fish on the bank, on the hot sand, and there will be pain and there will be suffering – but in that suffering the fish will know for the first time that she has been living in the ocean. And for the first time a great thirst, a great desire will come to go back to the ocean. And she will make efforts to go back.And if she succeeds and reaches back into the ocean there will be great joy. She had been in the ocean forever but there had been no joy. But now there will be joy, now she will be thrilled, blessed! Now each moment will be a kind of ecstasy. And it is the old, the same ocean she was born in. What difference has happened? A new consciousness has arisen. The fish is no longer innocent, the fish is enlightened.In primitive societies you will not find buddhas, you will not find christs. Primitive societies live in the ocean. Innocence you will find, a childlike innocence you will find, an animal-like innocence you will find – but you will not find a buddha. A buddha is one who has recognized his innocence. This recognition makes the difference. But to recognize, you first have to lose.I can understand. Your question is very relevant. If this insane society drives you into neurotic paths, then the logical mind will say then why are the primitives not all enlightened? This society drives you into madness but through that very driving you start moving away from your innermost core. Suffering arises, and a great desire to come back home arises. That desire is what religion is all about – to come back home.What the society has done you will have to undo. Religion is against the society, the antidote to society. That’s why when religion becomes part of society it is no longer religion. It becomes Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism. Then it is no longer religion. Religion is basically against society. It has to be – because society takes you away from yourself and religion brings you back to your own being. It destroys, demolishes, all that the society has done. But before it can demolish, the society has to do something.So buddhas exist only in a very cultured society. Enlightened people exist only in a very insane society. It will look paradoxical, but this is how it is.If you look from this standpoint then you will be rebellious but you will not be against the society. There is a difference. You will be very compassionate, even towards all this insanity that is created by the society. It is part of the game. It makes enlightenment possible.Take another example. A man has lived always in health. He does not know what a fever is; he does not know what a headache is. He does not know any kind of illness. Can you imagine him feeling his health? It is not possible. In the very nature of things he will never know what health is. And he is healthy. So to know that one is healthy and the well-being of health, health alone is not enough. One can be healthy, perfectly healthy, and one may not be aware of it – because the awareness comes from the opposite. The awareness comes from a dialectical process. The thesis must be opposed by the antithesis. Health must fall into illness, then you become aware of what you have lost. And if you can regain it there is great joy.There is a Sufi story….A very rich man was searching for bliss, for truth – or whatsoever name you want to give to his search. He had much money and he was ready to offer any amount of this money to anybody who could give him a key. He went from one teacher to another, but nobody could supply him with happiness. He was ready to pay any price; that was not a problem at all.He was carrying a big load of diamonds in a bag and he would put the bag before a master and he would say, “Now take this, but tell me the secret of bliss.”Then he came to a Sufi teacher. The Sufi was sitting under a tree. The rich man came on his horse with his famous bag – it had become famous all over the country – and he put the bag before the master and said, “I am in search of happiness and I am ready to pay anything. Here are many diamonds – crores of rupees worth. You can take them, but give me happiness.”And the Sufi master did something. Sufis are people who do. Rather than answering, they create a situation. The master simply jumped upon the bag and ran away!For a second, the rich man could not believe what was happening. Such a famous master! And then he suddenly realized what had happened. The master had gone with his diamonds! So he started shouting and running after the master. But in that village the master knew every street every nook and corner. And the rich man was running after him and shouting, “I have been robbed! My whole life’s treasure has been robbed! This is a thief. Catch hold of him. This is no longer a master. This is a fraud. This man is a cheat.” And he was shouting and running. But he could not get hold of the master because the master knew the streets of the town.The whole town gathered. The whole town started collecting around the rich man and they said, “Don’t be worried.” But he said, “Why should I not be worried? I have been completely destroyed. All that I had was in the bag and that man has escaped with it.” And he was crying and he was as miserable as one can be.Then the whole crowd and the rich man went in search and found the master sitting back under his tree with the bag in the place where the rich man had put it. And his horse was standing there. The rich man came and jumped on his bag. Holding the bag close to his heart he gave a great sigh of relief and he said, “Thank God!”And the Sufi master said, “Are you happy or not? This is the key to happiness. Are you happy or not? Tell me.” And the man said, “Really, I have never been so happy!”In a primitive society people are innocent. They are like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They have not yet tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. A civilized person is Adam expelled. He has tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He is no longer innocent, he is corrupted.But Adam cannot become Christ. That is not possible. You first have to fall to rise, you have to lose to get. Adam prepares the way for Christ. By being expelled from innocence, a new possibility arises – he can re-enter again, he can re-enter the innocence. This second innocence – what Hindus call “second birth,” dwij – this second birth, this second innocence, is qualitatively different from the first. The first was ignorant innocence. It was not aware of itself. It was not luminous, it was dark. The second kind of innocence is luminous. A light burns in it. It is aware of itself. It is not only innocence, it is innocence plus awareness.So in a way even this insane society does something beautiful to you – it takes away your bag of diamonds. It creates the possibility of being happy. If you are stuck in it then something has gone wrong, otherwise there is nothing wrong. Going away is part of coming back. Go as far away as possible and coming back will be as beautiful as can be. Go as distant from God as you can. The farther you go, the more ecstatic the coming back will be.So in a primitive society enlightened people don’t exist. They exist only in an insane society. That is the first thing.The second thing: even a primitive society is not really absolutely primitive. In fact, no society can be absolutely primitive. Society as such means that civilization has entered, even if it is primitive. It may be a primitive civilization, maybe it does not have cars and roads and airplanes – that does not matter. That does not make a society a society.A society is made out of rules, regulations, taboos, inhibitions. Even in a primitive society they are there. they are crude, gross, as primitive as the society is primitive. but they are there. No society can exist without rules. Society means rules. No society can exist without taboos. Society means taboos. No society can exist without repressions. Society means repressions. Society means that the individual has to fit with the mass. In that very fitting, the individual loses his innocence. He becomes corrupted.So the second thing to remember is that even a primitive society is a society, so there is some possibility of being enlightened. But the more the society becomes complex, the more there is a possibility of becoming enlightened. The more there is a possibility of becoming insane, the more there is a possibility of becoming enlightened.Now it will depend on you how you use the situation. A civilized society creates a great possibility. You can get obsessed, you can get stuck, you can become frozen – that is your choice. Otherwise, the more complex the society is, the closer you are to becoming enlightened. You can use that opportunity.Buddha was born in a very complex Hindu society. That was the peak of Indian civilization, the golden age. The society was very complex, very sophisticated. Buddha was born into it. And all the twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, Buddha, and all the avataras of the Hindus – Krishna, Ram and others – they all came from the very sophisticated layer of the society. They were all aristocrats. They didn’t come from the low strata. They were all kings or sons of kings. Why? Because at that peak the insanity drives you really the whole distance away from God. And then the turning becomes possible.I am not saying that the turning is going to happen inevitably – I am not saying that. It will depend on you. If you become aware of the insanity that you are living in, you will start turning. If you don’t become aware of the insanity and you remain asleep in it, you may continue to remain insane.It is not an accident that the East is no longer much interested in religion. The East is so poor now and society has fallen so low; it is no longer sophisticated, it is no longer aristocratic. Its problems are very physical, down-to-earth. It cannot think of spiritual problems.It is no accident that the West is becoming more and more interested in religion. The Americans particularly are becoming very deeply involved with religion – because now America is at the peak of civilization, of sophistication, of luxury, of affluence. Exactly the same thing happened two thousand and five hundred years ago in India, when India was the golden bird – just as America is today. America is modern India.The sun is going to rise in the West. The East is deserted. The East is a potential field for communism, not for religion. Eastern countries are by and by turning communist. Communism can only be the religion of the East – it is the lowest kind of religion.So the American mind, particularly the cultured American mind, is interested in Buddha, not in Marx; is interested in Krishna, not in Marx. But the Chinese mind is interested in Marx, Lenin, Mao. The Indian mind is interested in Gandhi, in Marx, in socialism, in communism. When you are hungry, your religion can only be communism. When your bodily needs are fulfilled, when your mental needs are fulfilled, then there is no way other than to be religious. Then you will start seeking meditation, satori, samadhi.The second question:Osho,Before coming to Pune I thought I knew something about helping. Now I feel I know nothing about helping. The most I can do is be present with a client and follow my instincts at that moment. It is a very scary place.Now you are in fact beginning to be a helper, a therapist. When you start losing that ego of being a therapist, feeling starts flowing through you. That ego is an obstruction. A real therapist does not know that he is a therapist, he is just a medium for God to flow through.And I can understand why you are feeling scared – because all your expertise and all your past has existed around a subtle ego, around “I.” Now that seems to be relevant no more. When the past seems to be relevant no more, one feels scared. One is losing knowledgeability and that was your support, that was the ground on which you were standing. You used to know this and that, you used to know how to help, what to do, what was needed…now all that is disappearing. Now you will not know what to do and you will not know the right answer to every question.But now, for the first time, if you remain available to the patient, your client, the right answer will come through you. It will vibrate through you. It will not be your answer, that is true, it will be no longer your answer – it will be God’s response through you.That’s my whole work here. I am preparing a new kind of therapist, a totally new kind of therapist, whose function is not to do something to the patient, but just to be available. Their presence will be a healing presence, miracles will happen through them, but they will not be able to say, “I have done this.” God will be doing the miracle, or the unknown, or the whole. And for the first time you will be really a help, a great help.But for a few days, a few months, a few years…. It depends. If you relax into this, surrender into this, this hesitation will disappear soon. If you don’t surrender, if you go on resisting, then it will take many months or many years. Or maybe you may succeed in resisting and it may disappear again. Then you will miss a great opportunity – a door was opening but you didn’t allow it to open.My observation is that when a musician becomes a real musician, he throws away all musical instruments. He need not have them. Now the music arises in his innermost core; it is not produced by any instruments. When an archer becomes a real archer, he throws away his bow and arrows. There is no need for them. When a healer really becomes a healer, he forgets that he is a healer.A man of knowing becomes completely innocent, unburdened of knowledge. And the process is…. I am not saying that you need not have any training – no, not at all. I am not saying that you need not know anything about psychoanalysis, psychiatry, medicine – I am not saying that. I am saying that you have to know all that and one day you have to forget it too. I am not saying that suddenly a man who does not know anything about archery can become an archer just by surrendering, no. First one needs to know – that is the first part. One has to learn. Then the second part, and the higher part, is that when you have learned all, forget the learning.In Zen they say that if a person wants to become a great painter he should first learn painting for twelve years – day in, day out. He should go on learning all that is possible about colors, painting, canvases, techniques, and after twelve years he should throw away his canvas, his brush, his colors, and for twelve years he should forget all about painting. He should never touch it, never talk about it. And then one day he should start painting again. Now the painting will have something original about it. All that is needed as technique is there, but it is no more in the conscious mind, it is no more a part of the ego. It has gone deep into the unconscious. Those twelve years of training, learning, have become part of his blood and bones.Then for twelve years he has simply forgotten about it. So from the conscious mind all has disappeared. If you ask him anything, he will not be able to say anything. He will not be able to talk about painting any more. Now he will paint like an innocent child who does not know anything, and yet in his painting will be all the expertise of the technician. Now two great things will be meeting in him: the innocence of the child and the knowledgeability of the expert. When these two things meet, there is great creativity.What happens ordinarily? One can become just an expert, a technician…then you can paint, and you can paint perfectly, but something will be missing. The soul will be missing. The painting will be perfect. Nobody will be able to find any fault, that is true, but that is not enough for a painting – that nobody can find any fault. That is not enough. It is needed, but it is not enough. It is necessary, but not enough. Something more is needed. Just to say about a painting that there is no fault in it, is not praise.If a poet brings a poem and you say, “Yes, it is perfectly as it should be. There are no mistakes, no linguistic mistakes, no grammatical mistakes, no mistakes in the rhythm – everything is perfectly okay,” this is not praising it. It may be dead. It has to be dead. Life is not there. It is a corpse. Everything seems to be perfect but something very essential is missing.I have heard about a madman who escaped from his mad asylum. He was a professor of philosophy – and a very clever man. When he escaped from the mad asylum, naturally he started thinking about how to avoid detection – because they would be searching for him immediately. All over the country a search would be made. He was a dangerous madman and the police would be looking for him.So he thought it over. What to do? How not to be caught again? And he found a very, very perfect solution. He knew why people had started to think that he was mad – it was because he used to make such absurd statements. So he thought, “I should do one thing. I should never make any absurd statements. Secondly, I should make only statements which are absolutely certain, with which nobody can find any fault. I will say only things which are proved by science and I will not say a single thing which cannot be proved. Unimpeachable, impeccable will be my statements.”So he searched in his memory. He was a great scholar, a very famous professor. He remembered a few statements which were perfect. Nobody could find fault with them. For example: “The earth is round. Two plus two is four” – things like that. That was his whole conversation. You could say anything and he would say, “The earth is round. Two plus two is four.” He would say things like that. He would only say things like that.Within three days he was caught. He was very much surprised. Why? When he was caught he told the superintendent, “But I am puzzled. Not a single statement have I made which can be proved wrong. Can you prove that the earth is not round? What was wrong in it? How could they detect that I am mad?”There was nothing wrong in it – obviously, certainly. The statement was perfectly true – the earth is round and two plus two is equal to four. But it is irrelevant! Somebody is talking about his woman and you say, “The earth is round.” It is irrelevant. It is meaningless.A technician goes on doing the right things but they have no meaning. He can make a beautiful painting but something is missing – meaning is missing. You cannot find any fault with his color, you cannot find any fault with his drawing – you cannot find any fault. If you have to find fault you will be not able to. But that is not the point. Where is the meaning? Where is the significance? Something is missing. The total is missing. It is a mechanical phenomenon. The organic unity is missing. That organic unity comes out of innocence, not out of expertise.So there are painters who are only technicians. Because of these technicians there was a great revolt in the world of painting. People revolted. They stopped going to the art colleges, they stopped learning painting, and they said, “We will be free painters.” So they started free painting. Now their painting may be original, it may have some significance, but they are incapable of painting it on the canvas. They don’t know how to mix colors, they don’t know how to draw. The idea in their mind may be great, but they have no expertise to bring to the canvas. That’s what has happened to modern painting. Looking at a modern painting it is very puzzling. You don’t know what you are looking at. The man seems to be original but he seems to know nothing about painting.I have heard….Once a rich man came to Picasso. He wanted two of his paintings and only one painting was ready. And the man was ready to give him any amount of money. So Picasso said, “You wait. I will bring two paintings.” He went in and he cut the painting in two.Now if you cut Picasso’s painting in two, or even in four, it does not make any difference – because it is just a mad jumble of colors. And he sold that one painting as two.Another story about Picasso….His paintings were being exhibited and the critics were surrounding one painting especially. His paintings were strange, but that was the strangest he had ever done. And they were really full of praise – like anything. And then came Picasso and he said, “Who has put it upside-down?” The painting was upside-down!Or another story….A rich woman asked Picasso to do her portrait. He did it. He took many months. And he was going to get millions of dollars out of it.Then the woman came and she said, “Everything is okay, but I don’t like the nose.” So Picasso said, “Okay. Come after seven days.”And then he was sitting before his painting, very much worried. And the woman who used to live with him in those days asked, “Why are you so worried? I have never seen you so worried.” He said, “The problem is – where have I painted the nose? I cannot find it.”Somebody can be very technically expert – then the thing goes dead – and somebody can be very innocently, childishly original but then, then again it can’t be a real painting. Zen people are right. A painting needs both the innocence of a child and expertise – both together. Then a great synthesis arises.One has to learn and then to forget – that’s my whole approach here. My approach about therapy is the same. This is my approach about everything – that first you have to know, and then you have to forget all that you know. Then the knowing goes into your blood. It becomes an unconscious milieu around you. It goes on functioning from the unconscious. And in the conscious you remain very, very innocent, original. Then there is great joy.You ask me, “Before coming to Pune I thought I knew something about helping. Now I feel I know nothing about helping.” Good! That’s how it should be. Now the real helping will start.“The most I can do is to be present with a client and follow my instincts at that moment.” That word instinct will change soon and you will start feeling intuitions instead of instincts. I can understand why you have used the word instincts – because you don’t yet know about the phenomenon of intuition. Let me explain it to you.When the body functions spontaneously, that is called instinct. When the soul functions spontaneously, that is called intuition. They are alike and yet far away from each other. Instinct is of the body – the gross; and intuition is of the soul – the subtle. And between the two is the mind, the expert, which never functions spontaneously. So there is no corresponding word for the psychological realm. For the physical, instinct; for the spiritual, intuition – but between the two is the mind. Mind means knowledge. Knowledge can never be spontaneous. So there is no corresponding word like intuition or instinct for the psychological realm.I can understand why you have used the particular word instinct. In the beginning it will feel like that because you are not aware of your soul yet. But good, let it be instinct. Instinct is far better than intellect. Instinct is deeper than intellect and intuition is higher than intellect. Both are beyond the intellect, and both are good.First one becomes alert about instinct, then by and by one will become alert about intuition. And then there will be a kind of meeting of these two. Then both words disappear; then there is totality, tathata. Then one functions as a total organic unit. That is the moment when you become an instrument of God.The third question:Osho,One of the key words to my and others' experiences here is “energy.” I can feel it – sometimes more, sometimes less – and I also feel that opening myself more to experiencing it, is letting it do the job of change. Still it puzzles me as it is a totally new concept to me and I should like to know more about it. Is it an inner or an outer phenomenon, or both? Can one misuse it? Please explain.The question is from Sucheta. She has stumbled upon one thing which is very significant – energy. That’s what we are producing here.To those who come as spectators, it remains unavailable. Those who come just to see what is happening will not be able to see it. And this is the real happening. But it is invisible. You have to become a participant, only then will you know about it.There are two ways of knowing a thing. One is that of the spectator. You go to the movie, you sit in your chair and you see whatsoever goes on moving on the screen. You are a spectator. This is one of the problems for the modern mind. The modern mind has become a spectator. Somebody is dancing – you are watching. People are glued to their chairs before their TV sets for five, six, seven hours. The average in America is five hours. It is as if the TV set is their god and they are worshipping. They are just glued. They cannot get up, they are almost paralyzed – just watching, just looking. Somebody is making love – people are watching. Somebody is wrestling – people are watching. Somebody is dancing – people are watching. Somebody is singing – people are listening. People have become spectators.And when you become a spectator, much is lost. Your life becomes very superficial – because God is not available through being a spectator, God is available only through participation. If you want to know what dance is, dance. Don’t be a spectator. Don t go on looking. You don’t know what dance is if you only see a dancer. You just know the movements of the dancer, you don’t know how it feels from within the dancer – how it feels to the dancer, what joy, what ecstasy, what is happening in the innermost core of the dancer. Great things are happening. If there is a real dancer, great things are happening.When Nijinsky used to dance, sometimes he would make leaps which were physically impossible. Scientists could not figure it out. That big a leap was not possible because of gravitation. And another phenomenon was that when he jumped, coming back to the earth he would fall as if he was a weightless feather. So slowly! It had never happened before. It couldn’t happen. It should not happen. But it was happening. And they were puzzled.And it did not always happen. If Nijinsky wanted it to happen, it would not happen. The moment he would will it, he would miss. If somebody had come just to photograph him, he would not be able to make that kind of leap. And he would feel very humiliated. It was nothing that he could do. It only used to happen when he used to disappear in his dance. Then by and by he became more aware of it – that when he was not, when the dancer disappeared in the dance, then it happened. Then suddenly gravitation no longer functioned; it was as if another kind of law started working – levitation. It was as if he started being pulled upwards.You cannot know it from the outside. You can see Nijinsky jumping, you can watch – but you don’t know what is happening inside him. Inside him something like a satori was happening. The West was not aware of these phenomena, that s why nobody told him that this was a satori. Had he been to the East – in a Sufi country, in a Zen country, or a Taoist country – it would have been immediately recognized. And great possibilities would have opened.Just the reverse happened in the West. Nijinsky went mad because he became so disoriented. He could not figure out what it was. He became so afraid of it – as if he was being possessed by some evil spirit or something. That which could have become the door to God became a door to a madhouse. He needed a master in that moment. He needed one who had realized this inner phenomenon. The master would have been of great help. But he was not aware that he needed a master; he was not aware that anything religious was happening. He became disturbed. He became afraid of himself.How can you see what is happening to Nijinsky? I am here. I am talking to you. You can listen to my words but you can’t see from where they are coming. You cannot see my heart.So one way is the way of the spectator. Another way is the way of the participant. Two kinds of people come here. Spectators come; they miss the whole thing. The whole thing looks like a crazy trip. What are people doing? What is happening to these people? Why so much dancing? Why so much singing? Why so much crying and weeping? What is happening to these people? What kind of meditation is this? Spectators come, and they are puzzled. They cannot figure it out.Only by being a participant will you know what is happening. And if you are a participant then “energy” will be the word that will become the most important – that is what is happening around here.Sucheta is right. She has stumbled on the right thing. “One of the key words to me and to others’ experiences here is ‘energy.’ I can feel it – sometimes more, sometimes less – and I also feel that opening myself more to experiencing it, is letting it do the job of change.”Perfectly true. You will feel it sometimes more and sometimes less, not because it is sometimes more and sometimes less, but because you are sometimes more sensitive and sometimes less sensitive. The energy is continuously flowing, the river is continuously flowing – it depends on your sensitivity how much you will be able to feel it in a certain moment. It is not that sometimes the energy is here and sometimes it disappears, it is here twenty-four hours. It is going to be here as long as I am here, or, for those who are sensitive enough, it will be available after I am gone. It depends on you.So when it is flowing less, then watch – you must have become a spectator. Then it is flowing less. When it is flowing more, watch. You must be a participant – then it is flowing more. So keep it as a key. Whenever it is less, just become aware that you must become more of a participant. You must have fallen into the trap of being a spectator.That’s why I insist that while you are meditating, keep your eyes closed, have a blindfold, so that you don’t become spectators. Otherwise the tendency is there. It is so ingrained. Your whole culture has prepared you to become spectators. So even if meditation is happening to you, and you are moving into energy, suddenly the idea arises, “See what is happening to others.” And you miss. If you open your eyes, a great change has happened: you have fallen from being a participant and you have become a spectator. And this is not a small distance, it is as far away as earth and sky. And then suddenly it is no longer flowing. You are no longer here. If you want to be here, the only way to be here is to be a participant.And if you are a participant, you need not do the job of change. The energy will do it. Let me do it. Allow me. It will happen. All that is needed from your side is not to resist. All that is needed from your side is openness, cooperation – a loving cooperation, not a fearful defense. And, yes, you need not bother about change. The change happens very easily.“Still it puzzles me.” It will puzzle you in the beginning. The puzzling phenomenon comes because you are no longer In control, you are no longer the master of it. You cannot manage it, you cannot will it; it is beyond you, it is bigger than you. That’s why it puzzles you. We are always puzzled by the bigger because we always want something which we can define, which we can hold in our hands, which we can possess. Anything bigger than you puzzles you – because the mind feels so tiny. It falls short and cannot figure it out. And once the mind feels “I cannot figure it out” it starts freaking, it starts getting so frightened that it can start thinking of escaping.Many people escape from here. Once the energy takes possession of them and things start happening…. And they always wanted them to happen – this is how human mind functions. They came here in the first place for something to happen. If it doesn’t happen, they are angry. If it starts happening, they are frightened. Fear and anger are the same energy. Fear is negative anger and anger is positive fear. The difference is only of positivity and negativity. And this is how people are working. If it doesn’t happen, they are angry – as if I am not doing it to them. They are not cooperating, that is the only thing. But they are angry at me – as if I am doing it to others and not to them. They go on writing letters to me. That something is happening to somebody else, why is it not happening to them? – as if I am responsible. It is not happening to you because you are not cooperating.And it cannot happen to you if you are expecting. Your very expectation is a barrier. And it cannot happen to you if you are competitive, if you are thinking that it is happening to your girlfriend or your boyfriend or somebody and it is not happening to you. If you are competitive, it is not going to happen to you. All competition is out of the ego. Then you are angry.And if it happens, then you become frightened. Then you become so afraid that you start thinking of where to go now and of how to escape from this place – because something is happening which is crazy. It is crazy – crazy in the sense that you don’t have any idea of what it is, you don’t have any mind to explain it, you don’t have any philosophy to make it clear to you.“Still it puzzles me," Sucheta says, “as it is a totally new concept to me.” Right, it is a totally new phenomenon. Don’t call it a concept. It is not a concept, it is a reality. It is not an idea. This energy is not an idea. It is the most pregnant force in the world. It is through this force that people are transformed. It is alchemical. It is about this force that alchemists have been talking down the ages. It is this chemistry that transforms the gross into the subtle, that transforms the iron into gold, that changes the lower into higher, that transforms sex into prayer energy, that makes you capable of moving into different planes, higher planes, higher plenitudes. It is not a concept.But I can understand what she means. she is saying that she has no philosophy to figure it out. But there is no philosophy and I cannot supply it. Nobody has ever been able to supply any philosophy to figure it out. It is so big; philosophies are so small. Philosophies are in the mind of man and this is universal energy. Mind cannot contain it. And you should not try to do that, otherwise the mind will come in and will disturb your receptivity for it.“And I should like to know more about it.” Forget. Knowing more about it is not going to help; being more into it is going to help. And being more into it is the only way to know more about it. Don’t do the reverse.Ordinarily our mind says, “First know more about it, then go into it.” That seems to be more clever. But it doesn’t work. The mind says, “First know, then go into it. Without knowing, jumping into it is dangerous, can be dangerous. You may be lost. Or you may not come back again. Who knows? Whether this is good or bad, divine or devil, who knows? So first know everything about it.” But there is no way to know anything about it without going into it. That is the danger, that is the risk, the gamble.That’s why I call sannyasins the gamblers. They are ready to go into the unknown with me without any hitch or hesitation. I cannot give them any guarantee. It is not possible in the very nature of things. A guaranteed truth is a lie. The truth cannot be guaranteed. One has to go into it with a throbbing heart. One has to take the risk. The danger is there. Either you will become enlightened or you will go mad – that danger is there.That is why a master is needed, and a great love for the master is needed – so you can trust him. So that when things start going out of your hand, he can take them in his hand. If you don’t trust him, then madness is going to happen. So I never suggest to anybody to go into this unknown without a master.I know that sometimes it happens that a person can go without a master, but that should be an exception, it should not be made a rule. We can forget about it. Yes, it happens that once in a while a man escapes danger and reaches to truth without being guided. But that should be thought of as accidental; one should not make an ideal of it. It is far better, far happier, far more joyous and celebrating, to go with somebody who knows the way, who has been on the way again and again.Sufis say that if you want to ask the way to a certain peak, ask the man who comes down and goes up every day. Ask the postman who goes to the mountain peak to deliver the post – who comes every day and goes every day. Ask the man who knows the path so perfectly that he can go with a blindfold, he can go in darkness without any light. Ask that man.But I cannot give you any knowledge about it. There exists none. Experience is the only way to know it. I can give you an invitation; I can tell Sucheta, “Come along with me. Drop your resistances – conscious and unconscious. Drop your fears. And also drop this mind which wants things to be explained.” There are things which cannot be explained because there are things which are mysterious. And those are the real things. That which can be explained is meaningless; it is trivial, it is mundane. All that is beautiful, all that is true, all that is great, is beyond explanations. It is a mystery. You have to go into it. You have to savor it.“And I should like to know more about it.” It is good that you want to know more about it but the way to know is to be more into it.“Is it an inner or an outer phenomenon, or both?” It is neither – because for energy there is no in nor out. In and out are our divisions created by the ego. It is like your house. You say that this is inside my house and this is outside. Do you think that the sky is divided between the inner and the outer because you have made a small wall? The sky is not divided. The sky remains undivided, indivisible. There is no in and no out. It is one sky. The sky that is inside your house is the same sky that is outside your house. And there is no way to cut it into parts.And so is energy. It is one vitality, it is one God, it is one life. All is one unto it. It is neither lower nor higher, neither inner nor outer, neither material nor spiritual. All divisions are egoistic. It knows no divisions.“Is it an inner or outer phenomenon, or both? Can one misuse it?” No, there is no possibility. You cannot misuse it because before you can get it, you have to disappear. You get it only with the condition that you are not – so who can misuse it? If you are, you never get it. This is a built-in protection. Nobody can misuse it – because before you can get it, you have to disappear utterly. That is a basic requirement. Nobody can misuse God. It is prohibited by its inner mechanism – because before you enter the shrine of God you have to disappear.And once you are not, who is there to use or misuse? Forget the word misuse. You cannot even use it! It starts using you. You become just instrumental – a passive vehicle, a hollow bamboo. God starts flowing through you. When he starts singing, you become a flute; otherwise you are a hollow bamboo, you remain a hollow bamboo. All songs are his. He uses you. You cannot use, you cannot misuse, because you are no more.The fourth question:Osho,Why do you go on saying, “When you find a master,” when you are right in front of me?The question is from Anand Vimoksha. I go on repeating it because although I may be in front of you, you are not in front of me. And unless we both confront each other, unless we are face-to-face, heart-to-heart, I will have to go on repeating it.Vimoksha, I am in front of you, but where are you? You are not in front of me. You are still hiding; you are still hiding in your cave. You are still afraid to come out and confront me. It is a confrontation, it is an encounter. And I have to go on calling you, “Come forth! Come out!” That’s why I have to repeat again and again, “When you find a master.”The master has found you but you have not yet found the master. I have chosen you but you have not yet chosen me, Vimoksha. It has to become your choice too – then there will be a meeting. And in that meeting will be a disappearance of me and you.The fifth question:Osho,You say one should not feel guilty, but how is it possible to avoid it? The slightest negative emotion or quality, if turned inwards, kills oneself; if turned outwards, kills others. It seems to me that unless and until one has fully realized the spirit or become enlightened there must always be a deep existential humiliation.The question is from Hannah.First, there is no existential humiliation as such. There are only psychological humiliations. And they are created by you.Existence knows nothing of humiliation because existence knows nothing of the ego. Have you ever seen a tree humiliated? Have you ever seen a rock humiliated? Have you ever seen anybody except man humiliated?Watch nature and you will be surprised. If two dogs are fighting, they don’t start fighting like human beings. They are not so foolish. They first show to each other how much “I am.” They bark, they jump, they show their chests, they show their teeth. They simply show that this is “I am.” What you are, you show, and the other shows, and then it is decided – because they are not foolish. There is no need to fight. Then it is decided who is stronger. Then the one who is the weak one shows his back, puts his tail between his legs and goes away.But there is no humiliation. Remember, if you think that the one who is going away with his tail between his legs is humiliated, you are wrong. You are bringing your human mind in it. It is a simple decision. If I ask you which is bigger – two or three? – and you say three, is two humiliated. Foolish! Just foolish! They are wise people, these dogs. They have decided without any violence, without any conflict. Just by a mock fight they have decided. What is the point of going into a real fight when it is decided that one is weak? Of course the stronger will win, so why go into it?The one who has left the field is not a coward, remember. He exposed his whole heart, put everything on the table, was not hiding any card, not even a trump card. Seeing that the other has all the great cards and he doesn’t, it is finished. There is no need to fight and there is no need to feel humiliated – “God has made him a bigger dog and God has made me a smaller dog – so it is finished.”A man came to a Sufi master and asked him, “Why am I not like you?” And the Sufi master said, “You puzzle me. I can ask the same thing – ‘Why am I not like you?’ – and become very humiliated. I am not like you either. God never makes two persons alike. You are you, I am me.”A man came to a Zen master and asked the same thing, “Why are you so pious, so beautiful, so graceful? Why am I not like you?” And the master said “come outside.” And he took him outside and he showed him two trees standing in his garden. One was very big, whispering to the clouds; another was very small.He said, “Look, one is big and one is small, but I have never seen the smaller one asking the bigger one, "Why am I not like you?" And I have lived here for many years. There is no problem. The big is big; the small is small. The small is happy in being small; the big is happy in being big. There is no comparison so there is no humiliation.”Hannah is an egoist. I remember many years ago when she took sannyas. It was not much of a sannyas either. But I never say no. Just out of politeness I never say no. Why should I say no? She took sannyas at Mount Abu – it must be five or six years ago. When I gave her a name…. I remember the name I gave her; it was one of the most beautiful that we can give in India. I gave her the name “Ganga.” That is the most beautiful river, the most sacred to the Hindus. And on the sides of this river Ganga has flowered all that has been beautiful in India. The Vedas were written there, the Upanishads were sung there, Buddha talked there, Mahavira walked there. All the twenty-four tirthankaras, Krishna and Ram and Buddha, and all the great saints – they all owe something to the Ganges, to Ganga.Hannah immediately refused. She said, “I don’t like this name. My name, Hannah, is beautiful.” Just out of politeness I said, “Okay, I will keep your old name.” But that very moment, she became closed to me and she has remained closed to me. Since then I have not been able to make any contact. She refused me! I gave her sannyas, but she refused me. Her own ego and her own name and her own past was too much.Remember, it is the ego which feels humiliation, it is not existence. Existence has no humiliation. The bigger the ego you have, the more humiliated you will feel. And remember, the reason is your ego. Existence is completely unaware of any kind of humiliation. The rose is not humiliated before the lotus because the lotus is so big. And the marigold is not humiliated before the rose because the rose has such a beautiful fragrance. Nobody is comparing. Nobody has any ego to compare. Nobody is competing. Existence is pure silence as far as comparison is concerned. It is our psychological cancer, the ego, which feels humiliation.The second thing: “You say one should not feel guilty, but how is it possible to avoid it? The slightest negative emotion or quality, if turned inwards, kills oneself; if turned outwards, kills others.” There is no need to turn it anywhere, in or out. You can simply watch it and it disappears, evaporates. It goes neither in nor out.For example, anger has arisen in you. It is a negative poison. Now there are three possibilities of response. Hannah mentions only two; she knows only two. Many people know only two. One is to throw this anger, this fire and poison onto the other. Then it is destructive. And naturally, after you have burned the other, wounded the other, you will feel guilty. I can understand. You will feel foolish, you will feel stupid, you will feel that you have done something wrong. You should not have done this.Or the other possibility is that you don’t throw the anger on the other, you turn it inwards. Then you hurt yourself. Then you wound yourself. Then you will have stomach ulcers. Then this fire will rage inside you. Then you will always be sitting on top of a volcano. You will never be at ease; you will be always restless. All joy will disappear from your life.The society, the church, the state, is in favor of the second. The society says, “Don’t be angry with the other. Do whatsoever you want to do with it – swallow it – but don’t be angry with the other.” If you suffer from ulcers, that is your business. If you suffer from cancer, that is your business. And the society has given you explanations such that the cancer need not be connected at all with your anger; the ulcer need not be connected with your anger.If you swallow anger today the ulcers won’t appear just today – they will take years. Maybe after forty years of swallowing the anger, the ulcers will appear. And after sixty years of swallowing the anger, cancer will appear. So you will not be able to relate anger with the cancer. You will not be able to find any reason to show that it is anger that has created the cancer. That seems to be so far-fetched.The society has decided that you should just behave rightly. The society protects the other because the society consists of the other. The society says that you can be self-destructive, that is your business. The society is against murder but it is not against suicide. It is suicide if you turn your negative emotions inwards. I am against both because both will create guilt and both will create complexities.What is my approach? My approach is that if anger is there – watch. Witness that anger is there. Don’t do anything about it. There is no need to do. Just look at it. And you will be surprised that just by looking at it, it starts disappearing. The cloud sooner or later disperses, is gone. And when the cloud is gone and you have not done anything about it – neither throwing it out nor throwing it in – you will not feel any guilt ever.And this is how one should relate to all kinds of negative emotions. Be a witness. Just watch it. Sufis call it sahada – be a witness. Hindus call it sakshin – be a witness. Just watch. Don’t do anything. Doing is not needed. All doing is wrong. If you do anything about it, something is going to be wrong – because you will be doing under its impact. If you do it to others, it will be wrong; if you do to yourself, it will be wrong. Anything done under the impact of a negative emotion is going to be wrong. And then later on guilt will arise.But there is a way not to do – be a watcher, just be a witness. See it. It is there. You are not it, you are the seer. Sit silently when you are angry, when you are jealous, when you are full of hatred. Close your doors. Sit silently. Let the anger be there, let the anger flash in front of you, let the hatred move like a movie – and you be a watcher.And you will be surprised. It cannot be there forever, one thing is certain. Sooner or later it goes. It only takes minutes to go. And when it is gone, it is gone; it leaves no trace behind it. No guilt is created. And a man who does not create guilt is religious. I call a man who does not create any kind of guilt religious.The sixth question:Osho,This morning in the lecture I was fast asleep and suddenly felt a hard weight on my back. At first I thought I must be snoring or making a noise and someone must have woken me to stop me, but I found out that no one had hit me. What was it?The question is from Sheela.I have not answered it up to now because each day when I wanted to answer she was asleep again! It is not a new question! I have been waiting. But today she is awake so I thought that this is the moment.Can’t you recognize my hand when I wake you?Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Imam Mohammed Baqir is said to have related this illustrative fable:‘Finding I could speak the language of ants, I approached one and inquired, "What is God like? Does he resemble the ant?"‘He answered, "God! No, indeed – we have only a single sting, but God, he has two!"What is God?Al-Hillaj Mansoor says:It is the gathering together then the silenceThen the loss of words and the awarenessThen the discovering and the nakedness.And it is the fire clay then the fireThen the clarity and the coldThen the darkness then the sun.And it is the orgy then the casting away of caresThen the wish and the approachThen the conjunction then the joy.And it is the strain then the relaxationThen the disappearance and the separationThen the union…Then the fusion.What is God?It depends on you. Your God will be your God, my God will be my God. There are as many Gods as there are possibilities of looking at God. It is natural. We cannot go beyond our plane; we can only be aware of God through our eyes, through our minds. God will be just a reflection in our small mirror. That’s why there are so many concepts about God.It is like the moon in the sky on a full moon night. There are millions of rivers and reservoirs and oceans and small streams and small puddles on the road – they will all reflect God, they will all reflect the moon. A small puddle will reflect the moon in its own way and the big ocean will reflect it in its own way.Then there is great controversy. Hindus say something, Mohammedans say something else, Christians say something else again – and so on, so forth. The controversy is foolish. The conflict is meaningless. God is reflected in millions of ways, in millions of mirrors. Each mirror reflects in its own way. This is one of the fundamentals to be understood. Not understanding this fundamental there is naturally antagonism between religions, because they all think, “If our standpoint is right then the other has to be wrong.” Their rightness depends on the other’s wrongness. This is stupid. God is infinite, and you can look at him through many ways, through many windows. And naturally you can look at him only through yourself – you will be the window. Your God will reflect God as much as it will reflect you; you will both be there.When Mansoor says something, he is saying something about himself. This tremendously beautiful statement:…then the union… then the fusion.– is much more about al-Hillaj Mansoor than about God. This is Mansoor’s God. This is Mansoor’s unique experience.Mansoor was murdered, crucified, like Jesus. Mohammedans could not understand him. This happens always. You cannot understand any point higher than your own. It becomes a danger to you. If you accept it, then you accept that there is some possibility which is higher than you. That hurts the ego, that humiliates. You would like to destroy a Mansoor or a Christ or a Socrates just for a single reason: that you cannot conceive, you cannot concede, that there is a possibility of some higher standpoint than yours. You seem to believe that you are the last thing in existence; that you are the paradigm, that you are the climax, that there is no beyond. This is the attitude of the stupid and the irreligious mind. The religious mind is always open. The religious mind is never confined by its own limitations. It keeps remembering that there is no end to growth; one can go on growing.It is said in the Bible that God created man in his own image. This is a human statement; it says nothing about God. It simply says something about man. It is man writing about himself. Naturally man thinks in terms which are anthropomorphic. Man thinks in terms of man being the center of existence. God created man in his own image. He has to…at least in human scriptures he has to follow the human mind and the human ego.Just the contrary is the case. Man has created God in his own image. Man’s God is a human God. You can see. You can go into the temples and you can see the images of God. They are made in the form of human beings – a little better, more beautiful. but still a modification, a decoration of the human body. They have human eyes with a little more compassion. Just a little more is added. The ideal human being, that’s what our Gods are.When Nietzsche declared that God was dead. he was, in fact. not saying anything against God himself. He was simply saying that the God that we have followed up to now is no longer applicable because man has grown up. The God that we have been following up to now was a childish, juvenile God. Humanity was juvenile. Somebody worshipping a stone as God is saying a very, very primitive thing. His statement is very primitive, pagan. Somebody worshipping an idol is a little better, but still limited. All forms are limited. Somebody worshipping a tree…a little more alive because the tree has a kind of vitality. God is vital; the tree participates in god so it is vital. God is green and fresh and so is the tree; and God blooms and the tree blooms. There is an at-oneness.But a tree is a tree. It may be a faraway reflection of the divine, but to worship the tree as God is ignorant. Somebody worshipping a river may be right in his own way – because the river also expresses the divine, everything expresses him – but everything expresses him in a limited way. He is all. So no single thing can express him in his totality. How can a single thing express him in his totality? If you worship the tree, what about the river? If you worship the river, what about the sun? If you worship the sun, what about the moon? You are worshipping only one thing – and because it is limited and one, it cannot represent all.When Nietzsche said “God is dead,” he was saying that all formulations of God up to now have become irrelevant. Man has gone beyond them; man has become more mature. Man needs new Gods every time. As man becomes more mature he needs a more mature God. Look in the Old Testament. God is ferocious, very jealous. God declares, “I am a very jealous God. If you worship somebody else I will be your enemy. I will torture you in hell. I will throw you into fire.” This seems to be a very primitive God; seems to be conceived of by a Genghis Khan – not very cultured, not very sophisticated yet.The Hindu God is far more sophisticated. Krishna with his flute is far more cultured. But Buddha reaches to the very peak because he drops the idea of God. He talks about godliness. The very word God makes God like a thing: defined, clear-cut, solid, concrete, like a rock. Buddha drops the very idea. He says, “There is godliness but there is no God. There is divineness. Existence is full of divineness, bhagwat, but there is no God like a person sitting there on a golden throne controlling, managing, creating. No, there is no God as a person. The whole existence is full of divinity, that is true. It is overflowing with godliness.”Now this is a far higher concept. we drop the limitations of a person. We make god more like a process. The ancient concept says that God created the world, he was the creator. Buddha does not agree. He says, “God is creativity, not a creator.” God is one with his creativity. So whenever you are creating something you participate in God.When a painter is lost in his painting, when he is completely absorbed in his painting, he is no longer an ordinary painter. He is divine in that moment of absorption. “…then the union… then the fusion.”A dancer lost utterly in his dance is a human no more; hence the beauty, hence the utter beauty. Even those who are just spectators, even they start feeling something strange, incredible, fantastic, happening.It happened that for nine years before al-Hillaj Mansoor was crucified he was confined in a jail. And he was tremendously happy because he used those nine years for constant meditation. Outside there were always disturbances, distractions – friends, followers, the society, the world, the worries. He was very happy. The day he was put into jail he thanked God from his very heart. He said, “You love me so much. Now you have given me complete protection from the world and there is nothing left except you and me – then the union… then the fusion.”Those nine years were of tremendous absorption. And after those nine years it was decided that he had to be crucified, because he had not changed a bit. On the contrary, he had gone farther in the same direction. His direction was that he started declaring, “I am God – an-el-haq! I am the truth, I am the reality.”His master, al-Junnaid, tried to persuade him in many ways – “Don’t say these things! Keep them inside you, because the people won’t understand it and you will be getting into trouble unnecessarily!”But it was beyond Mansoor. Whenever he was in that state – what Sufis call hal – whenever he was in that state, he would start singing and dancing. And those utterances would simply overflow; it was not possible for him to control them. There was nobody to control; all control was lost. Junnaid understood his state, but he knew the state of the people too – that sooner or later Mansoor would be thought to be anti-religious. His declaration, “I am God,” was a fact, his experience was there behind it, but people didn’t understand it. They would take it as arrogance, as ego, and there would be trouble. And the trouble came.After nine years they decided that he had not changed a bit; in fact he had grown deeper into it. Now he was continuously declaring, “an-el-haq! I am the truth! I am God!” So finally they decided that he had to be crucified.When they went to take him out from his prison cell, it was very difficult – because he was in a hal, in that mystic state. He was no longer a person, he was just pure energy. How to drag pure energy out? The people who went there were just struck dumb! What was happening in that dark cell was so fantastic! It was so luminous. Mansoor was surrounded by an aura not of this world. Mansoor was not there as a person. Sufis have two words for it: one is baka, another is fana. Baka means you are defined by a personality, you have a definition around you, you have a demarcation line that this is you. Fana means that you are dissolved into God and you don’t have any definition. Baka is like an ice cube and fana is like the ice cube which has melted and become one with the river.This constantly happens to the mystics: they move from baka to fana, from fana to baka. It is almost like day and night. By and by there comes a kind of rhythm. Sometimes you will find the mystic in the state of baka – and when you find him in the state of baka you will see the most unique individuality that has ever been seen. In the state of baka he will be a unique individual – very original, very pure, clear-cut. he will be like a peak standing against the sky, or like a star in the dark night – so clear, so separate, so individual. That is the meaning of baka – individual.You will not find these kinds of individuals in the ordinary world. There are people but not individuals, persons but not individuals A person is one who has no individuality; he is just an anonymous part of a mass. He lives like they live, he talks like they talk, he eats like they eat, he goes to the movie that they go to, he purchases the car that they purchase, he makes a house like they make – he is continuously following “they,” the mass, the collectivity, the crowd. He is not himself; he is very confused. His boundary lines are very messy. They are there but they are in a mess; they are not clear-cut. If you look into him you will not find him there. You will find layers upon layers of conditioning. He will be a Mohammedan because he was born in a Mohammedan house. He will be a Hindu because he was born into a Hindu family. He will be reciting the Gita because his father used to recite it – and his father’s father. For ages they have been reciting it, so he is reciting it. It all seems accidental. He has no uniqueness in him. He is just a part. He lives like they live, he dies like they die. He lives their life, he dies their death. He never asserts himself, he is never rebellious. This is the state of the ordinary personality. This is not individuality.Individuality arises only when you become very clear-cut, when you attain an original shape of your being, when you do your thing, when you don’t care what others say, when you are ready to sacrifice your whole life for your freedom, when freedom becomes your ultimate value and nothing else matters – then you become baka, individual. And this is the paradox: only individuals can go into fana, into that utter dissolution, desolation, into that utter disappearance.First you have to be, only then can you disappear. If you are not, then what is going to disappear? First you have to detach yourself from the crowd, only then can you take the jump. So this is the paradox: the man in the state of baka can go into the state of fana, and only he can go.The mass man cannot go into fana because he does not know who he is. He has no address yet, he has no name yet, he has no identity yet. He is just a number. He can be replaced very easily, he’s replaceable. He is just a part doing a certain kind of work. He is a function. For example, he may be an engineer. If he dies, you can put another engineer there and nobody will miss him. Or he may be a doctor. If he dies, you place another doctor there and nobody will miss him. He is a replaceable part, he is a function.But the man of baka is not a function; he has a totally different kind of quality in his being. He will be missed forever and ever. Once he is gone you cannot replace him. You cannot replace Jesus. You can replace the pope of the Vatican; many times you have replaced him. Each time one pope dies he is replaced. You can replace the Shankaracharya of Puri very easily, there is no problem – one dies and you put another there. But you cannot replace the original Shankaracharya. You cannot replace Jesus, you cannot replace Mohammed. Once gone they are gone forever. They exist as unique individuals – that is the state of baka. And they are the only people capable of going into fana. It looks contradictory, because fana means losing all your definition, losing all your being.But first you have to have the being to lose it. How can you lose it if you don’t have it? How can you renounce it if you don’t have it? So the paradox is only apparent. It has a very, very universal law behind it. First you have to have something in order to drop it. First gather together.It is the gathering together then the silence…First gather together, integrate, become baka, and then you can go into fana.This man, Mansoor, became a man of unique individuality. Wherever he went he was immediately recognized; it was impossible to miss him. He came to India too. In fact, because his master, al-Junnaid, told him, “It is better if you start traveling into other countries, otherwise you will be caught,” he traveled to faraway countries. Everywhere he was recognized immediately. He was a king of kings. You could not miss him. If he was standing in a crowd of ten thousand people, you would be able to see him. He had baka; he was crystal clear. His presence was immense, huge, enormous. Once you had seen him, all other persons would look pale, faint, flat. So sooner or later he would be recognized and he would have to leave the country because trouble would arise.He went to many countries in the Middle East, but wherever he went it was okay for a few days – he could live without being recognized – but not for long. So finally he went back and said to Junnaid, his master, “It is futile. I get caught everywhere. So why not here?”When this man was being carried from the cell, the officers who had come to take him out could not find exactly where he was. He was there, utterly there. The whole cell was full of a radiance, a presence – very solid yet indefinable. They could not enter the cell. They stood there in awe, in wonder – “What to do?” Finally they gathered courage. They tried to pull him out but they could not. Then there was only one way: his Master al-Junnaid was asked to come and help because the time was passing and Mansoor had to be crucified and they could not get him out.Al-Junnaid came and he said, “Mansoor, now listen. A thousand and one times I have told you to surrender to God. If he wants you to be crucified, then be ordinary and be crucified. Let him do his work. Enough is enough?” And when al-Junnaid shouted, Mansoor came back out of the fana into the baka. Again there was a demarcation line; he was no longer a cloud, he became concrete and solid. The boundaries appeared. The master had come and he had to listen to his master.Then he was taken to the gallows. It was very difficult to kill him. One thousand wounds were made on his body – still he was alive. Then they started cutting off his limbs, but still he was alive – because on the cross he again lost the state of baka and went into the state of fana. He got lost again into ecstasy, into that energy that is God.God is energy for a man of the state of Mansoor. God is consciousness for the man of the state of Buddha. God is love for Christ. He is not a person. These three L’s have to be learned: God is love, life, light. You have heard about the three R’s. The three R’s make you civilized. These three L’s make you religious.Be more alive – so much so that you become one with life. Then let love arise so much that you start overflowing with love. Then you know no boundaries. Then out of you a new kind of light starts arising, a luminousness. These three L’s have to be learned, and those three R’s have to be forgotten.The whole philosophy of Sufism is to approach God as cosmic energy, with no concept. But we all have concepts and all concepts are juvenile, childish. God cannot be conceptualized.We have been given concepts by others; we have learned them. They are just suggestions from the mass, ideas put into your head. Christians have an idea of an old man with a white beard, very ancient-looking, sitting there on a golden throne surrounded by angels, controlling the world. There is nothing wrong about it, but there is nothing right either. It is good enough to satisfy the curiosity of small children, children also need some idea about God, but one has to grow out of this childishness.We go on hammering certain ideas into the heads of small children.I have heard….The clergyman said to Mrs. Mott whose baby was just christened, “Oh, Mrs. Mott, I have never seen a child that was so well behaved at a christening.”Mrs. Mott said, “Well, it’s because my husband and I have been practicing on him with a watering can for a week.”If you practice on a child for one week with a watering can, of course…. It becomes habitual. And that’s what has been done to humanity down the ages – ideas have been practiced on you. Those who practice them don’t know what they are doing; they are in the same trap. Their parents practiced those ideas on them. They don’t know what they are, what they are talking about. If you insist too much on asking what exactly the word God means,. you will make anybody and everybody uncomfortable. So asking questions is not supported; one has to accept these things, one has to believe these things. Nobody likes answering if you ask too much. If you go on asking, you make the other person very uncomfortable because you start seeing and touching his buttons. It is also a belief for him; he does not know what God is.It is just out of fear that children have been trained, and out of fear they go on clinging. That’s why whenever you are afraid you start thinking more of God. In a dark night, passing through a cemetery, you are bound to remember God. When you are alone, ill, in difficulties, in frustration, in anxieties, in misery, you remember God. God is more associated with misery. If you are happy, you tend to forget God. God has no association with happiness. In reality, it should be just the other way – when you are happy you can approach God more easily because a happy mind is a flowing mind, a happy mind is an open mind, a happy mind is more vulnerable, more delicate.An unhappy mind is closed. How can a mind that lives in fear be open? It is not possible.I have heard….A young man wanted to pass an old man in a wagon on a country road, but the old man would not pull over.Finally when he had passed the old man, he took his pistol out and walked back to the wagon. “Old man, do you know how to dance?” he asked, shooting at the ground near the old man’s feet and laughing uproariously as he began to jump up and down.When the young man started back, the old man grabbed his concealed shotgun and said, “Young man, did you ever kiss a mule?”The young man said, looking into the barrel of the shotgun, “No, but I always wanted to.”Out of fear you can create anything. And your God is created out of fear. Your God is nothing but your fear instinct. It is not your experience.A little boy in Aberdeen, Scotland, was disciplined by his mother, who used to say to him when he was naughty, “Now, God won’t like that.” And when he was particularly unruly or disobedient, she would say, “God will be angry.”Usually these admonitions were sufficient, but one night when she had prunes for his dessert at supper, he rebelled. He refused to finish the prunes on his plate. She pleaded, she coaxed. Finally she said, “Now, God won’t like this. God doesn’t like little boys who refuse to finish all their prunes.”But the little fellow was quite unmoved. She went on further to say, “God will be angry.” But for some reason or other the little boy stubbornly refused to take the last two prunes which lay on his plate…dark blue, wrinkled tokens of his rebellion.‘Well,’ said the mother, “you must now go to bed. You have been a very naughty boy, and God is angry, really angry.”So she packed him upstairs and put him to bed. No sooner had she come down than a violent thunderstorm broke out. The lightning was more vivid than usual. The thunder clumped up and down the sky with shattering reverberations. The suddenly angry wind threw handfuls of rain against the windows. It was a most violent storm, and she thought her little son would be terrified and that she should go up and comfort him. Quietly she opened his bedroom door, expecting to find him whimpering in fear, perhaps with the covers pulled over his head. But to her surprise he was not in bed at all; he had gone to the window. With his face pressed against the window pane, she heard him mutter, “My, my, such a fuss to make over two prunes!”But that’s how your God is.You have been brought up in fear and you have been brought up in greed. Because of fear and greed you go on believing in a certain idea of God. That idea is as absurd as your greed and your fear. It has nothing to do with God, it has something to do with you and your psychology.If you really want to know what God is, then you will have to drop all kinds of fear and all kinds of greed. You will have to drop, in reality, your whole psychology, your whole mind. God is an experience of the state of no-mind, fana; when you are no more, dissolved, then you know what God is.So, a few things…. God is not a concept, a theory, a hypothesis, an explanation, a philosophy – not at all. How can you make a concept of something that you don’t know? You don’t know God, you have never encountered God, so whatsoever you think about him is borrowed, is pseudo. The real has to be your experience. Otherwise, God is a kind of explanation – because there are problems in life and there are puzzles in life and there are mysteries in life, and you always find it difficult to explain them. Birth is there and death is there, and this whole tremendously beautiful existence is there. From where does it come? Who creates it? Why is it created? Why is it at all? Why is it rather than not? A thousand and one questions arise in the mind and you need some comfortable, convenient explanation so you can rest and sleep well. God is a blanket explanation. It covers all your problems. In a single concept you explain everything.Whenever you say “God knows,” you simply mean “I don’t know.” But it is a very tricky strategy. You don’t say “I don’t know,” you say “God knows.” It gives you a kind of feeling that you may not know it but there is somebody who knows – and that is your God and he takes care, you need not worry. Father knows, mother knows, God knows, somebody knows. So why bother? You can remain unburdened. But let me tell you, God is not an explanation. And those who cling to explanations will never know what God is.God is the dropping away of all explanations and all theories and all philosophies. God is the dropping away of all kinds of thinking, because thinking is a barrier. How can you think about the unknown? You can think only about the known. Thinking is just chewing the same thing over and over again. You can think only that which you have known already. Thinking never gives you anything original; it cannot, it is not in its nature. And God is the most unknown phenomenon. God means the totality. It is not known. All explanations are kinds of deceptions – deceiving yourself, deceiving others, that you know.A sincere, honest seeker will drop all explanations. That is what is meant when al-Hillaj says: It is the gathering together then the silence…– the silence which comes when you drop all explanations, all theories, all philosophies.…then the loss of words…– then the words are not needed at all. When all theories and all explanations and philosophies have been dropped, what are you going to do with words?…then the loss of words and the awareness…When words are lost, in that silence awareness arises.…then the discovering and the nakedness.You are utterly naked. Before God you have to be utterly naked, with no explanations, no philosophies surrounding you. You have to be as naked as possible, totally nude, empty, undressed. Then only is there a possibility of contacting God.God is not a person – that is the second thing to remember. It is human to think about God as a person. When we think about God as a person it looks warmer. Lao Tzu says “Tao,” but Tao doesn’t seem so warm. You cannot hug Tao. Tao cannot hug you. Buddha says Dhamma – the law. But the law seems to be cold. You need some warm embrace, you need a God who can love you, who can caress you, who can kiss you, who can take you close, who can hold your hand. This is human desire, desire for warmth.But existence has no obligation to fulfill your desires. Your desire is all right, but your desire simply shows that you are missing love, not God. Try to understand it. Your desire simply shows that you have missed your parents – your mother, your father, or you have missed a beloved. Your desire simply shows that there is some hankering for love that you are projecting on to God. So God becomes a person. You transform God into a person because of your need. But this is your need, and there is no necessity that your need has to be fulfilled. You have to understand your need and drop it. That’s why my insistence is never to remain unfulfilled in your love, otherwise you will never find the real God.Love as much as you can. Love human beings, love animals, love trees, love rocks, mountains, rivers – love as much as you can. Let there be great experience of love so that your love-need is fulfilled, so that one day you can transcend love.Just the other day there was a question from Ananda Prem. “Why,” she asks, “do spiritual persons want to go beyond love?” This is why. Because if you are not yet satisfied in your love, you will go on projecting love-needs onto God. And that will be a false God, that will be your projection. That will be your idea, not the reality of God. You cannot see the reality of God. You will see God in terms of what you would like him to be; you cannot see that which is. You will have a kind of wish fulfillment.So Freud is not absolutely wrong when he says that God is a kind of wish fulfillment. He’s right about ninety-nine per cent of people. He’s right about Ananda Prem. Ananda Prem is suffering from a love-need. She tries to find a lover and she cannot, because she has a certain idea of a lover. The very idea becomes an obstruction. She searches for a perfect lover. Yes, it is very difficult in the first place to find a perfect lover, and if you can find one, the perfect lover will not be in any kind of need. A needy person cannot relate to a perfect lover. Only a perfect lover can relate to a perfect lover. Both will be without needs. Their love will be of a totally new kind; it will be a kind of sharing. It is not that they need each other; just because they have so much they want to give it.A perfect lover is one who is as happy alone as when he is with the beloved; there is no difference. Then he is a perfect lover. But he is as happy alone.Now Ananda Prem goes on searching for a perfect lover, and because she cannot find the perfect lover and ordinary human beings are just worthless for her, now she can start projecting upon God. She writes in her question: “What about Meera? Meera loved God in the form of Krishna, still she attained.” Yes, she loved God in the form of Krishna, but Meera’s love is the love of a perfect human being. She has no need, she does not want anything from Krishna; she simply goes on giving. She has a song to sing, she sings. She has a dance to dance, she dances. She has nothing to get, she only gives. And she gets a thousandfold – that is another thing, but she has nothing to get.If you want to become Meera, Ananda Prem, first you will have to be fulfilled about human love-needs – otherwise your Krishna will be false, it will not be Meera’s Krishna. Your Krishna will be just your imagination, your Krishna will be just a projection of a repressed desire. Your Krishna will have much sexuality. First be finished with the human needs. And the only way to be finished is to go into them. I am not against them, remember, and I am not saying that something is wrong in them. There is a great lesson in them and it can be learned only by going through them. Go through them, don’t demand the impossible – otherwise love will not happen.Remember the limitation of human beings, and remember your limitations. And whatsoever kind of love is possible, go into it. don’t hanker for the impossible, otherwise you will miss even the possible. And the impossible cannot happen. The impossible happens only the other way round: go through the possible, let the possible be finished with, let your being come out of it fulfilled – then the impossible can also happen. You have become capable of it.If people’s love-needs are not fulfilled, they go on projecting onto God – and poor God suffers unnecessarily. When I was reading Ananda Prem’s question I became very, very sad for God. If Ananda Prem starts loving God, then think about God too! – because he cannot go to the court, he cannot say no; he just has to suffer your love.First go through human turmoil, human anguish – the joys of human love and the miseries of human love. Let yourself become ripe through it. Then only do you have the fragrance which can be offered to God, not before it. First become a lotus. Come out of the mud of desire. And remember, the lotus comes out of the mud. Out of desiring comes the state of desirelessness – the lotus of desirelessness. Seeing the futility of desire again and again and again, one day one becomes so mature that one drops the very desire. In that very dropping is the meeting. When there is no desire there is nothing to hinder you from seeing God. Then God is all over the place, then only God is. But God is not a person.Christians say that God is a father. God is not a father. That simply shows somehow that your father-need is still unfulfilled. There are people who say that God is a mother. That simply shows that their mother-need is unfulfilled. There are some who think that God is a lover. Then their love-need is not fulfilled. What you say about God shows something about you. If you think of God as a father, it simply shows that you are unsatisfied with your father, that you are not yet reconciled with your father, that you have become too dependent on your father. You need a father in the sky now. Maybe your father is dead and you cannot live without a father, or maybe your father is far away and you cannot live without your father. You are still immature and childish; you need somebody to cling to. Then you will create God the father.God is neither father nor mother nor lover nor beloved. God is not a person at all.God is energy, cosmic energy. God is continuous creativity. God is love, life, light. God is not an object of experience either. It is not that one day you will encounter God as an object of experience. God is not an object and God is not a subject either. When subject and object meet and disappear into each other, fana, then there is a new kind of experience – what Krishnamurti calls “experiencing.” It is not even experience, because the very word experience seems to be finished, complete, rounded. God is never complete, never finished; it is always an ongoing affair, always open, always flowering, always moving. God is a dynamic energy. God is a process, not a thing.So, an experiencing…. And what is an experiencing? What is the difference between experience and experiencing? The difference is that in experience you remain separate from the object. For example, you are listening to me. This can happen in two ways. For those who are here just as spectators, as listeners, as an audience, it is an experience. I am here separate from them; they are there separate from me. I am an object and they are the subject. They are there centered in their egos listening to me. And they are continuously judging whether this is right or wrong, whether this applies or not, whether this can be practiced or not, whether this agrees with their scripture or not – they are continuously judging inside. This will be an experience.But those who are in deep love with me, who are not standing against me, who are not there as a subject listening to me, who get lost into it, who are en rapport with me, involved with me, involved with me as if they are listening to themselves, to their own heartbeat – then there is not an experience but experiencing. Then I am not here separate from them, and they are not there separate from me. Then there is a union and a fusion.God is an experiencing.If you want to know what God is you will have to learn the art of experiencing. Then there is no need to go to a mosque or to a temple or to a church. Wherever experiencing happens there is the church, there is the temple, there is the mosque. Looking at a roseflower, if you disappear into the roseflower and the roseflower disappears into you – the observer becomes the observed and there is no distinction left, there are not two things confronting each other but a meeting, merging, melting into each other – then boundaries are no longer there. Somehow you have entered into the rose and the rose has entered into you. And this is possible, this transfiguration is possible. Because it is possible, religion is relevant, meaningful – otherwise religion won’t be meaningful. Being with the roseflower, you enter into God. Then all possibilities can be used as doors to the divine.I have heard….Bernard Synon writes: Think of a man driving up a country hill road, who upon reaching the top, stops his car and walks over to a nearby five-barred gate. Leaning on it he gazes with pleasure at the vista spread out before him. There is a sky of breathless blue, full of birds wheeling lazily in the warm sun. Fields of emerald green ripple in the soft breeze, while on the hillsides cattle and sheep graze peacefully. The whole scene is one of tranquil beauty and the man draws a deep breath saying, “It is really lovely.”At that moment another car draws up and the first man ;s joined by another. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” murmurs the first man.The other man is silent for a moment, then says thought-fully, “Have you ever considered what is really happening out there? These graceful birds who wheel in the sky are seeking food. How graceful do they look to the insects they gobble? or to the writhing worms they drag from the earth with cruel and rending beaks?”The first man shifts uneasily, “Ah, come now!”The other man speaks again. “Those sheep so peacefully grazing – they are being fattened and will soon be dragged to the slaughterhouse trembling with fear as they smell the blood-stained floor on which they will die. Their little lambs will be snatched away to dangle from butchers’ hooks.”The first man is silent as the voice continues.“This emerald green grace rippling in the sun – within it murder and mayhem are constantly taking place as spiders devour flies and large insects devour the smaller. If the sounds could be interpreted and magnified, screams of pain and fear would reverberate throughout this lush meadow.”The first is a poet; he looks through the eyes of positivity. The second is a critic; he looks through the eyes of negativity. Bernard Synon ends this small parable here. I would like to bring another man, the mystic, in.A third car comes and out gets a mystic who listens to the stories of both the men and laughs. And he says, “Life is not either/or. Life is both/and. You are both right, but life is more than that. Yes, there is dark night and there is bright day, there is summer and there is winter, and there is life and there is death. You are both right, but you have chosen one standpoint against the other. You see only half the picture of life and you try to impose that half on the whole. Then you go wrong. I don’t choose, I simply accept as it is.”Yes, there is death and there is life and both are intertwined. Seeing both together one transcends; one transcends to a higher peak. Then one is no longer dominated by any standpoint. Then you see life and death as part of each other, and then you are so transcendental to- both that you see eternity. Then there is neither beauty nor ugliness, there is simply truth.Beauty is choosing one standpoint, ugliness is choosing another standpoint. Truth is not choosing any standpoint at all. Truth is not choosing.God is not any aspect of reality. God is all the aspects together without any choice. If you choose, you miss; if you don’t choose, there is no way to miss. But there is a problem…. When you choose, you can remain yourself – all choice feeds the ego. When you don’t choose, you disappear. You disappear with your choice, likes, dislikes. You cannot exist without choosing. The ego cannot exist without choice. Choice is its very breath. Just as you cannot exist if the breath disappears, so ego cannot exist without choosing, without taking a standpoint, without being for or against. Once you don’t take any standpoint, you disappear. In that disappearance is God.You will never meet God, remember. Nobody has ever met God. When people say that they have met God, what they mean Is that they have disappeared, only God is. The ego disappears and then there is experiencing – continuous, constant, eternal. That energy, that ever-flowing energy, is what God is.So remember, God is not an object of experience, neither is he the subject of experience – God is experiencing itself. God is not static but a process – evolving, expanding, exploding, exploring. It goes on and on. It is an adventure; it is a pilgrimage from nowhere to nowhere. God is not there in the heavens or somewhere else – God is not there, God is here. And God is not then, God is now. And God is not that, God is this.If you can understand these few words: here, now, this…. These three words are the three pillars of Sufism, of Zen, of all that is essential religion. These three words – let them vibrate in your being again and again: here, now, this.Those who think of God as that – far away, somewhere else – are just imagining, and missing the obvious which is just close by. God is not far away. He is closer than you are to yourself. He’s your innermost core, how he can be far away? And God is not then, there – in the past, in the future. It is not that God used to walk in the days of Moses and talk to people, it is not that God used to talk to Mohammed and will not talk to you. It is not that he used to sing songs to the seers of the Upanishads and he has forgotten you or abandoned you. God is now. God is always now. God is never past, never future. In relationship to God, past and future are meaningless words. You cannot say “God was,” you cannot say “God will be.” You have always to say “God is.” There is only one tense: is, present. And God is here this very moment.If you can be in a state of experiencing, God is here, now, this. If you cannot be in the state of experiencing, God is never, nowhere. This state of experiencing is what Sufis call meditation. But this God here, now, this, is a dangerous God. You have to disappear for it to be. You have to dissolve into it. It is risky. We have created substitutes to avoid the risk.It was announced in church that a substitute preacher would preach.A little boy leaned over and asked his mother, “What is a substitute?”“Well, for example, son, if you threw your baseball through the window and broke it, and we didn’t have another real pane, we could put a piece of cardboard in the window…that is what we call a substitute.”When the substitute minister had finished preaching that morning, the little boy leaned over and said, “Mother, this sure is not a substitute…he is a real pain!”All your substitutes are real pains because no substitute can ever satisfy. No substitute can ever fulfill, no substitute can ever quench your thirst. But man is very cunning and goes on creating substitutes. Your temples are substitute temples, your teachers are substitute teachers, your prayers are substitute prayers. Your own prayer has not arisen yet, and you have not yet found the temple of experiencing. But remember, you choose these substitutes, and then you suffer. And when you suffer, you blame God.I have heard….Cohen, aged eighty-six, had lived through beatings in Polish pogroms, concentration camps in Germany, and dozens of other anti-Semitic calamities.“Ah, Lord!” he prayed, sitting in the synagogue. “Isn’t it true that we are your chosen people?”And from the heavens boomed a voice, “Yes, Cohen, the Jews are my chosen people!”“Well, then,” wailed the old man, “isn’t it time you chose somebody else?”No people are God’s chosen people. You have chosen to be God s chosen people – and then you suffer. Jews have suffered for a really long time. And all their misery can be condensed into this single thing: they have chosen to be the chosen people of God. That very ego has created great antagonism. And they are stubbornly clinging to it. The more they have suffered, the more stubborn they have become.But God has not chosen anybody. How can God choose? All is his. All is he. There is no question of choice. But we choose our ideas and then those ideas become prisons, calamities. Beware! If you are suffering, then look back – you must have chosen something wrong, otherwise you cannot suffer. This is my basic observation after observing thousands of people and their miseries. Whenever I see somebody suffering and in misery, I have by and by become absolutely certain about one thing – that he is responsible, that he has chosen some wrong ideas, that he has chosen some wrong notions. But those who suffer always throw the responsibility on others. And sometimes it seems very unjust. If a couple comes to me and the wife or the husband is miserable but the other partner is not miserable at all, the miserable partner tries to throw the responsibility on the other – “He is responsible for my misery.”It seems very hard to tell the person who is in misery that he must be responsible for his misery – because nobody else can be responsible for his misery. If the other is happy he must have chosen different values. He must have chosen values that give happiness, health, wholeness. If you have chosen wrong values, you suffer, but you can always manipulate and interpret in such a way that your suffering seems as if it has been done to you, Nobody can make you suffer. It is always basically you who decide whether to suffer or not. In every situation you can take a standpoint from which you can get out of suffering, and in every situation you can take a standpoint from which you can create as much suffering as you like. But people like to suffer. There is a reason for it: the more they suffer the more they are. In suffering the ego feels strengthened; in bliss it disappears.So you go on saying that you need bliss, that you seek bliss, but when I look into you I find just the opposite. You seek misery, you live on misery, you look for misery. You go on saying that you seek bliss and you go on looking for misery. Unless this mechanism is understood perfectly well, you will never be able to know what God is. God is bliss. And bliss is possible only when you have understood the phenomenon of how you create your misery. Substitutes create misery.For example, you wanted to love a woman but love is dangerous, unsocial, rebellious. And who knows what might happen? So you settled for marriage. Now marriage is a substitute for love. You will never be happy, you will be miserable. Of course you will be comfortably miserable, conveniently miserable – but miserable all the same. You will have a certain security, a good bank balance, prestige, respect, but you will not be happy. Look at your respectable people. They have all that they always thought would help them, they have it. Money they have, power they have, prestige they have. But look into their eyes – they are deserts. Not a single flower blooms, there is no joy. They are just dragging themselves somehow. They settled for a substitute.Go and sit by the comer of a temple or a mosque and watch people coming and going. Do you see any celebration? Do you see any real joy? Do you see any dance? – nothing! People just walk into the temple as part of their formal duty, and get out as soon as they can. They have to fulfill a certain duty; they have to show society that they are religious people – it pays. But there is no joy. The temple is a substitute.See people praying. Not a single tear comes to their eyes. See people praying. No radiance is on their faces. Not even a ripple of dance is around them. And they go on praying for their whole life. It is a sheer wastage of time and energy. They have chosen a substitute. Beware of substitutes. Only then can you find God. God has no substitute. God is the really real, the truth.Now this small parable.Imam Mohammed Baqir is said to have related this illustrative fable:”Finding I could speak the language of ants, I approached one and inquired, ‘What is God like? Does he resemble the ant?’ ”He answered, ‘God! No, indeed – we have only a single sting, but God, he has two!’"That’s how all your religions and philosophies are – God is just your magnified roop, form. You have one sting, he has two. You live seventy years, he lives eternally. You become old, he never becomes old. But the difference is of quantity, not of quality. Your God is your projected, reformed, modified, decorated form. Your God is you as you would like to be.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Why did Van Gogh kill himself? Why did Hemingway put a shotgun in his mouth and blow the top of his head off? Why do they poison their rivers, their air and their own food? Why do they justify it all with their reasoning, psychology and laws? Why do they come here for a couple of months, and why do you have so much compassion for them? I am sick and tired of them!The question is from Prageet.First, there are suicides and suicides. Each suicide has something unique about it – as each life has something unique about it. Your life is yours and your death is also going to be yours. Sometimes it is possible that your life may not be yours, but it is not possible that your death may not be yours.Life can be anonymous. If you live with others, you can compromise too much, you can imitate – but death is always unique because death is alone. You die alone. There is no society. They don’t exist in your death. The crowd, the mass, is there when you are alive, but when you die you die absolutely alone, utterly alone.Death has a quality.So sometimes it happens that a man may commit suicide because he has become tired of the anonymous existence. He has become tired of all the compromises that one has to make in order to live. That’s why van Gogh committed suicide – he was a rare man, one of the greatest painters ever. But he had to make compromises every moment of his life. He got tired of those compromises; he could no longer tolerate being part of the crowd mind. He killed himself in order to be himself. He was only thirty-three or something when he killed himself. If he had been in the East there would have been another alternative: suicide or sannyas. These are the two alternatives which every man who has some sense of life, of individuality, has to choose between.In the West nothing like sannyas has been in existence. If you become a Christian monk that is again a compromise; you still remain part of the society. Even if you go out of the society you remain part of it. The society goes on controlling you – it has a remote control system. It does not allow you to really go out of it. You remain a Christian, you remain a Catholic, even when you have moved to a monastery. It does not make much difference.In the East, sannyas has a totally different flavor. The moment you become a sannyasin you are no longer a Hindu, you are no longer a Mohammedan, you are no longer a Christian. The moment you become a sannyasin, you drop out of all collectivities. You become yourself. You will be surprised to know that in the East people don’t commit suicide as much as in the West. And the difference is big – too big to be just accidental. In the East we have created a creative kind of suicide, that is sannyas. You can still live, but you can live in your own way. Then the need for suicide disappears, or becomes very much less.In the West it always has happened that the unique individuals have to commit suicide. The mediocre go on living, the unique have to commit suicide. A van Gogh, a Hemingway. a Mayakovski, a Nijinsky – these are unique individuals. Either they have to commit suicide or they have to go mad – the society drives them mad. The society puts so much pressure on them that either they have to yield to the society and become just anonymous, or they have to go mad, or they have to commit suicide. And all are destructive alternatives.Nietzsche went mad; that was his way of committing suicide. Nijinsky committed suicide; that was his way of going mad. Nietzsche had the same quality as a buddha. Had he been in the East he would have become a buddha, but the West does not give that alternative at all. He had to go mad. Van Gogh had a unique quality of tremendous intelligence, creativity. He could have moved on the path of sannyas and samadhi, but there was no door open. He got tired; just going on living a compromise was hurting too much. It was not worth it. One day he completed his painting – the painting that he had always wanted to do – and that day he felt, “Now there is no need to make any compromise with anybody for any reason. I have done my paintings, I have done my best. It is time to disappear.”He had always wanted to paint a sunrise. He had painted sunrises for years, but still something was missing and lacking and he would paint again and again. The day his painting was complete and he was fulfilled and satisfied and contented that it had happened – that very moment it was absolutely clear to him that now there was no need – “I was only waiting for this painting. I am fulfilled in it, I have bloomed. Now why make compromises? For what?” He committed suicide.He was not mad, he was simply not mediocre. His suicide was not a crime, his suicide was simply a condemnation of your so-called society which asks for so many compromises. Mediocre people are ready to compromise; they have nothing to lose. In fact they feel very good being part of a crowd, of a mob, because in the crowd they need not think about themselves as mediocre; all are just like them. They can lose themselves in the crowd. They can lose themselves and forget themselves in the mass mind, and in the mass mind they have no responsibility. They need not bother whether they are intelligent or unintelligent; they need not bother whether they are asleep or awakened.But a man who has some soul in him will find it continuously heavy to go on degrading himself, to go on compromising for small ordinary trivia, meaningless things – for bread and butter, for a house, a shelter, for clothes.Van Gogh was very poor because his paintings wouldn’t sell. His paintings were at least a hundred years ahead of his time. That is always so. The greater a man’s intelligence, the bigger is the distance between the people that exist by his side and the people for whom his painting, his poetry, his assertions, will be meaningful. He comes before his time.That’s why Buddha’s assertions are still relevant, still fresh; not rotten, not old. His time is coming now. It is as if he came two thousand five hundred years before his time.Vincent van Gogh’s paintings are now becoming great paintings; great appreciation has arisen for him. He came a little early. They always do. His brother used to give him enough money just to keep his body and soul together, because his paintings wouldn’t sell. So just enough money…. And van Gogh would eat for half the week and for half the week he would fast to save money to paint.Just think how difficult it was for him to live. Nobody would appreciate his painting. Once it happened that his brother made an arrangement. He told a friend, “You go and purchase at least one painting. At least once in his life he should have the joy of somebody purchasing his painting. You take money from me. Go and purchase a painting.”The friend went. Van Gogh was very happy. This was the first man who had come to appreciate his painting. But soon he recognized the fact that the man was not interested…. Van Gogh was thrilled! He was dancing and he was showing his paintings, all the paintings that he had done. But the man was not interested, he was just fulfilling a duty. He said, “Anyone will do. You just give me any painting and take this money.”It hurt van Gogh even more. He threw the man out with his money and he said, “I suspect it is my brother behind it. He always wanted somebody to purchase my painting and it seems he has sent you. You get out from here! I am not going to sell. I wanted somebody to love my painting, to see what I have done, but you are not the person. You don’t have any perception, you don’t have any aesthetic sense, you don’t know what paintings mean. You simply get out!”So not a single painting was sold. Starving, fasting, he was painting three days, four days a week. And for three, four days he would be able to eat. The day he completed the painting that he always wanted to complete….He was madly in love with the sun. The sun is the source of life. Maybe the sun was his symbol for God, maybe through the sun he was searching for God. The day he painted his sunrise, he committed suicide. This suicide is not a crime, it is simply a shout against the mediocre society that we have created in the world. It is simply a protest that for those who have life. this society is not worth living in. This society is only for the mediocre. This society is only for those who really don’t want to love, who just want to drag.But each suicide will have a different quality to it.You ask why Hemingway committed suicide. Hemingway’s suicide has another flavor, different from van Gogh’s. Hemingway’s whole search was the search for freedom. Birth happened; it was not your choice. You were thrown into life – as the existentialists say. You were thrown into it, it was not your choice. Nobody ever asked you whether you wanted to be born or not. So birth is not freedom. It has already happened.The next most important thing is love, but that is also not possible to do. When it happens, it happens; you cannot manage it, you cannot will it. If you want to love a person just through will, it is impossible. It happens when it happens – -suddenly you are in love, That’s why we use the phrase “falling in love.” You “fall” into it. But you cannot will it; it comes from the unknown. It is just like birth. It is as if God manages that you fall in love with this person; it is as if the decision comes from the blue. You are not the decisive factor, you are more like a victim. You cannot do anything against it. If it happens you have to go into it; if it does not happen you can do whatsoever you want and it will not happen. Nobody can produce love on order.And the most important three things in life are birth, love, death. Death is the only thing that you can do something about – you can commit suicide.Hemingway’s search was for freedom. He wanted to do something that he had done. He had not managed birth, he had not managed love, now there was only death. There was only one thing which if you wanted to do, you could do. It would be your act, an individual act, done by you.Death has a mysterious quality about it; it is a very strange paradox. If you are standing by the side of a small baby, just born, and if somebody asks you to say something absolutely certain about the baby – the baby is in his crib, asleep, relaxing – what can you say absolutely certainly? You can say only one thing: that he will die.This is a very strange thing to say. Anything else is uncertain. He may love, he may not love. He may succeed, he may fail. He may be a sinner, he may be a saint. All are “maybes,” there is nothing certain about anything. It is not possible to predict anything. There is only one thing you can say – and it looks very absurd at the side of a baby who has just been born – only one thing is absolutely certain: that he will die. This prediction can be made, and your prediction is never going to be wrong.So death has a certain quality of certainty about it – it is going to happen. And at the same time it has something absolutely uncertain about it too. One never knows when it is going to happen. There is certainty that it is going to happen and uncertainty about when it is going to happen. Both this certainty and uncertainty about death make it a mystery, a paradox. If you go on living, it will happen – but then again it will come from out of the blue. You will not be the decisive factor. Birth happened, love happened – was death also to happen? That made Hemingway uneasy. He wanted to do at least one thing in life to which he could have his own signature, about which he could say “This I did.” That’s why he committed suicide. Suicide was an exercise in freedom.You cannot know anything about death unless you go into it. Hemingway’s attitude was that if it is going to happen then why be dragged into it? Why not go into it on your own? It is going to happen. His whole life’s concern was death, that’s why he became so interested in bullfights. Death was very close by. He was constantly. attracted by the theme of death – what it was. But you cannot know. Even if somebody is dying in front of you, you don’t know anything about death. You simply know that the breathing has disappeared, that this man’s eyes won’t open again, that this man will never speak again, that his heart is no longer beating – that’s all. But this is nothing. How can you know about death from these things? The mystery remains a mystery, you have not even touched it.You can know it only by going into it. But if you are dragged into it there are more possibilities of your becoming unconscious – because you are being dragged into it. Almost always people die unconsciously. Before death happens they become so afraid, so very afraid, that a kind of coma surrounds them and protects them. It is a natural anesthetic. When you go for an operation, you need an anesthetic – and death is the greatest operation there is: the soul and body will be torn apart. So nature has some built-in mechanism – before you start dying you go into a coma; all consciousness disappears. In the first place your consciousness was not very much. Even while you were alive, it was just a tiny flicker. When the wind of death comes, that flicker is gone – there is complete darkness.Hemingway wanted to go into death fully conscious. It was a conscious exercise in dying. But that is possible only through suicide or through samadhi. These are the only two possibilities. You can die consciously in only two ways. You can commit suicide; you can manage your own death. You can have your revolver ready, contemplate it, put it to your chest or your head, pull the trigger yourself consciously, see the explosion and see death. This is one possibility. It is a very destructive possibility.Another possibility is to go more and more into meditation, to attain to a state of awareness that cannot be drowned by death. Then there is no need to commit suicide. Then whenever death comes, let it come. You will be dying fully alert, aware, watchful.So it is suicide or sannyas, suicide or samadhi.And in the West, sannyas and samadhi have not been available. That’s why these two very rare people committed suicide. And they have not been understood. People think that they were kind of ill, neurotic, mad, morbid, unhealthy. They were not. I am not saying that all people who commit suicide are the same. There are neurotic people who will commit suicide. There are morbid people who are more concerned with death than they are concerned with life, who enjoy destructiveness. They are self-destructive mechanisms who go on poisoning themselves.I’m not talking about all suicides – but you have asked about these two. And there are as many as people commit suicide. But these two are very rare. These two are very potential. If Vincent van Gogh or Hemingway had been in the East or had had the Eastern attitude, they would have flowered as great sannyasins.And then you ask: “Why do they poison their rivers, their air and their own food?” That is again creating a mass suicide very slowly.When you live unintelligently, insensitively, you live such a dull kind of life that your interest naturally starts moving towards death. That’s why there are constant wars. And the periods that you call days of peace are not much concerned with peace, they are only preparations for a new war. So either you are in war or you prepare for war. There are only two kinds of periods in history: actual fighting and preparation for the fighting. There has never been a period of peace. The peace is absolutely false, pretentious. Underneath the peace, underground, you are preparing for another war.Why is there so much attraction for war? – because only when people are dying do they become a little alert. When there is danger you become a little alert. You don’t know how to be alert in any other way. That’s why when there is war you will see people’s faces more alive. Something is happening. Otherwise nothing happens. It is the same old tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing. Every day you get up and the same life starts in the same rut. Every night you go to bed and you have again ended a repetition of a day. And you can be certain that tomorrow you will do the same again. When war happens, things are no longer a routine; suddenly there is news in the air; something new is happening. So people are destructive – they create war.And they create many kinds of war. They have been constantly fighting with nature. And nature is our life, nature is our very source. But even a man like Bertrand Russell writes about “the conquest of nature.” Conquest? the very idea is aggressive. It is as if we are against nature or nature is against us. We are one. We are nature. The trees are nature – are people not nature? The air is nature and the sun and moon are nature – are the eyes and the smiles and the tears not nature?Just as the earth goes on growing into trees, so it goes on growing into people too. It is the same nature, it is the same ecology, it is one whole – and it is interdependent. And everything depends on everything else.But the Western mind has been very aggressive. Nature has to be conquered. You have to fight amongst yourselves, you have to fight with nature; not only that, you have to fight with yourself. These are the three fights: man fights with other men, man fights with nature, man fights with himself. When man fights with other men it is politics. When man fights with nature it is science. And when man fights with himself it is religion. This is a foolish kind of approach – as if the whole thing depends on fighting.Whom do you call the religious man? – the one who fights with himself continuously, repressing, cutting his life into fragments, choosing, judging, destroying, becoming split and schizophrenic. This is the same attitude – an aggressive, violent attitude. It shows in politics because it is the same man. It shows in religion because it is the same man. It shows in what you do with nature.You ask me: “Why do they poison their rivers, their air and their own food?” – because they are poisoned with violence. So whatsoever they do becomes poisonous. They are suicidal because they don’t know what life is and they don’t know how to live it. They don’t know the joy and the celebration. They don’t know that it is a gift, that it is a great gift. They don’t know gratitude. So they go on being destructive in every possible way.The Western attitude has been growing more and more towards death and every day it is bringing death closer to this planet. Any day this planet can explode into utter annihilation. The whole intelligence – technology, science, politics, everything – is directed towards one thing: how to commit a global suicide.But it is the same man. I would like you to become just the contrary: the man who loves, who does not fight; the man who loves himself. That’s why my religion is a love for yourself. The man who loves himself loves others. Then there will be a totally different kind of politics; it will be based on love. The man who loves himself and loves other people, loves nature too – because trees are people, birds are people, animals are people. Then there will be a different kind of science in the world. But the science has to come from religion, because religion is the deepest core. Because you hate yourself, you hate others, you hate nature. Those are just reverberations of the original hate that you go on carrying with yourself.“Why do they justify it all with their reasoning, psychology and laws?” What else can they do? One has to justify everything. In fact, when you are doing something wrong, you have to justify it immediately, otherwise you yourself will become aware of the wrong that you have done. And you will be a criminal in your own eyes. To avoid that, you have to find rationalizations.Once a scientist was staying with me. I love my garden to be a jungle, so I had a beautiful jungle around my house. The scientist said to me, “Are you aware of what you are doing? If you allow these trees to grow so close to the house they will run over the house. These are dangerous things. There is a constant fight between man and trees. If you don’t keep them away, within years their roots will enter into your walls and they will destroy your house.” He said, “I hate trees.”That has been the attitude of man: destroy. If you take that attitude then everything becomes inimical – even poor trees, innocent trees. And there is some fact to it, so you can base your reasoning on it. Yes, it is true that if trees are left to grow completely in freedom then they will run over your towns and your houses. That’s true, it is factual. But to base your whole life on that small fact and make it a philosophy, is wrong.The other thing is as much a fact as this – we exist with the trees. Destroy all the trees and you will die. You breathe oxygen in, trees exhale oxygen. You exhale carbon dioxide, trees inhale carbon dioxide. So when you are surrounded by trees you are more alive. It is not just poetry.When you go into a jungle and a great jubilation comes to your heart, you suddenly feel more alive – as if the greenery makes you also green. It is not just poetry, it is pure science. It is because there is more oxygen, more life throbbing all around, more vitality. And when you breathe that oxygen in, your blood is purified; you can throw the toxins out more easily and you live at the maximum.So there is a partnership with the trees: they take your poison in and purify it and create oxygen for you; you take oxygen in, you use the oxygen and throw the carbon dioxide outside. Trees use carbon dioxide as their food. So there is an absolute partnership. Man cannot live without trees and trees cannot live without man.Animals are needed for trees and trees are needed for animals. They are not separate; they are part of one rhythm. This too is a fact. And life should not avoid this. One has to understand the totality of it; and one has to live in such a way that no one fact becomes, or pretends to become, the whole. There is no need to destroy. There is no need to fight. That is the approach of Tao, the approach of Sufism, Zen.There is a famous Zen story….A king told his old carpenter that he would like a certain table. The old man said, “I am very old and my son is yet not ready. He is learning by and by. But I will try, I will do my best. Give me time.”For three days the old man disappeared in the forest. After three days he came back.The king asked, “It takes three days to bring a little wood for the table?”The old carpenter said, “Sometimes it takes three days, sometimes three months. And sometimes you may not find wood for three years. It is a difficult art.”The king was puzzled. He said, “Explain it. What do you mean? Explain in detail.”And the man said, “First I have to go on a fast – because only when I am on a fast does my mind by and by slow down. When my mind slows down, all thoughts disappear. all aggression disappears. Then I am no longer violent, then there is pure compassion and love – a different vibe. When I feel that vibe of no-mind, then I go into the forest, because only through that vibe can I find the right tree. With aggression, how can you find the right tree?” And I have to ask the trees themselves whether one of them is willing to become a table. I go, I look around, and when I feel that this tree is willing…. That willingness can be felt only when I have no mind. So there is fasting, meditating – and when I become absolutely empty, I simply roam around with the trees to have a feel. “When I feel that this tree fits, I sit by its side and ask its permission – ‘I am going to cut a branch from you. Are you willing?’ If the tree says yes wholeheartedly only then do I cut – otherwise who am I to cut its branch?”Now this is a totally different approach. There is no fight between the man and the tree, there is a friendship. The man tries to fall en rapport with the trees, and he asks their permission. This is absurd for a Western mind. The Western mind says, “What nonsense are you talking about? Asking a tree? Have you gone crazy? And how can the tree say yes or no?” But now even Western science is gradually becoming aware that the tree can say yes or no. Now sophisticated instruments exist which can detect the moods of a tree – whether the tree is willing, whether the tree is unwilling, whether the tree is happy or unhappy? Now subtle instruments have been developed – just like a cardiogram. You can have a cardiogram of the tree. Electronic instruments can detect the moods of the tree.When a woodcutter comes around the tree the tree is shaken with fear, is sad, is afraid, clings to her life. No Taoist will cut a tree in that state, no, not at all. If the tree is not willing, then who are we? When the tree on its own is ready to share, then only can it be cut.Now this table will have a different quality to it. It has been a gift from the tree; it has not been taken away. The tree has not been robbed, it has not been conquered. It will not be difficult to understand that this table will have a different vibe to it. It will have something sacred about it. If you put this table in your room you will create a certain kind of space around the table which will not be possible with other tables. It will be there befriending you because you befriended it. It will be there as part of your family, not as a limb cut from an enemy.The Western mind has been too aggressive against itself and against nature. It has created schizophrenia against people, it has created politics, war, and it has created the ecological crisis.But things have gone now to the extreme. Either man has to turn back and drop the Western aggressive attitude or man has to get ready to say good-bye to this planet. This planet cannot tolerate man any more; it has already tolerated him for long enough.“Why do they come here for a couple of months and why do you have so much compassion for them?”They need compassion because only through compassion will they learn compassion. There is no other way to learn it. If they can feel my compassion and my love, they will start being compassionate and being loving. It is only in the milieu of love that one learns love. I am just creating a climate here. It is not a teaching, it is a climate.And I don’t have anything else to give. To whosoever comes I can give my love and my compassion – because that is all that I have.And Prageet says:“ “I am sick and tired of them.”If you are sick and tired of them then you are one of them. That very attitude of being sick and tired is violent.Why this question? Such a long question has arisen in Prageet’s mind, and this is his first question. He has been here for almost two years. Why has such a long question arisen? He has a very violent mind. He is a good group leader, but a very violent one. He runs the gestalt and the bioenergetic groups and he goes on beating people. And he had never asked this question up to now. But just a few days ago one guy beat him really hard. Hence the question.If you are tired and sick of them, you are one of them. Feel compassion, feel love. Help people through love and compassion. I know that sometimes you have to be hard too, just because of compassion, but that is another quality of hardness. Sometimes you have to push their buttons, but when you push their buttons, naturally they can go to the extreme – they can hit you. A real group leader is always in danger. That is the risk. You provoke people to bring their negativities to the surface, and when those negativities come to the surface, naturally you can be one of the targets. You are in danger.But a group leader will accept it with gratitude. When somebody hits a group leader, he will bow down to him and say thank you – because that is what he wanted. He was creating a situation in which the anger could bubble up and burst. Once that anger has gone, the man will have a totally different kind of energy. The group process is a catharsis; it is a process of taking the pus out of your system. But when you are taking pus out of a system, sometimes a few drops of pus may fall upon your clothes – that’s natural. When you do surgery your hands will be bloody and you will need a good bath after it.Don’t be angry. Otherwise you become part of them.Now Prageet says, “I don’t want to lead any groups nor do I want to Rolf people. Maybe I could work in the garden?” No, not at all. I love my trees!The second question:Osho,In answering my question, you kept referring to me as “she.” So you have found me out. Even growing a beard, I could not deceive you. Only one small request: may I keep the swami in the front of my name?Sorry, Ma Anand Sucheta. I goofed again.Yes, it has happened. Just the other day Swami Anand Sucheta asked a question and I continued to refer to him as she.Now there are two other Suchetas, both are she. One Sucheta is he, two Suchetas are she. They have also written questions to me. But the swami who asked the question has really understood the point of it. “Swami” was clearly there, “swami” was written on the question – but for two reasons I was goofing. One was that Anand Sucheta really has the heart of a woman. By growing a beard it makes no difference.There is a biological he and she and there is a psychological he and she. Sometimes when I am giving sannyas to a person I have to think twice whether to call him ma or swami. Not to create an embarrassing situation for you I go on giving swami and ma according to your biological body. But sometimes it is very clear that to call this person “swami” seems absolutely wrong. He has such a feminine heart and his path is going to be love. He is so receptive.Just the other night Prabha was here. Now he has a heart of a woman. He is a very big man physically, but he has a very, very soft vulnerable heart of a woman – a very loving heart. His psychological being is a she. And that is really more important because my work is concerned not with your biology but with your psychology.But I am happy that Anand Sucheta understood the point. He says: “In answering my question, you kept referring to me as “she.” So you have found me out. Even growing a beard I could not deceive you. Only one small request: may I keep the swami in front of my name?”That you can go on keeping. But go on knowing that you are feminine. And be joyous about it – because my understanding is that the feminine mind is closer to God than the masculine mind. The masculine mind is the Western mind and the feminine mind is the Eastern mind. The masculine mind is aggressive and the feminine mind is receptive. And God comes easily to those who can receive him – like a womb; to those who can become pregnant with him.Go on keeping your swami name. That is for others. But for your own self go on remembering. Become more and more feminine. Allow your femininity to take possession of you.Secondly, although Swami Anand Sucheta asked the question, the question was more relevant to one of the Ma Anand Suchetas. She did not ask it but really she should have asked it. It was more relevant.So when sometimes I goof, I goof for reasons. Try to find out why. Meditate over it. When I make a mistake, meditate over it and you will always be enriched by it.The third question:Osho,Every time you come and go in the lecture, I am worried you may miss a step and fall.PS You look so drunk.That’s true. But I have been drunk for so long that you need not be afraid. For twenty-five years I have been that way. In the beginning it really was difficult to walk. I was very much afraid myself that I might fall any moment. Somehow the body had become so distant and there was such a gap – earth and sky apart. It took time for me to settle down. Although everything has settled down, that drunkenness is still there. This is God-drunkenness. Once you have drunk from the spring of the divine you are never in a state of being undrunk. Once is enough. A drop of it is enough to drown you forever. You need not drink again and again; you will never become thirsty again.I can understand your question, but don’t be worried. Somehow…. I call it “somehow” because I am not managing it. I cannot manage it because I am not there to manage it; it has managed itself. Somehow I remain drunk and I remain aware.Sufis have a particular principle about it – it will be meaningful to understand it. They call it an oscillation between the two states, ahwal. The two states are baka and fana: individuality and dissolution of the individuality. Between these two there has to be a kind of rhythm, a synchronization. There are people who are in their baka, but they don’t know anything about fana. Then there are people who are in their fana, but they forget how to come back to baka. Both are lopsided.A kind of balance is needed between the two – drunkenness and awareness. One has to be drunkenly aware, or alertly drunk. That is the highest alchemy – where opposites meet and they become one. That is the greatest synthesis.It is said of al-Junnaid, master of al-Hillaj Mansoor, that he used to impose disciplines to establish a rhythm between these two polarities. It is reported that the master once ordered a disciple, al-Shibli…al-Shibli later on became a great master himself. This man, al-Junnaid, created many masters. He had a great creative energy to create masters. He was one of the masters of masters. When al-Shibli attained his satori. his samadhi, his fana, he became incapable of coming back to the baka. He was so drunk, so lost, that the master was very angry with him.He said, “You listen, Shibli! First you were clinging to your baka state. Now you have moved to the other and now you cling to it. Clinging remains. Clinging has to go. one has to be more liquid. One has to be capable of moving from one to the other easily, smoothly – just like a pendulum that swings from left to right, right to left. Without any hitch, hesitation, without any clinging, one has to attain to that smooth movement.”But al-Shibli could not follow. Then the master said, “If your self-discipline is not sufficient to restrain your mystic states, ahwal, it is better that you admit yourself to a mad asylum for a time. “This is strange advice from a master – “Go to a madhouse, admit yourself, and stay there until you attain a discipline by which you can be alert and drunk together.”This has been one of the greatest problems on the path of the ultimate ecstasy, and you will find this phenomenon in many ways. You see Buddha. Buddha is drunk and alert together. Ramakrishna is not alert. He is drunk. Something of the balance is missing. If you ask me, I cannot tell you to make Ramakrishna a goal. When Ramakrishna would get into his fana state, for days he would remain almost unconscious. Once he remained unconscious in a coma for six days. And when he came out of it he started crying, and he started asking God, “Take me back. Let me go into that again.” He became like a child. It is better than the state of baka – this ecstasy is good – but there is a higher stage to it. That is Buddha’s state. He is drunk and yet alert. One has never seen him unconscious. He has managed the ultimate synthesis.The way of ecstasy is also the way of sobriety, because it is the science of the knowledge of states. As Sheik ibn Ajiba has said, “A drunkenness with consciousness of the state is higher than drunkenness with forgetfulness. Ecstasy is not the goal but the means; nevertheless an absolutely essential means.”So you need not be afraid. I am drunk and alert together. My drunkenness takes care that I don’t become so much alert that I am fixed in the baka. My awareness takes care that I don’t become fixed in the state of fana. They help each other like the two wings of a bird – they are opposite and yet complementary. With one wing you cannot fly, you will need both wings.And that is my teaching. My whole effort here is to make you alert and drunk together. Hence I go on telling you to dance and abandon yourself in dance, and I go on teaching you ways of meditation, awareness, vipassana – so that both can grow together. The day you are drunk, suddenly you will find a light burning in you which keeps you alert. And certainly, as Ajiba says, a drunkenness with awareness is higher than a drunkenness with forgetfulness.The fourth question:Osho,During the day when I am bouncing around, I completely lose myself. I am enjoying, but where does meditation come in?The very enjoyment is what meditation is all about.The question is from Vidya. Now she is hankering for some misery. She is enjoying but she cannot enjoy enjoying; she wants to create some trouble for herself. It is very difficult to be really happy and happy with happiness. Once you are happy you start looking for some trouble. You cannot believe that you can be happy, that you can really be happy. Something must be wrong. When you are miserable you are perfectly happy – that is your state, you know it, you are well acquainted with it; that is your identity. When you are miserable you are happy, because you know that this is how you are – but when you are happy then you start becoming miserable. You cannot trust happiness, it is so unknown.That’s what meditation is: to enjoy, to celebrate.Hoping to develop his son’s character, a father once gave him a penny and a quarter as he was leaving for Sunday school. “Now, Peter, you put whichever one you want to in the offering plate,” he said.When the boy returned, his father asked which coin he had given. Peter answered, “Well, just before they sent around the plate the preacher said, ‘The Lord loveth a cheerful giver,’ and I knew I could give the penny a lot more cheerfully than I could give the quarter, so I gave it.”I perfectly agree with the boy. Whatsoever is cheerful is good. Whatsoever makes you cheerful is religious. Let cheerfulness be your only religion, the only law. Let there be no other law. Just enjoy and enjoy tremendously, totally. Meditation will come like a shadow. It is meditation coming; it is the sound of the footsteps of meditation coming to you.The fifth question:Osho,It is a long, long journey between the preparation and the ultimate; between the state of robopathology and enlightenment. Must one suffer during the period of the “journey” or is there a possibility of peace? Please explain.It depends on you. It depends on what attitude you take about it. Waiting can become great joy if you trust that it is going to happen, if you trust that it is coming closer every moment. If you trust that it has already started happening because you have started moving towards it, then each moment that passes will make you more and more joyous. The home is coming closer.But you can be very miserable if you take the. attitude – “How long do I have to wait? How far is the goal? Why have I to wait so long? Why have others reached? Why are others reaching before me?” Then you can create a thousand and one problems for yourself and you can get miserable. And remember, the law is that the more miserable you get in your waiting, the longer the waiting will be – because God cannot happen in a miserable mind. The happier the waiting, the closer you are coming. If your waiting can be your total joy, God will happen this very moment – no time gap is needed. It all depends on your patience.But when I say patience, I don’t mean a negative quality, I mean a joyous patience – thrilled, expectant. It is going to happen! When it is going to happen is not the point – it is going to happen.It all depends on how you interpret. Interpretation is a process that has to be understood very deeply. You can see a rosebush and you can start counting the thorns. If you count the thorns, there are millions. And in that very counting you will become incapable of seeing the rose. Counting the thorns, being hurt by the thorns, your hands will be bloody. You will be angry, you will be frustrated, you will be in despair – and your eyes will not be capable of seeing the rose. How can you see the rose with so many thorns? Thorns will be floating in your eyes. Your eyes will be covered by thorns; you will not be able to see the rose. Even if you have a glimpse of the rose you will not be able to trust. How can the rose happen? You know only thorns, you know only the pain of the thorns. The rose seems to be an impossibility. Maybe it is a dream, maybe you have imagined it, maybe it is a hallucination or something. But in the very nature of things it cannot happen – it is so contrary to the experience of thorns. Then it becomes impossible. By and by you will become oblivious of the rose. Then it no longer exists for you.But if you look at the rose, if you feel the rose, if you become rosy with the rose, if you allow the fragrance to move into your innermost core, if you feel the wetness of the flower, the dewdrops on it, the sunrise dancing, if you see the utter joy of the flower, the incomparable beauty of it – in that very vision of the rose the thorns start receding. They may be on the bush but they don’t exist for you. They can’t exist for you; your eyes are full of the rose. And when your eyes are really full of the rose – not only your eyes but your heart too – then you will be surprised to find that the thorns don’t matter. Even if there are ten thousand thorns for one rose, only the rose matters, the thorns don’t matter. Your whole outlook has changed and you will look at thorns with a new vision. You will see the thorns not as enemies of the rose but as bodyguards of the rose. They are guarding it; they are friends; they protect – otherwise it will not be possible for the rose to survive. Those thorns are a must.Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. It becomes at the most a shadow. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have both heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice. And you can have it any moment. If you want hell, you can have it right now. If you want the heaven, you can have that too. It is absolutely your responsibility; it is your choice.It depends how you interpret.I would like to tell you a few anecdotes….Thirty nuns arrived in purgatory. “Now girls,” said the angel in charge. “I want every one of you who was ever sexually involved in any kind of relationship on the earth to stand up – and remember, no fibbing. I have ways of checking up on you.”Sheepishly twenty-nine of the nuns stood up, but the thirtieth remained seated.The angel nodded and put in a phone call to the devil. “Satan,” he said, “I’m sending down thirty nuns to you – and I advise you to be particularly careful of one. She’s stone deaf!”Now this is your interpretation. This shows more about the mind of the angel than anything about the woman who has kept silent and has not stood up.Another scene….The Pearly Gates. St. Peter interviewing a new arrival.St. Peter: “Name?”New Arrival: “Melvin.”St. Peter: “Did you ever gamble, drink, or smoke when you were on earth?”Melvin: “No.”St. Peter: “Did you ever steal, lie, cheat, or swear?”Melvin: “No.”St. Peter: “Were you promiscuous?”Melvin: “No.”St. Peter: “Tell me what kept you there so long?”This shows the mind of St. Peter, nothing about Melvin.The third…. “Rabbi Jacobs, I need fifty dollars to get out of debt,” sobbed Gottlieb. “I keep praying to God to help, but he has not sent it!”“Don’t lose faith,” said the rabbi. “Keep praying.”After Gottlieb left his house, the rabbi felt sorry for him. “I don’t make much money” he thought, “but that poor man needs it. I will give him twenty-five dollars out of my own pocket.”A week later, the rabbi stopped Gottlieb and said, “Here God sent this to you!”Back in his home, Gottlieb bowed his head, “Thank you, Lord!” he said, “But next time you send money, don’t send it through Rabbi Jacobs – that crook kept half of it!”It all depends on you, on how you look at things. You can see each day surrounded by two nights or you can see each night surrounded by two days. And it really makes a lot of difference. Let your waiting be joyous. You are waiting for God. Let it be a song in your heart. Let it be prayerful. Let it be a celebration. Only celebration is sacred.Just the other day I was reading a statement of a German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. He says, “I have not come across anything in the world which can be called sacred.” Now this man must have lived a very poor life, an utterly poor life, if he could not name, could not vouch for, could not be a witness to a single thing that he could call sacred. His life must have been one of utter frustration. He has not known any song, he has not known any joy. He has not seen a smile on a child’s face, he has not seen tears. He has not heard the birds singing and he has not seen roses and lotuses flowering, and he has not looked at the stars. He has missed.The whole of life is sacred.Once it happened that Buddha asked one of his disciples, “Can you find anything which is worthless in life? If you can, then bring it.” The disciple thought for many days and Buddha inquired every day, “What is happening? Have you not yet found anything worthless?” And after a month or two the disciple came and he said, “Sorry. I looked all around. I looked very hard. I could not sleep because you had put a question and I had to find the answer. But I could not find anything worthless.”Then Buddha said, “Now another task. Find anything which has worth. How many days will you take for it? You took months for the first.” And the disciple laughed. He said, “No need to take any time.” He just took a straw from the ground and gave it to Buddha. And he said, “This is enough proof. This has worth.”Buddha blessed the disciple and he said, “This is how one should look at life. This is the right attitude – samyak drishti, right vision.” And Buddha said, “I am happy with you – that you took months and still you could not find anything worthless. You could not find a single instance of something meaningless. And now for the meaningful, for that which has worth, you have not taken even a single second. Yes, this is how it is. The whole life is sacred.”Buddha has lived a rich life, spiritually rich. Heidegger must have lived in misery.How can you say that life has nothing sacred in it? Each moment is sacred. But you need the eyes to see that sacredness. God is not missing from existence; only your vision is not yet tuned to it.You ask: “It is a long, long journey between the preparation and the ultimate….” The length of that journey depends on you. It can be long, very long; it may not be so long. It may be very short. The goal depends on you – how long is not a fixed phenomenon. It cannot be measured. It becomes long if you look through misery, anguish, anxiety, antagonism. If your eyes are full of sadness, you create a long distance. If your eyes are full of joy, it is here, it is now, it is this.The sixth question:Osho,You are so crazy!!! How does it feel to be totally crazy?Just far out!!!And the last question:Osho,Has it happened? Has it finally happened? Is that you inside my heart, so clear and constantly with me now?Yes, it has happened. But don’t grab it – otherwise it can disappear again. Let it be there, but don’t become greedy – otherwise out of your greed you can crush it. Let it be there but don’t take it for granted. The moment you take it for granted, it disappears. It is there, it has happened.It is going to happen to all as it has happened to you. But remember, it is very fragile, it is very subtle. You cannot keep it in a fist. The moment you close, you kill it. If you remain open, it will be there. Never expect it to be there and it will be there. If you start expecting then you create hindrances.Yes, it has happened. But now you will have to be even more alert not to destroy it. It is not so hard – when it has not happened it is not so hard, the work is not so hard. The real work starts when it starts happening, because then you have to be very, very careful and very conscious. A single moment of unconsciousness and you can destroy it.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Sufi master, Ajnabi said, “Write to Mulla Firoz and tell him that I have no time to engage him in correspondence, and therefore have nothing to say to his letter.”The disciple, Amini, said, “Is it your intention to annoy him with this letter?”Ajnabi said, “He has been annoyed by some of my writings. This annoyance has caused him to write to me. My purpose in writing the passage which angers him was to anger such as he.”Amini said, “And this letter will anger him further?”Ajnabi said, “Yes. When he was enraged at what I wrote, he did not observe his own anger, which was my intention. He thought that he was observing me, whereas he was only feeling angry. Now I write again, to arouse his anger, so that he will see that he is angry. The objective is for the man to realize that my work is a mirror in which he sees himself.”Amini said, “The people of the ordinary world always regard those who cause anger as ill-intentioned.”Ajnabi said, “The child may regard the adult who tries to remove a thorn from his hand as ill-intentioned. Is that a justification for trying to prevent the child from growing up?”Amini said, “And if the child harbors a grudge against the adult who removes the thorn?”Ajnabi said, “The child does not really harbor that grudge, because something in him knows the truth.”Amini asked him, “But what happens if he never gets to know himself, and yet continues to imagine that others are motivated by personal feelings?”Ajnabi said, “If he never gets to know himself, it makes no difference as to what he thinks of other people, because he can never have any appreciation of what others are really like.”Amini asked, “Is it not possible, instead of arousing anger a second time, to explain that the original writing was composed for this purpose, and to invite Mulla to review his previous feelings?”Ajnabi said, “It is possible to do this, but it will have no effect. Rather it will have an adverse effect. If you tell the man your reason he will imagine that you are excusing yourself, and this will arouse in him sentiments which are harmful only to him. Thus, by explaining you are actually acting to his detriment.”Amini said, “Are there no exceptions to this rule – that man must learn through realizing his own state, and that his state cannot be explained to him?”Ajnabi said, “There are exceptions. But if there were enough exceptions to make any difference to the world, we would not by now have any Mulla Firozes left.”Man’s being is very simple, but his personality is not. The personality is very complex. The personality is like an onion – there are many layers of conditioning, corruption, poisoning. Hidden behind many layers – what Sufis call filters – is man’s simple being. But that simple being is behind so many filters that you cannot see it. And hidden behind these many filters, you cannot see the world either – because whatsoever reaches you is corrupted by the filters before it reaches you. Nothing ever reaches you as it is; you go on missing it. There are many interpreters in between.You see something. First your eyes and your senses falsify. Then your ideology, your religion, your society, your church – they falsify. Then your emotions – they falsify. And so on and so forth. By the time it reaches to you it has almost nothing of the original, or so little that it makes no difference. You see something only if your filters allow it, and the filters don’t allow much.Scientists agree with the Sufis. Scientists say we see only two per cent of reality. Only two per cent! Ninety-eight per cent is missed. When you are listening to me you will hear only two per cent of what has been told, of what has been said. Ninety-eight per cent will be lost. and when the ninety-eight per cent is lost, that two per cent is out of context. It is as if you have taken two pages from a novel, at random – one from here, one from there – and then you start reconstructing the whole novel from these two pages. Ninety-eight pages are missing. You have no inkling what they were; you don’t even know that they were. You have only two pages and you reconstruct the whole novel again. This reconstruction is your invention. It is not discovery of truth, it is your imagination.And there is an inner necessity to fill the gaps. Whenever you see that two things are unrelated, the mind has an inner urgency to relate them. Otherwise it feels very uneasy. So you invent a link, you fix those loose things with a link, you bridge them. And you go on inventing a world that is not there.So before we can enter into this small but immensely valuable dialogue between the master and the disciple, you will have to understand these layers, these filters.Gurdjieff used to call these filters “buffers.” They protect you against reality. They protect your lies, they protect your dreams, they protect your projections. They don’t allow you to come into contact with reality because the very contact is going to be shattering, shocking. Man lives through lies.Frederick Nietzsche is reported to have said, “Please don’t take the lies away from humanity, otherwise man will not be able to live. Man lives through lies. Don’t take the fictions away, don’t destroy the myths. Don’t tell the truth because man cannot live by truth.” And he is right about ninety-nine point nine per cent of people. But what kind of life can there be through lies? It will be a big lie itself. And what kind of happiness is possible through lies? There is no possibility; hence humanity is in misery. With truth is bliss; with lies there is only misery and nothing else.But we go on protecting those lies. Those lies are comfortable, but they keep you protected against bliss, against truth, against God.Sufis say that man is exactly like an onion. And religion is the art of how to peel the onion and come to it’s innermost core. And what is the innermost core of an onion? Have you ever peeled an onion? You go on peeling one layer. another layer, and another, and so on and so forth. Then a point comes when the last layer is taken off and only emptiness is left in your hand. That is fana. If you go on peeling your being, the last layer will be of being – baka – and beyond that will be emptiness – fana.So you can think in this way: at the very innermost core there is emptiness, pure sky, nothingness, fana. The first layer around fana is that of baka, individuality – what religions call the self, atman, the soul. But the soul is already a step away from your being. The self is already distant from your being. Buddha has the right word for it. He calls it anatta, no-self. Your innermost being is a non-being. Nothing is there, or only nothing is. The first layer, the first fence that surrounds it, is baka, individuality.This is your true and simple being: non-being surrounded by being, defined by being.The real core is empty but the emptiness has to be defined by something – otherwise there will be no division between you and anything else. So a thin. a very thin, layer of being divides you. But that being is also a circumference not the center. At the center is fana, dissolution, disappearance. Even at the point of baka, individuality, you don’t meet God, you are still there. Very little is left of you, but there is still just a thin line – even that has to disappear in fana. Then you enter God.Start from the other end. Start peeling the onion.The first layer is made of corrupted physical senses. Never for a single moment think that your physical senses are as they should be – they are not. They have been trained. You see things it your society allows you to see them. You hear things if your society allows you to hear them. You touch things if your society allows you to touch them.Man has lost many of his senses – for example, smell. Man has almost lost smell. Just see a dog and his capacity to smell – how sensitive is his nose! Man seems to be very poor. What has happened to man’s nose? Why can’t he smell so deeply as a dog or as a horse? The horse can smell for miles. The dog has an immense memory of smells. Man has no memory. Something is blocking the nose.Those who have been working deep into these layers say that it is because of the repression of sex that smell is lost. Physically man is as sensitive as any other animal, but psychologically his nose has been corrupted. Smell is one of the most sexual doors into your body. It is through smell that animals start feeling whether a male is in tune with the female or not. The smell is a subtle hint. When the female is ready to make love to the male she releases a certain kind of smell. Only through that smell does the male understand that he is acceptable. If that smell is not released by the feminine sexual organism, the male moves away; he is not accepted.Man has destroyed smell because it will be difficult to create a so-called cultured society if your sense of smell remains natural. You are moving on the road and a woman starts smelling and gives you a signal of acceptance. She is somebody else’s wife; her husband is with her. The signal is there that you are acceptable. What will you do? It will be awkward, embarrassing.Your wife is walking with you and there is no smell from her body, and suddenly a man passes by and she gives the signal. And those are very unconscious signals; you cannot control them suddenly. Then you will become aware that she is interested in the other man, that she is welcoming the other man. That will create trouble. So down the centuries man has destroyed smell completely.It is not just accidental that in cultured countries much time is wasted in removing all kinds of smell from the body. The body odor has to be completely destroyed by deodorants, deodorant soaps. It has to be covered by layers of perfume, strong perfume. These are all disguises; these are ways to avoid a reality that is still there.When you make love, both male and female release a certain kind of smell. That smell has to be destroyed because if the man is making love to the woman and the woman is not really into it she will not release the smell. The man will be offended, hurt. He will immediately feel that the woman is not having any orgasm. And the male ego will feel very offended. The smell has to be destroyed completely, so that the man never knows that the woman was simply pretending that she was having an orgasm, just making empty gestures, befooling him, buttressing his ego. And he feels satisfied because the woman looks satisfied. But once the smell is destroyed, there is no way to detect whether she is really satisfied or not.Smell is very sexual, that’s why we have destroyed the nose, utterly destroyed the nose. Even in language you can see the difference. To see means one thing; to hear, one thing – but to smell means just the opposite. To see means a capacity to see, but to smell does not mean the capacity to smell. It means that you are smelly. Even in language the repression has entered. And the same has happened with other senses.You don’t see people eye to eye; or, if you do see them, it is only for a few seconds. You don’t see people really; you go on avoiding. If you see, it is thought to be offensive. Just remember, do you really see people? Or do you go on avoiding their eyes? – because if you don’t avoid them then you may be able to see a few things which the person is not willing to show. It is not good manners to see something that he is not willing to show, so it is better to avoid. We listen t,, the words, we don’t see the face – because many times the words and the face are contradictory. A man is saying one thing and he is showing another. Gradually we have completely lost the sense of seeing the face, the eyes, the gestures. We only listen to the words. Just watch this and you will be surprised how people go on saying one thing and showing another. And nobody detects it because you have been trained not to look directly into the face. Or, even if you look, the look is not that of awareness, not that of attention. It is empty; it is almost as if you are not looking.We hear sounds by choice. We don’t hear all kinds of sounds. We choose. Whatsoever is useful we hear. And to different societies and different countries, different things are valuable. A man who lives in a primitive world, in a forest, in a jungle, has a different kind of receptivity for sounds. He has to be continuously alert and aware of the animals. His life is in danger. You need not be alert. You live in a cultured world where animals don’t exist any more and there is no fear. Your survival is not at stake. Your ears don’t function perfectly because there is no need.Have you seen a hare or a deer? How attentive they are, how sensitive. Just a small sound – a dead leaf stirred by the wind – and the deer is alert. You would not have noticed it at all. And great music surrounds life, subtle music surrounds life, but we are absolutely unaware of it. There is great rhythm – but to feel it you will need more alert ears, more alert eyes, a more alert touch.So the first layer is of corrupted physical senses. We see only what we want to see. Our whole body mechanism is poisoned. Our body has been made rigid. We live in a kind of frozenness; we are cold, closed, unavailable. We are so afraid of life that we have killed all kinds of possibilities through which life can make a contact with us.People don’t touch each other, they don’t hold hands, they don’t hug each other. And when you hold somebody’s hand, you feel embarrassed, he feels embarrassed. Even if you hug somebody, it feels as if something wrong is happening. And you are in a hurry to get away from the other’s body, because the other’s body can open you. The warmth of the other’s body can open you. Even children are not allowed to hug their parents. There is great fear.And all fear is basically, deep down, rooted in the fear of sex. There is a taboo against sex. A mother cannot hug her son because the son may get sexually aroused – that is the fear. A father cannot hug his daughter. He is afraid he may get physically aroused. Warmth has its own ways of working. Nothing is wrong in being physically aroused or sexually aroused. It is simply a sign that one is alive. that one is immensely alive. But the fear, the sex taboo, says keep away, keep a distance.Sudha’s father was dying; he was very old. He was my sannyasin. And Sudha was very much puzzled because before he died his hands would go again and again to his genital organs. His hands had to be pulled away. And she was puzzled and worried, naturally. What was happening to her father? Was there some sexual repression? Why did his hands go to the sexual organs, to the genitals, again and again? And he was almost unconscious.It happens to many people when they are dying. One of the reasons is repression, but only one. They are losing the social consciousness; they are losing the conditioning. This first layer of corrupted senses is disappearing; death is moving in. And they are becoming small children again. Small children play with their genital organs; they have not yet been corrupted. They enjoy their bodies, they love their bodies. They are playful about it, it is fun.Now the man is no longer old; he is becoming younger again. Death is taking the layer away – that is one thing. Another thing is that when a man dies, for a single moment all his senses become totally alive as they would have been if they had not been corrupted. It is like a flame before a lamp goes out – the flame burns brightly, with intensity, for a single second. Exactly the same happens when life is going out. For a single moment the last effort is made to live, and one burns bright with total sensitivity.Another reason: when a man is dying the circle is complete – naturally death is very close to birth. Death is very close to life; it is the very crescendo of life. Life comes out of sex energy and life is moving back into sex energy.But all our senses are corrupted. We have not been allowed to be natural – -hence man has lost dignity, innocence, grace, elegance. This is the first layer. And because of all these repressions the body has become non-orgasmic. There is no joy – it has happened both to man and woman, in almost the same way, but man has gone deeper into corruption than woman – because man is perfectionistic, neurotically perfectionistic. Once he gets an idea, he tries to go to the very extreme of it. Women are more practical, less perfectionistic, less neurotic, more earthly, more balanced, less intellectual, more intuitive. They have not gone to the very end. It is good that women have not become as neurotic as men – that’s why they still retain some dignity, some grace, some roundness of being, some poetry. But both have been corrupted by the society, both have become hard. Men more, women a little less, but the difference is only of degrees.Because of this layer, everything that enters you has to pass this filter first, and this filter destroys, interprets, manipulates, gives new colors of its own, projects, invents – and the reality becomes very garbed. When this layer disappears…. That is the whole effort of yoga: to make your body alive, sensitive, young again, to give your senses their maximum functioning. Then one functions with no taboos around; then lucidity, grace, beauty flow. Warmth arises again, openness – and growth happens. One is constantly new, young, and one is always on an adventure. The body becomes orgasmic. Joy surrounds you.Through joy the first corruption disappears. Hence my insistence to be joyous, to be celebrating, to enjoy life, to accept the body – not only to accept it, but to feel grateful that God has given you such a beautiful body, such a sensitive body, with so many doors to relate to reality: eyes and ears and nose and touch. Open all these windows and let life’s breeze flow in, let life’s sun shine in. Learn to be more sensitive. Use every opportunity to be sensitive so that that first filter is dropped.If you are sitting on the grass, don’t go on pulling it up and destroying it. I had to stop sitting on the lawn – I used to give darshan on the lawn – because people would go on destroying the grass, they would go on pulling on the grass. I had to stop it. People are so violent, so unconsciously violent, they don’t know what they are doing. And they were told again and again, but within minutes they would forget. They were so restless they didn’t know what they were doing. The grass was available to their restlessness so they would start pulling it up and destroying it.When you are sitting on the grass, close your eyes, become the grass – be grassy. Feel that you are grass, feel the greenness of the grass, feel the wetness of the grass. Feel the subtle smell that goes on being released by the grass. Feel the dewdrops on the grass – that they are on you. Feel the sun rays playing on the grass. For a moment be lost into it and you will have a new sense of your body. And do it in all kinds of situations: in a river, in a swimming pool, lying on the beach in the sun rays, looking at the moon in the night, lying down with closed eyes on the sand and feeling the sand. Millions of opportunities are there to make your body alive again. And only you can do it. Society has done its work of corruption, you will have to undo it.And once you start hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, then you smell the reality.The second layer is of conditioning: social, political, religious, ideological – belief systems. Belief systems make you non-communicative. If you are a Hindu and I am a Mohammedan, immediately there is no communication. If you are a man and I am a man, there is communication, but if you are a communist and I am a fascist – communication stops. All belief systems are destructive to communication, and the whole life is nothing but communicating – communicating with trees, communicating with rivers, communicating with sun and moon, communicating with people and animals. It is communication; life is communication.Dialogue disappears when you are burdened with belief systems. How can you really be in a dialogue! You are already too full of your ideas and you think they are absolutely true. When you are listening to the other, you are just being polite, otherwise you don’t listen. You know what is right, you are simply waiting until this man finishes and then you jump upon him. Yes, there can be a debate and a discussion and argumentation, but there can be no dialogue. Between two beliefs there is no possibility of dialogue. Beliefs destroy friendship, beliefs destroy humanity, beliefs destroy communion.So if you want to see and hear and listen, then you will have to drop all belief systems. You can’t be a Hindu, you can’t be a Mohammedan, you can’t be a Christian. You can’t afford these kinds of nonsense; you have to be sensible enough to be without beliefs.Caged in one’s own system you are unavailable, and the other is unavailable to you. People are moving like windowless houses. Yes, you come close, sometimes you clash with each other – but you never meet. Yes, sometimes you touch, but you never meet. You talk, but you never communicate. Everybody is imprisoned in his own conditionings; everybody is carrying his own prison around him. This has to be dropped.Beliefs create a kind of smugness, and beliefs stop exploration because one becomes afraid. Maybe you come across something which is against your belief – then what? It will disturb your whole system, so it is better not to explore. Remain confined to a dull, dead, defined world; never go beyond it. It gives you an “as if” kind of knowledge – as if one knows. You don’t know anything – you don’t know anything about God, but you have a certain belief about God. You don’t know anything about truth but you have a theory about truth. This “as if” is very dangerous. This is a kind of hypnotized state of the mind.Males and females, all have been conditioned – although in different ways. Man has been conditioned to be aggressive, to be competitive, to be manipulative, to be egoistic. Man has been prepared for a different kind of work: to be the exploiter, to be the oppressor, and to be the master. Women have been given belief systems to be the slaves. They have been taught how to submit. They have been given a very, very small world, the household. Their whole life has been taken away from them. But once the belief system settles in, the woman accepts it and remains confined to it. And the man accepts his belief system and remains confined to it.Men have been taught not to cry; tears are not manly so men don’t cry. Now what kind of foolishness is this? Crying and weeping sometimes has such a therapeutic effect – it is needed, it is a must, it unburdens. Man goes on burdening himself because he cannot cry and cannot weep; it is-unmanly. And women have been taught to cry and weep. It is perfectly womanly, so they go on crying and weeping even where it is not needed – it is just a belief system. They use it as a strategy to manipulate. The woman knows that through argument she will not be able to win over the husband, but she can cry – that works. So that becomes her argument.Man is corrupted in one way: he cannot cry. And the woman is corrupted in another way: she starts crying and uses crying as a strategy to dominate. Crying becomes political – and when your tears are political they lose beauty, they are ugly.This second conditioning is one of the most difficult things to get rid of, it is very complex. You have a certain political ideology, a certain religious ideology and thousands of other things jumbled together in your mind. They have become so much a part of you that you don’t think they are separate from you. When you say “I am a Hindu,” you don’t say that “I have a belief called Hinduism,” no. You say “I am a Hindu.” You are identified with Hinduism. If Hinduism is in danger you think you are in danger. If somebody burns a temple you think you are in danger. Or, if somebody burns the Koran, you think you are in danger because you are a Mohammedan.These belief systems have to be dropped. Then under-standing arises; then readiness to explore, then innocence arises. Then you are surrounded by a sense of mystery, awe, wonder. Then life is no longer a known thing, it is an adventure. It is so mysterious that you can go on exploring; there is no end to it. And you never create any belief, you remain in a state of not-knowing. On that state Sufis insist very much, and so do Zen masters – in fact, all great masters of the world insist on that state. If they agree on any one thing, it is the state of not knowing.Remain constantly in the state of not-knowing. If you happen to know something, don’t make a belief out of it. Go on dropping it, go on throwing it. Don’t let it surround you, otherwise sooner or later it will become a hard crust and you will not be available again to life. Remain always childlike – then communication becomes possible, then dialogue becomes possible. When two people who are in a state of not-knowing talk, there is meeting – they commune. There is nothing to hinder. You will be able to understand me only if you are in a state of not-knowing, because I am in that state continuously.With me, communion is possible if you drop your belief systems, otherwise they will hinder the path.The third filter, the third layer, is pseudo reasoning, rationalization, explanations, excuses. All are borrowed. Not a single one is your own authentic experience, but they give a kind of satisfaction. You think you are a very rational being. You cannot become rational by accumulating borrowed arguments and proofs. The real reason arises only when you are intelligent. And remember, there is a difference between an intellectual and the man whom I call intelligent. The intellectual is hidden behind the pseudo reasoning. His reasoning may be very logical but it can never be reasonable. His reason is just pseudo, it appears like reason.Listen, I have heard….The man was drowning. “Help, I can’t swim! I can’t swim!” he cried.“I can’t either,” said the old man sitting on the river bank chewing tobacco. “But I’m not hollerin’ about it!”Now this is perfectly rational, “Why are you hollerin’ about it? You can’t swim, neither can I. So keep quiet.”But you are sitting on the bank and he is in the river; the situation is different, the context is different.When Buddha says something, you can repeat the same thing but the context is different. When Mohammed says something, you can repeat exactly the same thing. but it will not mean the same thing – because the context is different. And the context matters, not what you say. It is not what you say but who you are that matters.I have heard….Donnegan sat in the confessional. “Father,” he moaned, “I have done something so bad, you are going to throw me out of the church.”“What did you do, my son?” asked the priest.“Yesterday,” said Donnegan, “I saw my wife sashaying in front of me and it got me so excited I grabbed her, ripped off her clothes, threw her down on the floor, and we had sex right then and there.”“That is a little unusual,” said the priest, “but no reason for excommunication.”“Are you sure you’re not going to throw me out of the church?”“Of course not.”“Well,” said Donnegan, “they threw us out of the super-market!”It all depends on the context – who you are, where you are. It depends from what point of view, from what experience, you utter. I use the same words that you use, but they don’t mean the same, they can’t mean the same. When I utter them I utter them, when you utter them you utter them. The words are the same but because they come from different spaces they carry a different meaning, a different connotation, different flavors, a different music.The pseudo reasoning is just apparent reasoning, it is not knowing. It is more for the sake of finding excuses; it is more for the sake of argumentation. In this kind of deceiving, the male mind is very expert. This is the male mind’s expertise. He has learned the art very deeply. This filter is very, very strong in the male mind.Real reasoning arises only when pseudo reasoning has been dropped. What is real reason?Karl Jaspers has defined it perfectly. He says: Reason is openness, reason is clarity, reason is the will to unity. Reason uses logic, its methods and categories of understanding, just to transcend them. Reason is the ultimate flowering of wisdom.But not pseudo reasoning. Beware of the pseudo. The pseudo always creates a filter and the real always becomes a door. The real is always a bridge and the pseudo is always a block.This third, pseudo reasoning layer is one of the greatest disturbances in your being.The fourth layer is emotionality, sentimentalism. It is pseudo feeling, much ado about nothing, much fuss. The female mind is very expert at this. It is kind of empty; it is just on the surface. It is impotent sympathy; it does not do a thing. If somebody is ill, you sit by their side and you cry. Your crying is not going to help. The house is on fire and you cry. That is not going to help either. This pseudo kind of feeling has to be detected, otherwise you will never know what real feeling is. The real feeling is involvement, commitment. It is empathy not only sympathy. It is action.Whenever you really feel something in your heart, it immediately transforms you, it becomes action. That is the criterion – your feeling becomes action. If your feeling just remains a feeling and never becomes an action, then know well it is pseudo. Then you are deceiving yourself or somebody else.Many times people come to me and they say, “Osho, we feel much love for you. We understand what you say, but….” That “but” destroys all that they have said before. They say, “We feel that what you are saying is right, that what you are doing is right, but we cannot become sannyasins.” If you feel that what I am saying is right, if you feel that what I am saying is truth, then how can you avoid becoming sannyasins? It is impossible. Then your feeling would become action, then your feeling would become commitment – otherwise what is the point?One can never go against one’s heart. If you are still going against your own heart then you must have a pseudo heart – a pretender. Just as the third is the field for male expertise, the fourth is the field for female expertise.The fifth layer is corrupted, poisoned instincts, repression, disfiguration.Gurdjieff used to say that all your centers are overlapping each other, are misplaced, are interfering with each other, are trespassing, and you don’t know what is what. Each center in its own functioning is beautiful, but when it starts interfering into somebody else’s functioning, then there is great difficulty; then the whole system goes neurotic.For example, if your sex center functions as a sex center, it is perfectly good. But people have been repressing it so much that in many people the sex center does not exist in their genitals, it has moved into their head. This is what overlapping is. Now they make love through their head – hence the great importance of pornography, visualization. Even while making love to your woman you may be thinking of some beautiful actress – that you are making love to her. Then suddenly you become interested in making love to your woman. In fact, your own woman is non-existential. It is a kind of masturbation. You are not making love to her, you are making love to somebody else who is not there. You go on fantasizing in the head.Religious repression has disturbed all your centers. It is very difficult even to see that your centers are separate. And, functioning in its own field, each center is perfectly right. When it interferes with another field, then problems arise. Then there is a confusion of your totality. Then you don’t know what is what.Sex can be transformed when it is confined to its own center, it cannot be transformed from the head. It has created a pseudo center in the head.I have heard….From time to time, saints are allowed to visit the earth in disguise. Saint Theresa had long wanted to pay a visit to Hollywood, but Gabriel, who was in charge of the roster, thought that even a saint would not be able to come through unscathed after visiting the movie capital.Eventually, however, Saint Theresa persuaded him that no harm would come to her, and she set off on the first available earth-bound cloud.The weeks stretched into months without any word from earth, so one day a very worried Gabriel put through a telephone call to Los Angeles.The connection was made, the phone rang, and finally a voice said, “Terry here – who is this? Gabby-darling! How absolutely marvelous to hear from you….”Now Saint Theresa is no longer Saint Theresa – she is Terry. And Gabriel is no longer Gabriel – he is Gabby-darling. Hollywood has corrupted Saint Theresa.Your so-called saints are only avoiding the world; they are repressed beings. If opportunities are made available to them, they will fall far lower than you. They are just somehow holding themselves back because of the fear of hell and the greed for heaven. But whatsoever you have repressed because of fear or greed remains there. It not only remains there, it becomes unnatural, perverted, moves into deeper realms of your consciousness and unconsciousness. And then it becomes very difficult to uproot it.Gurdjieff was a Sufi. His whole teaching comes from Sufi masters. He introduced methods into the Western world of how to demark each center, and how to allow the center to function in its own field. The head should function as far as reason is concerned, that’s all.Have you watched? Sometimes people come to me and they say, “I think I love you.” I think I love you! Love has nothing to do with thinking. How can you think that you love me? But they don’t know how to function from the heart directly, even the heart has to go via the head. They cannot simply say, “I love you.”Just the other night a beautiful Italian woman took sannyas. I gave her the name “Prem Nishanga.” She was a woman of the heart, something rare. She was so happy she almost started dancing. There was no need to say anything, her whole body said it. She went into such ecstasy that you can go on saying in a thousand ways, shouting with joy, and it will not be as deep as just by going into ecstasy. I don’t know what she was saying because she was saying it in Italian, but her face, her eyes, her hands, her whole body was saying it. There was no need to understand her language; the language was irrelevant. When you say from the heart, no language is needed. When you say from the head, only language can say; there is no other way to say it.Watch and observe. Let the head function as reason, let the heart function as feeling, let the sex center function as sex. Let everything function in its own way. Don’t allow mechanisms to mix into each other, otherwise you will have corrupted instincts.When instinct is natural, untabooed, spontaneous, without any inhibition, there is a clarity in your body, a harmony in your body. There is a humming sound in your organism.The fifth layer is also male expertise.The sixth layer is corrupted intuition.There is a phenomenon called intuition of which we have become almost unaware. We don’t know that anything like intuition exists – because intuition is the sixth layer. Those five layers are so thick that one never comes to feel the sixth.Intuition is a totally different kind of phenomenon from reason. Reason argues; reason uses a process to reach a conclusion. Intuition jumps – it is a quantum leap. It knows no process. It simply reaches to the conclusion without any process.There have been many mathematicians who could do any kind of mathematical problem without going into its process. Their functioning was intuitive. You just say the problem and before you have even said it, the conclusion will come. There has not been a time-gap at all. You were saying it, and the moment you finished, or even before you finished, the conclusion has come. Mathematicians have always been puzzled by these freak phenomena. These people – how do they do it? If a mathematician were going to do this problem it might take three hours or two hours or one hour. Even a computer will take at least a few minutes to do it, but these people don’t take a single moment. You say it, and instantly….So in mathematics, intuition is now a recognized fact. When reason fails, only intuition can work. And all the great scientists have become aware of it: that all their great discoveries are made not by reason but by intuition.Madame Curie was working for three years upon a certain problem and was trying to solve it from many directions. Every direction failed. One night, utterly exhausted, she went to sleep, and she decided…. The incident is almost like Buddha. That night she decided, “Now it is enough. I have wasted three years. It seems to be a futile search. I have to drop it.” That night she dropped it, and went to sleep.In the night she got up in her sleep, she went to her table and wrote the answer. Then she went back, and fell into sleep. In the morning she could not even remember, but the answer was there on the table. And there was nobody in the room, and even if there had been somebody, the answer would not have been possible. She had been working for three years – one of the greatest minds of this age. But there was nobody and the answer was there. Then she looked more minutely: it was her handwriting! Then suddenly the dream surfaced. She remembered it as if she had seen a dream in the night in which she was sitting at the table and writing something. Then by and by everything surfaced. She had come to the conclusion from some other door which was not reason. It was intuition.Buddha struggled for six years to attain samadhi, but could not. One day he dropped the whole idea of attaining. He rested under a tree and by the morning it had happened. When he opened his eyes he was in samadhi.But first the reason had to be exhausted. Intuition functions only when reason is exhausted. Intuition has no process; it simply jumps from the problem to the conclusion. It is a shortcut. It is a flash.We have corrupted intuition. Man’s intuition is almost absolutely corrupted. Woman’s intuition is not corrupted as much – that’s why women have something called a “hunch.” A hunch is just a fragment of intuition. It cannot be proved. You are going to take a flight and your woman simply says that she is not going and she will not allow you to go either. She feels as if something is going to happen. Now this is nonsense. You have much work to do, everything is planned, and you have to go – but your woman won’t allow it. And the next day you read in the newspapers that the airplane was hijacked, or it crashed and all the passengers died.Now the woman cannot say how she knows. There is no way. It is just a hunch, just a feeling in the guts. But that too is very corrupted, that’s why it is just a flash. When all the five other layers have disappeared and you have dropped fixed ideas – because you have been taught that reason is the only door to reach to any conclusion – when you have dropped this fixation, this reason fixation, intuition starts flowering. Then it is not just like a flash, it is a constantly available source. You can close your eyes and you can go into it and always you can get the right direction from it.That’s what Fischer-Hoffman people think of as the guide. If the process really goes in…. It is very difficult, because those five layers have to be crossed first. And I don’t think many people are capable of it, even those who are in Fisher-Hoffman therapy. But the idea is perfectly right – if those five layers are broken then something arises in you which can be called the guide. You can always go into your intuition energy and you will always find the right advice. In the East that is what they have called the inner guru, your inner master. Once your intuition has started functioning, you need not go and ask any outer guru for any advice.Intuition is to be in tune with oneself, totally in tune with oneself. And out of that tuning, solutions arise from nowhere.And the seventh and the last layer of falsity is the pseudo self, the ego; the notions of being unique, special, exceptional; the notions of doing one’s own thing…and you don’t know who you are, you don’t know what your thing is.Notions of the ego go on corrupting you. Then you cannot listen to the truth. And this becomes a problem every day.Just the other day I was talking about Hannah. Rather than understanding what I said, rather than understanding, rather than feeling my compassion – because why else should I say it? – she immediately went to the office and canceled the darshan appointment which she had. She became very angry. Now I was talking about her ego, but rather than seeing it, she acted out of it again. She missed the point again.And the other day I was also talking about Prageet. He was better than Hannah. He asked for an appointment, he took it more rightly. Of course he was very much shaken; it was hard to digest, hard to swallow. But he tried his best to see the point of it. He made every effort that he could.Or, for example, I go on hammering on Chinmaya, again and again. I never hammer anybody else as much as I hammer Chinmaya, but he takes it absolutely rightly, in the exact way as it should be taken. And each hammering has become a growth in him; each hammering has helped him – he is moving.Hannah got stopped there. She may lose contact with me.This is the last layer: a very subtle pseudo sense of self.When these seven are broken, you come to the state of baka, real individuality, And when you have real individuality then there is a possibility of having a real non being. From real individuality, baka, you can have the jump into fana. Then you can offer yourself to God. This is the whole process.Now this beautiful dialogue between a master and his disciple. Now you will be able to understand.The Sufi master, Ajnabi, said, “Write to Mulla Firoz and tell him that I have no time to engage him in correspondence, and therefore have nothing to say to his letter.”Mulla Firoz must have been a very learned man of those days. “Mulla” means a pundit, a scholar, a learned man. He must have been offended and annoyed by Ajnabi’s assertions. Masters are there to shock. And when there is a man of knowing, the greatest shock is to those who think they know and don’t know. The knowledgeable man immediately feels offended, because the man of knowing has his own source of knowing. He talks from there. And the man of knowledge looks into the scripture. He has no source to check upon, he has no authentic experience of his own. He lives in pseudo reason, pseudo ego, argumentation, verbal knowledge, belief systems and all that.The Sufi master, Ajnabi, said, “Write to Mulla Firoz and tell him that I have no time to engage him in correspondence, and therefore have nothing to say to his letter.”The disciple, Amini, said, “Is it your intention to annoy him with this letter?”That is the intention always of all the masters: to annoy you, because only if you are annoyed can you be changed. If you are annoyed then there is a possibility, then you start moving.Ajnabi said, “He has been annoyed by some of my writings. This annoyance has caused him to write to me. My purpose in writing the passage which angers him was to anger such as he.”That was his purpose and it was fulfilled. He wanted to anger people such as Mulla – the knowledgeable people.Amini said, “And this letter will anger him further?”Ajnabi said, “Yes. When he was enraged at what I wrote, he did not observe his own anger, which was my intention. He thought that he was observing me, whereas he was only feeling angry. Now I write again, to arouse anger, so that he will see that he is angry. The objective is for the man to realize that my work is a mirror in which he sees himself.”This you have to keep in your mind constantly, because this Is happening here every day. If I say something, never be bothered about me. don’t think why I have said this, rather, on the contrary, just look inside yourself at what it has done to you. I said something about Hannah. Now there are two possibilities. She can think, “This man is wrong, he is offending me, he is insulting me, humiliating me, degrading me’”– something like that. Then she has missed the point. But if she starts watching and observing, “Why am I angered? Why is there this annoyance in me? Why am I disturbed?” then she is on the right track. Then she will come closer to me than she ever was before.Always remember this. What I say, how I say it, why I say it – there is no way for you to decide. There is no way for you even to understand. All that you can do in your situation right now is see what happens to you. If I slap your face, don’t be worried why I slapped you – whether I am an angry man or an aggressive man or violent – don’t be worried about that. Just close your eyes, and go into meditation and see why you are feeling offended. Why? Watch your mind. That is going to help.That’s why I don’t want mediocre people here who have just come out of curiosity to listen to me. This is not a school; nothing is being taught here. This is just an alchemical-lab; something is happening here. It is a process of transformation. If you remember this you will be benefited immensely.“Yes, when he was enraged at what I wrote, he did not observe his own anger, which was my intention. He thought that he was observing me, whereas he was only feeling angry. Now I write again, to arouse his anger…” The master is saying, “Out of compassion I will give him another opportunity.”…So that he will see that he is angry. The objective is for the man to realize that my work is a mirror in which he sees himself.That’s what a master is: a mirror in which you see yourself. If sometimes you see that your face is ugly, don’t try to destroy the mirror – change your face. By destroying the mirror you will not become beautiful; by escaping from the mirror you will not become beautiful.Yesterday, the whole day, continuously, Prageet thought about escaping: “How to escape from here?” But again and again he remembered that he had not to escape, he had to face it. Again and again he remembered and cooled down, and again and again the idea was there pulling him to escape from here. That is natural, it is understandable. But if you can remember for even a few single moments and you can remain with me and can go on facing the mirror, sooner or later you will have to change.There are only two possibilities: either escape from the mirror – then you will never see your face and you can believe that you are beautiful – or go on facing the mirror, go on seeing your ugliness. And all kinds of methods and processes are being made available to you so that you can change your face.Just a few days before there was a man who took sannyas. He said he was a beautician. I told him, “I am also a beautician. I do the same work. I change people’s faces – not the faces that you can see from the outside but the faces, the original faces, that are hidden deep behind all kinds of facades, all kinds of layers.”Amini said, “the people of the ordinary world always regard those who cause anger as ill-intentioned.”That’s what Hannah thought. That’s what for a few moments even Prageet thought. That’s what Chinmaya used to think in the beginning. But now he has crossed that point. I have been hammering him so much – how long can you go on thinking? One day or other one has to become aware that something is wrong somewhere inside oneself, and that it has to be dropped.Ajnabi said, “The child may regard the adult who tries to remove a thorn from his hand as ill-intentioned. Is that a justification for trying to prevent the child from growing up?”Amini said, “And if the child harbors a grudge against the adult who removes the thorn?”Ajnabi said, “The child does not really harbor that grudge, because something in him knows the truth.”This is of immense value, this statement. Yes, something in you always knows the truth. Something in Hannah knows the truth. It is impossible not to know the truth. Maybe it is not very clear, it is hazy – but something in you always knows the truth…that it is because of compassion, because of love, that you have been hammered upon. Otherwise there is no need.Amini asked him, “But what happens if he never gets to know himself, and yet continues to imagine that others are motivated by personal feelings?”Ajnabi said, “If he never gets to know himself, it makes no difference as to what he thinks of other people, because he can never have any appreciation of what other people are really like.”Amini asked, “Is it not possible, instead of arousing anger a second time, to explain that the original writing was composed for this purpose, and to invite Mulla to review his previous feelings?”A very reasonable standpoint of the disciple, but remember that sometimes reasonable things are not very useful. They don’t work. You will agree with the disciple, with what he is saying. This seems to be very, very reasonable – “What is the point of angering him, annoying him twice? Will it not be better to explain to him why in the first place you said things to annoy him? Would it not be better to explain?”Ajnabi said, “It is possible to do this, but it will have no effect.”A master is not interested in being polite, in following the rules of etiquette, manners, et cetera. A master is interested only in creating an effect, in creating an action, in creating a response. Yes, he could explain to the Mulla what had happened. That may satisfy him, that may cool him down. His anger may disappear, he may no longer feel annoyed – but that is not the point. That is not going to create the effect that the master wants. The master wants the Mulla to see that he is only a man of knowledge, not yet a man of knowing; that he was not wise. Explanation will make the Mulla more knowledgeable. He will have one more explanation. That is not going to shatter his ego.‘”t is possible to do this, but it will have no effect. Rather it will have an adverse effect. If you tell the man your reason he will imagine that you are excusing yourself, and this will arouse in him sentiments which are harmful only to him. Thus, by explaining you are actually acting to his detriment.”Amini said, “Are there no exceptions to this rule – that man must learn through realizing his own state, and that his state cannot be explained to him?”Ajnabi said, “There are exceptions. But if there were enough exceptions to make any difference to the world, we would not by now have any Mulla Firozes left.”There are not many. There are some exceptions but there are not many – that’s why they are exceptions. They are few and far between. They can be counted out; they need not be reckoned.A master has to function in such a way that the rule is fulfilled, not the exception – because ninety-nine point nine per cent of people follow the rule. Sometimes there is a rare person but that rare person need not have any help from anybody; he will come to his realization sooner or later. It may be only a question of time. That exceptional intelligence need not be worried about. The master has to function in such a way that the common mind, the normal mind, the usual mind, the non-exceptional mind, starts moving and changing.This small discussion between the master and the disciple is of immense significance for you. That’s why I have chosen it. Remember those seven layers of the onion. Unless you drop them you cannot see things as they are, you cannot see that which is. And from your very childhood you have been corrupted. Your whole life up to now has been a life of poisoning, and only you can drop it. I can show you the way but I cannot take it away from you. If I start taking it away you will snatch it and escape, you will think that you are being robbed. I can only show you the way. You have to follow it.Meditate over this small dialogue. It is especially for you.Enough for today.

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

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-2-06/

The first question:Osho,Recently, mind almost stopping, I have suddenly felt myself and everything around me to be existing exactly as in Jesus' time. And there has been a very strong sense of Jesus himself. Could you say something about this kind of phenomenon?The question is from Somendra.It is the same drama enacted again and again; the script remains the same, only the actors change. Friedrich Nietzsche has a very beautiful theory about it: the theory of eternal recurrence. It may not be true in the details, but the idea is significant and profound.It is like seasons – summer comes, followed by the rains, and then comes winter and again summer. In summer there will be summer flowers; in the rains there will be rain flowers; in winter there will be winter flowers. No single flower will ever be repeated, but the essential idea will be repeated again and again. It is an eternal recurrence.The story is the same. In its basics it is never different. It may be Krishna or Christ, Mahavira or Mohammed…actors change, different players participate, but the essential core of it is eternally the same. So when you move deeply in meditation – as Somendra is doing every day – and when the mind is almost stopping – as he says in his question – you become aware of many things which were already there, but of which you were not aware.Jesus is very deep in the Western consciousness. He is an archetype. Whenever you see something closely resembling it, your unconscious will release the archetype to your conscious. Because Somendra has lived as a Christian for many lives, Christ has gone very deep into his consciousness. He cannot remember Krishna, he has no relationship with Krishna. That symbol, that metaphor, does not exist in his unconscious mind. If he had been a Hindu for many lives, then he would have felt as if it was the time of Krishna. Or if he had been a Buddhist for many lives, then he would have felt the presence of Buddha. But it is the same. Buddha’s body is different from Jesus’ body, but what is hidden behind the body is not different – that inner purity, that inner innocence, that primal innocence is the same.In Somendra’s unconscious, Jesus is very deep. And Jesus will be felt by many of you for another reason also. Although Somendra was not there in Jesus’ time, there are many people here who were. The greater number of my sannyasins are Jews. It is not accidental, it can’t be accidental. Jews don’t exist in India – not at all. So many Jews reaching me – there must be something profound in it. They have missed Jesus and an unconscious search continues. And in a very unconscious way they are smelling something here. This time they don’t want to miss. More and more Jews will be coming. That time they missed; it was difficult to accept Jesus in those days.In these two thousand years much has happened. Jesus is more relevant now, more in tune with human consciousness now. Because Jesus was a Jew it was very difficult for Jews to accept him – as it is difficult for Hindus to accept me. Mind plays strange games. It somebody is born into your religion it becomes very difficult for your ego to accept him as enlightened. Or if somebody is born in the same village as you, it becomes even more difficult. Or if you have been studying with somebody in the same school and suddenly the rumor arises that he has become enlightened or has been chosen by God as his prophet. you will reject the idea outright. You know the man from his childhood, you know him in and out – how can he become the chosen one of God? While you are there, how can God choose him? How can God dare? If he was going to choose. he would have chosen you. It becomes very difficult for the ego.India is going to miss me for the simple reason that I have been born here. This accident is going to be a calamity for India. You don’t see many Indians here. You may not have looked at it in this way. Why are they not here? It is very difficult for their egos to accept me, particularly Jainas – the small religious group of Jainas in India. It was an accident that I was born a Jaina. You will not find them here. Sometimes you will find a few Hindus here, but the number of Jainas will be smaller. And even smaller will be the number of that particular sect – in the Jaina sect there is this smaller sect – to which I belonged in this accidental birth.The number of Jainas is very small – thirty lakhs in India – and among Jainas there are many sects. One sect, a very small sect, is samhiya – the word comes from samadhi – those who only believe in samadhi. It is the same word that has become sanmi in Japanese, and later on satori. You will rarely find a samahiya here, impossible. There are only a few thousand. They all know me, they are well-acquainted with me, but that is the problem – because of that they cannot come here.India is going to miss. Apart from India, nobody is going to miss; everybody else will be more in tune with me.Jews have come in great numbers. They have the feeling that something is happening here. The same drama is being enacted again in the twentieth century – something of Christ’s consciousness. And they can accept me more easily than they could ever have accepted Jesus. He was a Jew, a carpenter’s son – it was almost impossible to accept him.More of you by and by will start feeling a kind of deja vu, as if this is no longer the twentieth century, as if these twenty centuries have suddenly disappeared from your consciousness, as if you are again in the days of Jesus in Jerusalem walking with him, or by Galilee moving with him, or in Bethlehem. To many of you that dream will unfold, because to understand me, that will be the closest metaphor for the Western consciousness.No Hindu will ever feel that something of Christ is happening here. It he ever comes to feel anything, he will feel Krishna. No Buddhist will feel something about Christ. If he ever feels anything, he will feel something about Buddha. These are archetypes, metaphors in the unconscious, and when you come closer to your depth you start releasing the poetry of your soul.So Somendra is right. He says: “Recently, mind almost stopping, I have suddenly felt myself and everything around me to be existing exactly in Jesus’ time. And there has been a very strong sense of Jesus himself. Could you say something about this phenomenon?”It is tremendously significant. Go deeper into it. Don’t give any resistance to it. This will also disappear. Just as the conscious disappears, one day the unconscious also disappears. But to live in unconscious metaphors is better than to live in the conscious, because they are deeper. And he is perfectly right in saying “mind almost stopping,” because if it stops absolutely then even Jesus will disappear. These are all mind things ultimately; all words, all metaphors, are mind things. Just a little of the mind is left – be ready, Somendra, to drop that too. But there is no hurry, and don’t be impatient, and don’t fight with it. It is going on its own, it is on its deathbed.The second question:Osho,After today's discourse I met Satya on the stairs. She was laughing. I wanted to sob, but felt I must lighten up and laugh, that she was positive and I was negative. I laughed a lie. Could I be true to myself and meet her in that moment?The question is from Vandana.This is something to be understood by everybody.Satya is in a laughing space. Something is stirring in her. She is not the laughing type, she is the crying type. When she came here, whenever she would come to me she would start crying. Tears were easier for her. Now suddenly tears have disappeared and laughter has arisen – and such a mad laughter that she goes on laughing for hours. It has almost become painful to her. The whole night she goes on laughing.Naturally one becomes afraid. What is happening? For no reason at all? She has not been the laughing type, so her whole life she has repressed her laughter. Her type was the crying one, the sad. Now suddenly the type is changing, swinging from one polarity to another polarity. Before it stops in the middle and a balance arises, it has to go to the other polarity.Her whole life she repressed laughter, unknowingly. Now the repression has disappeared, the lid has been taken off. Now she cannot cry, the tears are there no more. The whole life’s laughter is coming up with a vengeance! It is almost hysterical. But it is a beautiful space because it is an indication of a great change, a transformation, an alchemical change. Tears are becoming laughter. Soon laughter will also disappear. As tears have disappeared, laughter will disappear. Then she will come to the exact middle; then there will be great balance, an equilibrium. That equilibrium is the goal.Neither the negative nor the positive is the goal, because both are half. Yes, if you have to choose between the negative and the positive, choose the positive. That is a lesser kind of evil, that’s all. But if you have a choice between tranquillity and the positive, then choose tranquillity. Then the positive is nothing, then the positive is almost negative in comparison to tranquillity. If there is only one choice – tears or laughter – then laughter is good. But if there is a choice of being silent, then tears and laughter both have to be dropped. One becomes silent.She will soon come to that silence. After this storm of laughter, there will be a great silence. It always comes after the storm. This is a release, a release of repressed laughter. It has to be taken off her consciousness. It is being taken off, and she is pouring like anything.Now Vandana says: “After today’s discourse I met Satya on the stairs. She was laughing. I wanted to sob, but felt I must lighten up and laugh, that she was positive and I was negative. I laughed a lie. Could I be true to myself and meet her in that moment?”Yes, there is no other way to meet anybody. Meeting is possible only if you are true, because only two true persons meet. Satya is laughing, and logically Vandana thought, “If I also laugh there will be a kind of dialogue. We will be both in the same space.”But how can you be both in the same space? Her laughter is true, your laughter is a lie. These are not the same thing. A true laughter and a laughter that is not true are poles apart. How can you meet? Truth and falsity can never meet. If Vandana had sobbed, as she was feeling, there would have been a meeting. But that looks illogical – somebody is laughing and you start crying? That looks illogical. It looks like you are going in a different direction. Then how will there be a meeting? But let me tell you, you are not going in a different direction. It you are being true and she is being true, you are going in the same direction. It does not matter what kind of truth is happening to you.If Vandana had cried great tears, if she had wept as she was feeling, if she had been true to her feeling, there would have been a meeting; then the laughter and the crying are not opposite because both are true. Only two truths can meet; only two truths can have a dialogue.But she missed the point, as many of you would have missed. The logical mind says, “She is laughing, and if I cry then we will fall apart. Then how will there ever be a communion between us?” And then the mind said, “She is positive and you are negative.” That doesn’t matter. You can meet a positive person through your negativity. The only thing needed is the same earth of truth, the same ground of truth.Positive and negative can meet. In fact, they meet beautifully. In fact, it happens sometimes that positive and positive cannot meet and negative and negative cannot meet, because they don’t have the pull of the opposite. There is a kind of homosexuality when positive and positive are there and when negative and negative are there. Meeting is more easy and more enriching when it is heterosexual. Laughter and crying can meet very beautifully. That is the meeting of man and woman, day and night, life and death.You can ask the scientist, the physicist…he will say, “Only opposite poles meet. The positive repels the positive; the negative repels the negative. Only negative and positive meet.” If you bring two positive magnets close they will repel each other; if you bring one negative and one positive together they will join together in a marriage.So the only thing needed is truth. Don’t be worried about the positive and the negative. Don’t listen to the logical mind, because the logical mind is absurd. Life is bigger than logic.Just see…Vandana feeling like crying and crying and Satya laughing – both are true. Then there is a common ground, then they are moving in the same direction, then they can hold hands. Satya may go on laughing and Vandana may go on crying, but there will be a kind of marriage in that moment, there will be great communion in that moment – both are being true. Remember, it is only truth that connects. It is only truth that bridges.Don’t be worried about the negative and the positive. The only thing that has to be remembered always is authenticity. All falsehood creates barriers.The third question:Osho,Why are people so fake?People are so fake because it pays, it is a good policy. If you are true, you will be in danger. You can be true only in a true society where truth is respected, loved. This society exists through lies. Here truth is not respected, here truth is crucified, here truth is killed. Lies are enthroned. That’s why politics becomes so important in this world – because politics is the game of lies. And the politicians become the most important people in the world. They should be the last. They become the first because this world – this whole society – is based on lies. And if you live with liars and you will live with this falsehood all around you, you have to be fake. It pays, it is economical, it is safe. It protects you – otherwise people will be against you. If you are true and they are all living through lies, they cannot tolerate you.From the very beginning a child starts learning that lies pay. If the child tells the truth, he is beaten; if the child tells the truth, it creates a kind of embarrassment for the parents. If the child is being truthful, nobody is for him, everybody is against him. If he is Lying, then he can protect himself. A lie becomes a kind of umbrella. And if he is Lying in tune with the parents’ lies, then there is no problem at all. He can exist very smoothly. And children are very perceptive, sensitive; they learn whatsoever they see around.I have heard….Returning after a lengthy absence to his family’s spot on the beach, the youngster found them preparing to leave.“Come along,” said the mother, “we are going to a restaurant for a good dinner.”“I am not hungry,” said the boy. “I have eaten seven ice cream cones and three frankfurters.”“Where on earth did you get seven ice cream cones and three frankfurters?” asked his astounded mother. “You didn’t have any money.”“I didn’t need money. I just wandered all around the beach crying as if I was lost.”“Crying as if I was lost…. ” Now the child has learned a great trick. If the child pretends that he is lost, it pays. And that is the whole secret of why people are fake – it pays. Whenever you are true, it harms you. And who is there to harm himself, and for what? The lie is a survival measure.I have heard….An art collector chanced upon a painting bearing the signature “Picasso.” He purchased it immediately, hoping that it would prove to be very valuable. But a nagging doubt about the possibility of its being a forgery compelled him to seek out Picasso’s home.After much waiting he finally gained a moment of Picasso’s time, and showed him the painting.“It is a fake!” snapped the great painter, and slammed the door shut.The collector was crestfallen and determined not to be taken in again. However, some time later, he came across a different painting, also bearing the signature “Picasso.” He carefully researched the history of this painting and purchased it only after fully documenting its authenticity. However, even with legal proof that this was a genuine Picasso, he still felt a twinge of doubt, and resolved to satisfy his doubts by again visiting him.When he finally gained a moment of Picasso’s time, the great painter took one look at the painting, and said, “It is a fake!”“But, Picasso,” pleaded the art collector, “I researched this painting thoroughly. I can prove that you yourself painted it.”To this Picasso replied, “I often paint fakes.”It happens. Even a painter starts learning what sells. Not all Picasso’s paintings are originals. More of them are fake, although they have been painted by him. Then what does he mean by saying that it is a fake? He is simply saying that he is just copying it from his other paintings; it is not original, it is a copy. It does not matter who is copying – somebody else or Picasso himself.It almost always happens that when a person gets a Nobel Prize he never produces anything original afterwards. He goes on repeating his old story in new ways. Because it has paid so much, he is stuck. He thinks it sells so he goes on writing the same thing again and again. It has never happened, up to now, that after getting a Nobel Prize, a poet or a novelist has been able to do anything original again. The Nobel Prize is a kind of death knell, the person is finished – because now he knows what pays, now he has found the secret of success, now he has the key, so why bother trying other keys? They may not be so successful. Why bother about other directions and dimensions of creativity? One knows the right way to do a thing, so one goes on doing the right thing again and again and again, and becomes fake.People are false because they have found a key. They know what makes life secure, comfortable, convenient, safe – although convenience, comfort, safety, security, don’t bring any kind of blessing. They bring all kinds of miseries, they don’t bring any happiness in life. Happiness comes only through being original. Unless you have your original face you will never be blessed.But to have your original face you will have to pass through many inconveniences, discomforts. The path is arduous. Keep it in mind that whenever you face a choice between convenience and joy, always choose joy, otherwise you will become fake. Whenever you have a choice between comfort and some adventure, choose the adventure, howsoever arduous, otherwise you will become a fake. Whenever you have a choice between security and insecurity, let insecurity be your love. Never choose security. Security makes people dead and dull. A perfectly secure person is already in his grave, he is no longer alive. If you are alive there is bound to be insecurity – the more alive, the more insecure.A really totally alive person lives moment to moment in insecurity. But then there is great thrill. And he is always on the verge of the unknown and he is always moving into something mysterious. The mysterious cannot be secure. Don’t depend on bank balances, don’t depend on marriage, don’t depend on a comfortable and well-paying job, don’t depend on family, society and state. People who have depended on those things are all around. You can see them – how dead they are, how dragging is their life, how sad are their eyes. Not a single song is in their heart and you will never feel any dance in their feet. Impossible. You can go on searching in their life and you will find desert and more desert, not a single oasis. Love does not bloom; celebration they have not known.I have heard….An Indian died – a very religious man, ritualistic, formal. He had been doing all the kinds of things that the scriptures commanded. So he was very, very certain of reaching paradise. When he reached there he looked through the door and he was surprised. The paradise looked almost like India, no difference, none at all.So he asked the angel standing at the gate, “What is the matter? It looks almost like India, I don’t see any difference. Paradise is almost like our land, our country.”And the man standing on the door said, “What are you talking about? And why do you go on bowing down to me? This is not paradise and I am not an angel!”This story is beautiful…. It is hell and the man standing on the door is not an angel but the devil! But hell will look like India. Hell will look like anything that you have become accustomed to. If you are a German then hell will look like Germany, if you are Japanese then hell will look like Japan, if you are English then hell will look exactly like England.Hell is that which you know. Meditate over it: hell is that which you are acquainted with; hell is the past, the known, the well-trodden path. Heaven is something unknown, something that you cannot compare with your past, cannot compare with your experience, there is no comparison. It is utterly new! Utterly! Absolutely! It is discontinuous. You have never known anything like it.But if you live a life of comfort and convenience and ritual and formality and lies, if you live a fake life, a pseudo life, you live in hell. And you will be living in hell in the future too. You are creating it around yourself. Shake yourself up and get out of your dull and dead so-called life. Start living again. And don’t think about what pays! It is always the wrong thing that pays in this world. The right thing never pays because there are no more people who can pay for the right thing. If you do something wrong you will be paid very much.Just think, a poet is not paid, but a general is. And the general is doing the wrong thing – killing people. He is a murderer. The soldier is paid, not a painter. Those who bring death into the world, they are paid. Can’t you see it? The army people are the well-paid people. They are the butchers and murderers, but they are the most well-paid, well-fed. They live in good houses, have all the facilities of life. Look at the poet who goes on singing songs of love – he will be a beggar. Think of the musician who brings music to your door – he is a beggar. All that is right is not paid; it cannot be paid. The world is so wrong. The politicians are highly paid, highly respected. The newspapers are continuously full of their news. Have you ever seen anything else than politics in the newspapers? And these are the most mischievous people in the world. These are the people who make the earth a hell. But they are the well-paid people.Remember, if you think in terms of payment, you will be fake. If you want to be paid in this world with comfort, luxury, you will have to be fake. If you really want to be alive, then don’t bother whether it pays or not. If it pays, good; if it doesn’t pay, good.But then you will be living a life of great enrichment. You may not be rich, but your life will be enriched. You may not have fame, but you will have joy; you may not be known in the world, but you will be known to God. And that is all that is worth anything.And I am not saying that you all have to carry your crosses on your shoulders continuously. No, I am not saying that. I never demand the impossible. When you live with false people there is no need to create unnecessary conflict either. Avoid. Go on searching for your life, your original face, but there is no need to be in conflict every day, every moment – otherwise it becomes a problem, an unnecessary wastage of energy. Follow the rules of ordinary life, just as one follows the rules of a game. On the roads in India they say: Keep to the left – so keep to the left. It is nothing of any importance. In America they keep to the right. That too is perfectly okay. When in America keep to the right, when in India keep to the left. And if some mad country exists somewhere where you have to keep in the center, keep in the center. Don’t be worried.But always know that this is nothing fundamental. It has nothing to do with any truth. It is a convenience. And when there are so many people…. You need not create inconvenience for others. You are at freedom to create all kinds of inconveniences for yourself – that is your freedom – but you need not create inconveniences for others.I have heard….The great maestro, Toscanini, was as well-known for his ferocious temper as for his outstanding musicianship. When members of his orchestra played badly, he would pick up anything in sight and hurl it to the floor. During one rehearsal a flat note caused the genius to grab his valuable watch and smash it beyond repair.Shortly afterwards, he received from his devoted musicians a luxurious, velvet lined box containing two watches – one a beautiful gold timepiece, the other a cheap one on which was inscribed: For rehearsals only.So keep that in mind. When you are moving in the world, moving with people, there is no need to carry your cross. There is no need to go on shouting loudly that you are a martyr or a Jesus or a Mansoor, there is no need. Follow the rules of the game. It is just a game.But remember always that the game should not become your whole life. That’s all I would like my sannyasins to remember. That’s why I don’t take you out of society. Never has it been done before. For a single reason it has never been done before – the reason was that Buddha would not allow his sannyasins to live in the world. The problem was that if the sannyasin was to be true, it would be difficult to live in the world – because with people you have to be polite, formal, many times. In life you cannot continuously remember that you have to be true; people are so false. Just out of compassion, out of politeness, sometimes you may have to keep yourself quiet, not to say a word – because if you say something it is going to hurt people unnecessarily. Or sometimes you will have to do something which is not true. You can’t be absolutely yourself when you are living with so many people. So Buddha said to his sannyasins, “Leave the world. Sacrifice your relationships to be true.” Others who decided to live in the world sacrificed their truth to live in relationship.Both are lopsided. You can leave the world, but then you will be leaving many opportunities to grow. You can go to a Himalayan cave and sit there. Of course there will be no need to lie because there will be nobody to lie to, nobody to talk to, nobody to relate to. You will be alone in the cave, you will be perfectly true, you can have your original face – but then you don’t have any opportunities as challenges to provoke you into growth. You are out of life, and only in life do people grow.Life is a great opportunity. In the cave you will be secluded, all alone, dull and dead. You will again become dead because you will not have any possibility of responding. Yes, you will not be telling any untruth, but to whom are you going to say the truth? You will not be angry, right, but you will not be loving either. So this is something meaningless. Anger is dropped but love also disappears. So the old kind of sannyasin becomes cold. They don’t have any anger – a good thing – but they don’t have any love. And that can’t be praised.It is as if a person was afraid of illness so he committed suicide. Now he will never be ill, that’s true, but he will never be alive either. This is throwing the baby out with the bath water. I am not in support of it.But up to now these have been the two alternatives given to humanity. One is to leave the world, to shrink into yourself – that is a kind of dull life again. Or, to live in the world and be false, because it is too troublesome to be true.I am giving you the golden mean: live in the world and don’t be of the world. You will need to be very, very alert – more alert than Buddha’s sannyasins. They did not need to be alert, they could go to sleep in their caves. You will have to be very, very alert, and you will have to keep two watches – one for rehearsals only, and one, the real one, for yourself. You will have to become a great actor. But when you act consciously you are not fake. When a conscious act is there and you know that it is just an act, then it is not going to destroy your life. But when you forget that this is an act and you become identified with it, then you become worldly.So the old definition of the worldly is to live in the world, and the definition of the non-worldly is to not live in the world to get out of it. My definition is different. The worldly is one who gets into his act and becomes unconscious and forgets that this is an act. It is as if you are playing on the stage, acting some role. For example, you are in a drama playing the role of Jesus or Pontius Pilate and you forget that it is a role, and when the curtains fall and you come home you come as Pontius Pilate or Jesus Christ. Then you will be in trouble.It has happened sometimes. Once it happened to an actor who was playing Abraham Lincoln continuously for one year around the United States. Every day the party traveled from one town to another town, and he was Abraham Lincoln. One year is a long time. He got mixed up. After one year he forgot his real identity, who he was, and he started saying that he was Abraham Lincoln. At first people thought he was joking, but then it became serious. He came home but he came as Abraham Lincoln. His wife tried to persuade him to get out of his role, his father tried to convince him that he was not Abraham Lincoln, but he wouldn’t listen. And he wouldn’t wear ordinary clothes either, he would wear the clothes that he had been wearing on the stage. And he would walk like Abraham, he would stutter like Abraham, and his face had also become like Abraham’s. For one year he was pretending and pretending and pretending. It became so difficult that they had to bring him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist tried hard, from one direction and another, but he wouldn’t say anything else except “What are you saying? Have you gone mad? I am Abraham Lincoln!” There was no way….They have a lie-detector mechanism in America which they use in the courts. The person concerned stands on the mechanism unaware that there is a mechanism underneath. It is like a cardiogram-type thing. It makes a graph of your heartbeats. When you are speaking the truth there are smooth lines, when you are suddenly ready to speak an untruth there is a gap – because the heart knows something else. And the graph is broken. So when you lie it can be seen in the graph. The graph becomes shaken or broken.For example, if somebody asks you, “What is the time on your watch?” you look and you say, “Nine o’clock.” There is no need to lie. The graph is running smoothly. And if somebody asks, “How many people are here?” you count and you say, “Ten.” There is no need to lie. The graph is going smoothly. Then the person asks, “Are you the murderer of this man?” Your heart says, “Yes!” because it knows, and you say “No.” So there is a conflict between the heart and you, and that conflict shakes the graph. Then it can be shown where you lied.So the psychiatrist suggested that this Abraham Lincoln be put on the lie detector. There only would they be able to see whether he was lying or not. Now the man who was Abraham Lincoln had got fed up with all kinds of treatments and psychiatry and medicine and tranquilizers, and all kinds of suggestions and everybody pretending to be wise and patronizing him. So he decided that day that although he was Abraham Lincoln it was better to say he was not. “Be finished with it! Inside I know that I am, but for the outside I will just tell them and be finished with it. Otherwise life will become a problem”Standing on the lie detector, they asked him different questions and he answered. Then they came to the real question – they asked, “Are you Abraham Lincoln?”He said, “No!” And the detector said he was lying.He had got so much in tune with the idea, that in his deepest core he knew that he was Abraham Lincoln. Now just on the surface he was lying.If this happens, then you are a worldly man. That is my definition of a worldly man – one who gets into his act and forgets to come out; one who remains hooked there. This is the worldly man. And the sannyasin, the other-worldly, is the man who goes on playing acts, who knows they are acts, who never gets hooked by any act. When he comes home, he plays the act of being the husband and the father and the wife. These are all games. Play beautiful, play artistically, play aesthetically, but there is no need to get hooked – that you are a father, that you are a mother, that you are this or that. Or you are a doctor, you are an engineer, you are this and that – these are functions. When you are treating a patient, be in the role of being a doctor, but when there is no patient and you are sitting alone in your room, there is no need to be a doctor. Otherwise you are doing the same stupid thing as that man who became Abraham Lincoln.I used to stay at a friend’s house in Calcutta. He was a Justice of the High Court in those days, now he is a Chief Justice somewhere. His wife told me, “My husband respects you so much, he loves you so much, that you are the only person who can be of some help to me.” I said, “What is the matter?” She said, “He is always the Justice – even at home, even with children. He never comes out of that role. Not only that, even in bed with me, while he is making love, he is the Justice. And I have to treat him as “Your Majesty,” “Your Honor.” He expects that. And I feel as if I am a criminal standing before him always to be judged. And the whole house becomes sad when he comes in. When he goes out there is joy that the Justice has gone.”This is happening to almost everybody, more or less. I call the man worldly who does not know how to play a game and gets too serious about it.My sannyasin is a new entry into the world of religion. He will live in the world, he will play all kinds of games, and he will know that these are all games and he will never be hooked by any game. And he will always be able to get out of any act easily, and he will go on searching for his original face. He will not be lost in the acts that he has to put up with.This is of immense importance. If he lives in the world in a worldly way, he becomes dead. If he becomes an old traditional kind of sannyasin, he shrinks and becomes dead. Both are ways of death. Life is where opposites meet. Life is where day and night meet. Life is in the world and yet only for those who can remain beyond it. Be a lotus flower – in the water and yet untouched by it.The fourth question:Osho,I am much confused about the following question. I am trained as a physician and I have always felt deeply that it is a good thing. But intrinsic in my work, in my activity, is a refusal to accept illness and death, disease and human suffering. Very deep, therefore, is a refusal to accept life or existence as it is. Very deep is a desire to correct some of these mechanisms of nature. All my professional activity is goaded by a fear, a deep personal fear, of sickness, suffering and death. I do not know how to view my work in the light of the whole. Please show the light of existence on this area of confusion for me.This is a significant question, but the question arises because of a wrong attitude in Western medicine.In the East we have a totally different outlook. The polar opposite to Western medicine is the Taoist attitude about medicine. You will have to understand a few things.First, the questioner says: “I am much confused about the following question. I am trained as a physician, and I have always felt deeply that it is a good thing. But intrinsic in my work, in my activity, is a refusal to accept illness and death, disease and human suffering.”Now, a distinction has to be made. Illness, disease and suffering are one thing; death is totally different. In the Western mind, illness, disease, suffering and death are all together – packed in one package. From there problems arise.Death is beautiful; illness is not, suffering is not, disease is not. Death is beautiful. Death is not a sword that cuts your life, it is like a flower – an ultimate flower – that blooms at the last moment. It is the peak. Death is the flower on the tree of life. It is not the end of life but the crescendo. It is the ultimate orgasm. There is nothing wrong in death; it is beautiful – but one needs to know how to live and how to die.There is an art of living and there is an art of dying, and the second art is of more value than the first art. But the second can be known only when you have known the first. Only those who know how to live rightly know how to die rightly. And then death is a door into the divine.So, the first thing: please keep death apart. Only think of illness, disease and suffering. You need not fight against death. That is creating trouble in the Western mind, in the Western hospitals, in Western medicine. People are fighting against death. People are almost vegetating in the hospitals, just alive on drugs. They are forced to live unnecessarily when they would have died naturally. Through medical support their death is being postponed. They are of no use, life is of no use for them; the game is over, they are finished. Now to keep them alive is just to make them suffer more. Sometimes they may be in a coma, and a person can be in a coma for months and years. But because there is an antagonism against death it has become a great problem in the Western mind: what to do when a person is in a coma and will never recover, but can be kept alive for years? He will be a corpse, just a breathing corpse, that’s all. He will simply vegetate; there will be no life.What is the point? Why not allow him to die? There is the fear of death. Death is the enemy – how to surrender to the enemy, to death?So there is great controversy in the Western medical mind. What to do? Should a person be allowed to die? Should a person be allowed to decide whether he wants to die? Should the family be allowed to decide whether they would like him to die? – because sometimes the person may be unconscious and cannot decide.But is it right to help somebody to die? Great fear arises in the Western mind. To die? That means you are murdering the person! The whole of science exists to keep him alive.Now this is stupid! Life in itself has no value unless there is joy, unless there is dance, unless there is some creativity, unless there is love – life in itself is meaningless. Just to live is meaningless. A point comes when one has lived, a point comes when it is natural to die, when it is beautiful to die. Just as when you have been doing work the whole day, a point comes when you fall asleep. Death is a kind of sleep – a deeper sleep. You will be born again in a newer body with a newer mechanism, with new facilities, with new opportunities, new challenges. This body is old and one has to leave it; it is just a dwelling.But there are people who-are even afraid of sleep. Just a few days ago I was reading a book in which the author says, “There is no need to sleep. It is a wastage of time.” A person lives almost one-third of his life in sleep – and that is not living at all, because he creates nothing, he does not work. What is the point of keeping a man asleep? Sooner or later they will start finding drugs so that a man can avoid sleep completely. Just think of the world where sleep will become impossible, they won’t allow you even to sleep.In Russia they have invented instruments to teach children while they are asleep. Now will you not leave even sleep alone. It is called hypno-teaching. A tape recorder is connected and the whole night the tape recorder goes on teaching mathematics, history, geography. The child has been tortured the whole day in the school, now you cannot even allow him rest. The Western mind is too utilitarian. It does not believe in rest, it believes in work. Its whole ethos is that of work, not of relaxation. And in the morning the child has to go to school again. You will create more neurotic people in the world if you don’t even allow sleep.And this author suggests that there is a possibility that through some drugs sleep can be completely removed and a man can live awake for seventy years. Just think of the nightmare! These people who are against sleep are against death too. They are against any kind of relaxation, let-go. Just go on fighting.In the East we have a different outlook: death is not the enemy but the friend. Death gives you rest. You have become tired, you have lived your life, you have known all the joys that can be known in life, you have burnt your candle totally. Now go into darkness, rest for a while and then you can be born again. Death will revive you again in a fresher way.So the first thing: death is not the enemy.The second thing: death is the greatest experience in life if you can die consciously. And you can die consciously only if you are not against it. If you are against it you become very panicky, very afraid. When you are so afraid that you cannot tolerate that fear there is a natural mechanism in the body which releases drugs into the body and you become unconscious. There is a point beyond which endurance will not be possible; you become unconscious So millions of people die unconsciously and miss a great moment, the greatest of all. It is samadhi, it is satori, it is meditation happening to you. It is a natural gift.If you can be alert and you can see that you are not the body…. You will have to see, because the body will disappear. Soon you will be able to see that you are not the body, you are separate. Then you will see you are separating from the mind too. Then the mind will disappear. And then you will be just a flame of awareness, and that is the greatest benediction there is.So the first thing: don’t think of death as illness, disease and human suffering.The second thing: illness, disease and suffering are bad because they happen only when you are not natural. Something has gone wrong. Health is natural, death is natural, but disease is not natural. Disease is simply an indication that something is going wrong in your nature. For example, you have eaten too much and there is pain in your stomach. This pain is not natural, you have done something unnatural. You have not slept for two, three days, because you were running after money and it was not possible for you to sleep. Or you were fighting an election and it was not possible to sleep, or to afford that much time for sleep. You were on an election campaign, so you have not slept for three days and now the head is becoming neurotic, bursting; there is great pain in the head. This is just a symptom. Nature is saying to you. “Come back to me. You have gone too far away.”Man is free and he can be unnatural. Many kinds of diseases happen only when we go somewhere astray from nature. If man lives naturally there will be no disease.But man cannot live naturally continuously because man also has freedom. Sometimes you can eat a little too much – that is your freedom. And sometimes you can go on a fast – that too is your freedom. Man is the only animal in the world who has freedom: that is his dignity. But freedom brings dangers. The first danger is that you can go against nature. And nature is so polite that it does not shout, it whispers. Nature is very silent; its voice is very still and small. It goes on saying, “Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it,” and it goes on tolerating. There is a point beyond which it cannot tolerate and the disease erupts.Now, what is the physician meant to do? In the East the physician does not fight disease, the physician is not meant to destroy the disease. The physician is simply meant to bring the man back to nature.The questioner asks: “But intrinsic in my work, in my activity, is a refusal to accept illness, disease and human suffering. Very deep therefore, is a refusal to accept life or existence as it is. Very deep is a desire to correct some of these mechanisms of nature.”Yes, the desire is perfectly right. But it is not to correct some mechanisms of nature, it is to correct some mechanism which has gone against nature.The physician is not correcting nature, he is only correcting man. This is a totally different vision. The physician is not correcting nature. Nature is always correct. Sometimes man can be wrong, because he has freedom. The physician corrects man.You will be surprised to know that in China there has been a traditional concept – a very ancient tradition – that when a person falls ill he stops paying his physician. Otherwise he has to pay, if the person remains healthy he has to pay; if he falls ill then he stops paying. That means that the physician has not been looking at nature and has not been helping nature and has not been helping him to keep “right,” in tune with nature. The physician has failed.This is a very strange outlook. When you are ill you go to the doctor and you pay. In China, for centuries they have been paying when they are healthy. They go to their doctor and pay because they are healthy – the doctor keeps them healthy. When they are ill, they stop paying. Why should they pay? The doctor has not been doing his job. His job is to keep people natural. This will be the vision of the future. Sooner or later, this vision has to come.The doctor is not against nature, the doctor is only putting people right because people have the freedom to go wrong. They can.So there is no need to keep yourself miserable – that you are doing something good, but then there is a refusal to accept disease and illness. Yes, there is a refusal to accept disease and illness, but disease and illness are not natural, they are a going astray. Put man right. You are not fighting against the whole, you are fighting for the whole against man. Let it be looked at in this way.The questioner says that he is afraid – it is as if he is fighting against the whole. If the whole wants disease then let it be there. If this is the will of the whole then let it be there, he should surrender.You are not fighting the whole when you are fighting the disease, you are fighting a part which is going against the whole. If the part is in tune with the whole, in harmony, there will be no disease, no illness.But man has freedom. And with freedom many dangers enter.If you go into the forest, into the jungle, you will be surprised to see that animals are almost never ill. I am not talking about the animals who live in a zoo – they are ill. They have become human imitators. To live with humans is very dangerous. But in a jungle, living in a wild situation, animals live and die – they are never ill. They never eat too much because they don’t have that much freedom. They never fast, they don’t have that much freedom, they don’t have that much consciousness. They don’t do anything that is unnatural. They go on doing the natural thing, and they keep healthy.Once I went into a reserve forest with a few of my friends. One lady was with me who was really fat, exceptionally fat. She was just sitting by my side in the jeep when we went into the forest. That forest has thousands of deer, and a row of deer was passing and we were watching. I told the lady, “Just watch for one thing. See if you find any deer that is fat.” Thousands of deer passed and the lady became very, very embarrassed because she could not find a single deer that was fat. They were all alike, there was not a single fat deer – because deer can’t eat too much. And when deer don’t eat too much they never have to diet, there is no need. A physician is not needed.Illnesses like tuberculosis or cancer don’t happen in nature. Cancer-happens only in a very higher kind of civilization.In India the ancient name for tuberculosis is “the royal disease.” It used to happen only to kings. It is called raj yakshma – only to the kings. It never happened to poor people. It couldn’t happen. A poor person can’t suffer that much for tuberculosis to happen. Then by and by poor people became rich, then the tuberculosis became more and more available to everybody.Cancer is a new phenomenon. It is absolutely new. It is not mentioned in any ancient medicine manual – Taoist or Hindu – it is absolutely new. It had to wait for the twentieth century to happen. A great tension is needed for it to happen. So much unnatural tension is needed for it to happen that it was not possible before. Only we can afford cancer; we have become affluent enough to have it. And our minds are becoming neurotic with desires – we are running in all directions, we are falling apart.You need not be worried that you are fighting against nature or against the whole. You are not fighting against nature, you are fighting against the stupidity of the part which has gone against the whole. You are bringing the person back to the whole.And remember always, a physician never heals, he cannot heal. He can only make the healing force of the whole available to the patient. It is the whole that heals. It is not the physician and it is not the medicine either that heals. The medicine and the physician and the hospital all bring the part back closer to the whole, where healing happens. the physician and the medicine were just instrumental.You need not be worried. You are in the service of nature. You can be happy that you are doing something beautiful.The last question:There are two questions connected. First:Osho,A couple of years ago, I had all the symptoms of a heart attack and was taken to hospital for five days, but there was no heart attack. And lately I hear that other people have had the same feeling. What does it mean?The question is from Sheela.And the second question is from Satya:Osho,So many people at the ashram seem to be having something happening to their heart recently: pain in the heart, burning in the heart, feeling like their heart is about to break with love, with gratitude. I have a tickle in my heart. Sheela says that when your long arm hit her in the lecture the other day, she felt it in her heart. What is happening?First: the physical heart is not your real heart. The real heart exists just behind the physical heart. The real heart is not part of your physical mechanism at all. The real heart exists in the soul – it is the center of the soul.The physical heart is the center of the body and the spiritual heart is the center of the soul. They both exist together, side by side. Just behind the physical is the spiritual heart. And it is going to happen to many people, this misunderstanding.When the spiritual heart starts opening, you will have ripples in your physical heart too. They correspond, they are very close together. When something vibrates in the spiritual heart, you will feel echoes in the physical heart too. In fact, you will first feel it only in the physical heart because you don’t know anything about the spiritual heart. Your first awareness of it will be of the physical heart getting some strange feelings. Sometimes it can be that of burning, sometimes it can be that of throbbing, sometimes it can be that of bursting, sometimes it can be almost like a heart attack.It has been happening down the ages to all meditators. Whenever people go deep into meditation this is bound to happen. The spiritual heart starts trembling, opening, the petals bloom, and the physical heart starts catching the vibrations, the echoes. But this is a beautiful sign. Don’t be afraid of it. Soon you will become aware of the spiritual heart, then all symptoms from the physical will disappear.The first symptoms will be of uneasiness, restlessness. It is so because something new is happening and you are not accustomed to it. When you become a little more accustomed to it, more harmonious with it, you will see that it is not restlessness, it was just a new taste that you had not known before. It disturbs you. When it becomes well-acquainted, well-known, it will give you a new kind of peace, silence. And great love will arise out of it.Just a few days before one old sannyasin came to me, and he said, “A strange thing has happened” – and he is very old, seventy or seventy-five – “I had the feeling of a heart attack, so I went to the doctor and they examined me and they said there was nothing wrong. I was absolutely healthy and normal. So what is happening to me?”I told him jokingly that it was not a heart attack, it was a love attack.Yes, when your spiritual centers start opening you will have love attacks. Your body will feel the trembling, the restlessness. Soon it will settle, and when it settles you will have a new being – a new plane of being. You have moved from the physical to the spiritual.Between the physical heart and the spiritual heart is the mind. That is the only barrier. The whole effort of meditation is to disperse the mind. Once the mind is dispersed, the physical heart and the spiritual heart both start dancing together. Then a great beauty arises. And it is not only spiritual, it will be seen in your physical face too. A grace, a new quality of energy will be around you. And not only will you feel it, others will feel it too. You will have a new vibe.This is going to happen to many people because many people are meditating and they are really working hard. But I am not saying that if sometimes you start feeling something going wrong in the heart you are not to go to the physician. You have to go! Sometimes it may be a heart attack. You have to go. If it is not a heart attack the physician will tell you that it is not. But you have to check it.This question is important because it is relevant to many of you. To many it has happened, and to many it is going to happen, and to many more. But always, when you have something happening in the body, go to the physician and be checked. If it is nothing, there is no problem. If there is something, you can take medicine.So don’t think that it is always the spiritual heart because sometimes it may not be. Sometimes it may be the physical heart and if you don’t go to the physician you can be in danger.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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This interchange between the Sufi mystic, Simab, and a nobleman named Mulakab, is preserved in oral transmission as a dialogue often staged by wandering dervishes.Mulakab: “Tell me something of your philosophy so that I may understand.”The mystic replied: “You cannot understand unless you have experience.”Mulakab: “I do not have to understand a cake to know whether it is bad.”Simab: “If you are looking at good fish and you think that it is a bad cake, you need to understand less, and to understand it better, more than you need anything else.”Mulakab: “Then why do you not abandon books and lectures if experience is the necessity?”Simab: “Because the outward is the conductor to the inward. Books will teach you something of the outward aspects of the inward, and so will lectures. Without them you would make no progress.”Mulakab: “But why should we not be able to do without books?”Simab: “For the same reason that you cannot think without words. You have been reared on books; and your mind is so altered by books and lectures, by hearing and speaking, that the inward can only speak to you through the outward. Whatever you pretend you can perceive.”“Does this apply to everyone?”Simab: “It applies to whom it applies. It applies above all to those who think it does not apply to them!”Sufism is an alchemy. It is the science to transform lead into gold, the lower into the higher, the outer into the inner. It is the science to transform the world into God.Remember, Sufism is not a philosophy, it is a science. It does not believe in speculation, it believes in experience. It does not believe in logical thinking, it believes in experimentation. Only experiment decides what is true; nothing else can be decisive. Only when you know do you know – there is no other way to know.Sufism does not trust in beliefs. It wants you to drop all kinds of beliefs because they will be the barriers to knowing. A belief is a pseudo kind of knowing – you really don’t know but because you believe, because you have believed so long, you start feeling as if you know. All your beliefs have to be taken away from you. You have to be left in ignorance and innocence. Only from there is experimentation possible.Science presupposes nothing – no belief, no a priori belief. There is no presupposition at all. Science starts with a blank mind.These are the three things you will have to understand deeply. The first is art. Art does not bother much about the object. it has its own projections. Art uses the object as a screen on which to project its subjectivity. When you see a woman’s face or a child’s face or a flower, art is not concerned with the objective – with what is there – art is concerned with what you make of it, what you project onto it. Beauty is not part of the objective, beauty is your dream that you bring to the object – then the object looks beautiful.Art invents, art does not discover. It is not interested in discovery, it is inventive, it is imaginative, it is projective. That is the basic meaning of the word poet. The original root comes from poietes – poietes means one who creates. Art is creative.But what can you create? Whatsoever you create will be your mind projection. Art creates beauty. Science is not creative in that sense. Science is discovery. Whatsoever is there, science only uncovers it. It does not invent, it has no idea to project. Science is objective; art is subjective. With art you have some projections, some ideas as a requirement. Before you come to the rose-flower you have to come with some dreams in your mind, you have to nourish dreams. When those dreams are overflowing they will overflow onto the roseflower, they will surround the roseflower with a glory, with an aura, and you will see something which is not there. You will see something which is really inside you and is only reflected from the outside back to you. Art is a dream; it is dream stuff.Science is objective. The basic requirement of science is to go nude, naked; to go without any prejudice; to go without any idea of what the case is; just to be there, impartial, objective, with no thoughts in the mind – so that you can watch whatsoever is there. Reality reveals itself if you can be a witness. A pure witnessing is what science is.And then there is philosophy. Art at least projects onto something outside. Science does not project at all; it allows the outside to reveal its truth. And philosophy? It is pure subjectivity. It does not even bother about the screen. Art at least bothers about the screen – the screen has to be there, then it can project. Philosophy is pure speculation. You close your eyes and you go into your thoughts and you can go on and on forever. It is an endless procession of thoughts.Philosophy is pure subjectivity, science is pure objectivity, art is just in the middle of the two – a little of philosophy and a little of science, a little of objectivity and a little of subjectivity. Art is a mixture.Religion can be of three types. It can either be philosophic or it can be artistic or it can be scientific. Sufism is the third kind of religion. It believes in experiment, in experience; it does not believe in beliefs. It trusts only the truth that is already there. You have only to uncover it.To start with, Sufism says that you have to prepare yourself so that no prejudices, no conditionings, come in between you and the truth. The journey starts with you dropping beliefs, theories, philosophies, systems. Only when you are empty of all thought are your eyes ready, receptive. Then you can see.The state in which human beings ordinarily exist is called nafs by Sufis. The word means: desire-nature – what Hindus call vasana and what Buddhists call tanha – the desire to have more, the desire to possess, the desire to be powerful, the desire to be this or that. You are full of these desires, nafs, and because of these desires you cannot see what truth is. Your desires go on overcrowding your consciousness and if the consciousness is too overcrowded by desires there is no possibility of seeing the truth.When you are full of lust, you start seeing things according to your lust. When you are full of desire you start projecting, you start seeing things which are not there. According to your desire you start coloring things.One day just go into the marketplace. Well-fed, satisfied with your food, go, have a stroll on the street. And then another day fast and go again on the same street. you will be surprised – it is not the same street. When you are well-fed you see certain things; on the same street, when you are hungry, you see totally different things. When you are on a fast, hungry, you will see restaurants, hotels, things like that. You will go on missing the shoe-store and other things. When you are well-fed you will not see the restaurants and the hotels at all. You may not have any idea that they exist there.You constantly choose according to your desire. When you are full of sexuality you will see women, if you are a man; or if you are a woman, you will see men. When sexuality disappears you stop seeing man and woman, you stop dividing that way. It simply does not matter. It is pointless.The first thing that you see in the other is whether he is man or woman. Have you watched it. You never forget it. You can forget everything – you can forget the name of the person, the face of the person – but you never forget whether the person is man or woman. Why? Have you ever forgotten that about anybody? Have you ever wondered whether he is man or woman? “I knew him twenty years ago. I don’t remember his name, I don’t remember his face, I don’t remember anything about him….” but have you ever wondered whether he was man or woman? No that you remember. That goes deep in you – because of nafs. The first thing you look into is whether the person is man or woman.Just a few days ago it happened that a Japanese man took sannyas and Mukta told me that he was a she – some mistake from the office on her chart. So I gave him sannyas and gave him a “Ma” name, but he was a man. And you know the Japanese, they are so polite they will not say no. I have heard that the Japanese have no equivalent word to no, they always say yes – hai. They are just being polite.So he accepted even that. He didn’t say, “I am a man. I am not a woman.” Only later on was it known that he was a man and I had given him a “Ma” name.What happened? When you don’t have nafs you don’t look into another’s sexuality. That doesn’t matter. That does not matter at all. You are not concerned with the form of his body – whether he has breasts or not, whether he has a beard or not. You don’t see it that way. Once nafs has disappeared, once the desire-nature has disappeared, the other is a person, a pure person. Maleness, femaleness are irrelevant facts. Who bothers? Otherwise those are the most pertinent and relevant facts. The first thing that you see in the other is a reflection of your nafs.Sufis say nafs is the state where man exists, and through nafs there is no possibility of seeing God – because nafs can only see sexuality, money, power. Nafs is blind to God. Unless you drop nafs you will not see God – and God is everywhere. Only God is. All is God. Nothing else is. But you will not see God, you cannot see God. To see God you will have to drop nafs.Why does nafs become such a barrier? What exactly is nafs? Nafs is a neurotic hunger which cannot be satisfied. That’s why it is neurotic – because there is no way to fulfill it. The more you fulfill it, the more it grows. Nafs is a constant hankering to have more – of whatsoever. If you have money you want to have more money, if you have a beautiful woman you want to have a more beautiful woman, if you have power you want to have more power – always more and more and more. Now this more cannot be satisfied. In the very nature of things the desire for more cannot be satisfied – because whatsoever you have, your desire for more remains.You have ten thousand rupees – your desire for more says, “Have one thousand more. Eleven thousand will be okay.” When you have eleven thousand the desire-nature says, “Have twelve thousand.” And so on, so forth. You can have millions, it will not make a bit of difference. Ten thousand rupees or ten million rupees, it will not make a bit of difference, not even an iota – because the desiring-nature always goes on asking for more. You have ten million rupees, the desiring-nature says, “Have eleven million rupees.” It is the same mind. When you had ten thousand it was saying, “Have eleven thousand,” now you have ten million it says, “Have eleven million.” The proportion remains the same.The desire nature, nafs, is like the horizon – it always looks as if it is just there, maybe ten miles away. If you rush you can reach it within two hours. But you will never reach it. After two hours, when you look, you will find that it has again receded back, and the distance is the same.This goes on – that’s why all the religions have called this desire-nature the source of all kinds of mirages, illusions. It creates an illusion, an illusory line, there – the horizon. The horizon does not exist because the earth and the heaven never meet anywhere. And the earth is round. It just appears that somewhere the earth and sky are meeting – just yonder, there. And it seems so close that it seems worthwhile to try. It remains always so close and always so distant. Between you and the horizon the distance is constant. It is the same distance.The desire for more cannot be satisfied. And because the desire for more cannot be satisfied, you cannot see that which is. You always hanker for that which is not, so your mind is somewhere else and you cannot see that which is very obvious and surrounds you. You see the horizon; you don’t see yourself. You see the distant; you don’t see the close-by. And God is your neighbor, God is really inside you, you are God. But that is very close and you don’t have any time or energy to look for the close. You will have time and energy only when your desire for the distant has disappeared.Nafs is a neurotic state of mind. Just look inside yourself and you will always find nafs. Why does this nafs exist at all? What is the reason for its existence in the first place?Man is afraid of his inner emptiness – so much so that the inner seems almost a kind of death. Look within and there is emptiness and nothing else – a silence, an eternal silence, never disturbed, not even a ripple arises there. Not even you are there – because you are noisy, you are the crowd. At the innermost core of your being there is pure emptiness, and that creates fear. One wants to fill it with something, one wants to stuff it with something, one wants to become something so that this emptiness can be dropped. That’s the reason why nafs exists. It is because of the fear of inner emptiness that you go on stuffing yourself.You may have watched it. When you are feeling very empty, you start eating, when you are feeling very lonely you start eating, when you are missing your beloved or lover you start eating too much. You stuff yourself. You just want to have a feeling of fullness. But no food goes into your inner emptiness, it only stuffs your stomach. It is destructive to your body if you eat too much. And you remain empty.Somebody becomes a food addict, somebody becomes a power addict, somebody becomes a money addict – they are all addictions. These are the real drugs. LSD or marijuana are nothing compared to money, compared to power. These are the really destructive elements. And I am not saying that LSD or marijuana are not destructive; they are destructive, but they are nothing compared to money or power.Whenever you are trying to fill your inner emptiness with anything, you are going against God – because that inner emptiness is the face of God. When you stop stuffing yourself with food, money, power, et cetera, et cetera, then suddenly you become aware of who you are.Sufis say that the first thing to be understood, experienced, is nafs, and by understanding it there is a dropping. It is not that you have to drop it – just to see it is to drop it, just to realize the fact and the absurdity and the neurosis of it is to drop it. That dropping has a beautiful name – Sufis call it tambah.Tambah means turning; tambah means exactly what Jesus says when he says “repent.” The original root word from which “repent” comes has nothing to do with repentance. It means “return to the source.” Return – that is the meaning of repent. It has no idea of guilt in it, just return to your source. Sufis call it tambah, Patanjali calls it pratyahar – turning towards oneself – and Mahavira calls it prankramana – coming back home. It is the same process.First understand the nature of nafs, desire, desire for more, that mad, neurotic desire for more – understand it, and tambah happens. Seeing the futility of it you turn back. Then you don’t rush towards the horizon, you start moving towards yourself. A one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, an about-turn, that s what tambah is.Through this turning the third thing starts happening – Sufis call it hal. Hal means a state of being, but a temporary one; an altered state, a changed state of being; a state of no-mind, but for single moments, like flashes. For a single moment you are rooted in your being and again you are uprooted. It comes like lightning. Hal means a state of consciousness, but temporary.In the beginning it will happen only in a momentary way – sometimes it will be there and sometimes it will not be there. It will be like a ray of light in your darkness, or a single star in the dark sky, clouded sky. And sometimes you will be able to see it and sometimes you will not be able to see it. This is called hal, what in America they now call “altered states of consciousness.” In fact, I have heard a suggestion from somebody that now they should be told to change the name of the United States of America. Jimmy Carter should be told to change the name to Altered States of America. That will be more relevant. The consciousness is changing. Man is more interested in consciousness now than ever.Nafs is interested in the content – the content that you can fill your consciousness with. The content may be money or food or knowledge or something else, but nafs is interested in the content. After tambah, after the turning in, one becomes interested, not in the content, but in consciousness itself. What is this inner emptiness that you want to fill? First see it, know it, first become acquainted with it, first have a real taste of it, have a bite of it and chew it and see whether it is something to be filled or something to be enjoyed. And the moment you have a taste of it, then everything you have tasted before will look worthless. This emptiness is fullness itself; this inner emptiness is the greatest joy there is; it is a benediction.First you will have hals, states – sometimes like a flash you will be enlightened – but then it is gone and you have fallen into misery again, deeper than before. If you don’t create a nafs for the hals…. There is a possibility that you may start hankering for more – then you have fallen back. Then you have turned back again. Again you have created a horizon, again the mind has come in, again there is the desire-nature.Remember it – to many people here, hals happen. When the hal happens, when you have a taste of that state, naturally you start desiring more. You become very, very desirous. A great longing arises – how to have it every day? And how to have it again and again – morning, afternoon, evening, night – how to have it more?I can understand. It is so beautiful, it is such a benediction, that one would like to have it. But if you start expecting, desiring, you will miss even the hals. Even these flash-like lightnings will disappear, even these moments will be no more – because they can happen only when nafs is not there. If you enjoy the hal and you don’t become desirous of it – when it is there you feel grateful, when it is gone you don’t hanker for it, you wait without desiring, you wait patiently, without demanding – it will come more and more.Then comes the fourth state – hals become permanent. That is called magama. Magama means that one has arrived. Then it is always there. Then- it is not that it happens to you – now you are it. From nafs to magama, this is the journey of a Sufi. And the whole journey consists of experiment, experience. It is existential.You will have to go a little deeper into the details of the state of nafs because the more you are acquainted with it, the more is the possibility for tambah, for conversion, for repentance, for pratyahar, for that great leap and change of direction.There are three states of nafs, there are three kinds of sleepy people in the world. Just the other day there was a question: You say, Man is asleep, but are all men asleep in the same way? No, they are not. Everybody is asleep but there are differences in sleep too, very significant differences.The first are called the hostiles. They are asleep. They are asleep in their rage, in their anger, in their hostility, hatred, in their violence, in their aggressiveness, in their ambition. The first kind of sleep is that of the hostile.You can see people. The hostile person is very apparent. He is always angry about everything. He is destructive. He wants to destroy everything. The hostiles become the revolutionaries – Mao, Stalin, Lenin. They want to destroy. They want to destroy the whole past, they want to destroy the whole society. Of course, when you want to destroy, you cannot destroy as a pure act – you have to give a utopia to peoples’ minds, like an opium. All utopias are opiums. You have to tell them, “We are going to change the society for a better state, that’s why we are destroying’ – otherwise nobody will support it. You have to create a dream. When you create the dream and people become infatuated with the dream, then you can destroy.That beautiful society never comes; it has never come, it is never going to come. That’s why a man like Buddha never talks about the society. No social revolution is going to happen. Who is going to do it? The hostiles do it. They are really interested in destruction. The idea of creating a better society is just a strategy to destroy, to destroy without guilt.This hostile person is one extreme. His anger is not particularly directed towards something, he is simply angry about everything. He is angry. He has no object of anger – everything and everybody seems to be inimical to him. Not only persons but things look inimical towards him. He is inimical, that’s why the whole existence looks inimical. His basic attitude is negative. His sleep is a very, very angry sleep.One thing is good about him – he is hot. He is not cold. He is really burning, boiling. He can be changed more easily than the other two kinds because he is hot. His fire is alive – wrongly directed, but the direction can be changed. He has power. If his direction is changed, if his anger becomes a fuel for inner transformation, he can become a buddha easily.It is not just a coincidence that all the great masters in India came from the warrior race – kshatriyas. Brahmins have not produced so many enlightened people. One would have expected that Brahmins would have produced more enlightened people because they are well-versed people – logically, philosophically, in every way. They are good people but they have not produced many enlightened people. Buddha was a warrior, so was Mahavira, so was Neminatha, so was Adinatha, and so on, so forth. The twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, Buddha, Ram, Krishna, Nanak – they are all kshatriyas, they all come from the warrior race. It is not accidental. If the hostile person changes, he can become a buddha very easily. So this is the best kind of sleep – the hostile sleep.That’s why my work here consists first of making you hot through encounter, through other cathartic groups, through Dynamic meditation, Kundalini. The whole point is to create more fire in you, to bring your hostility to the surface – because from there, there is a possibility of change.The second kind of sleep and the second kind of people are the phonies. This is the other extreme. One extreme is the hostile, the other extreme is the phony. These are the goody-goody people – always smiling, false and pseudo, always deceptive, never true. The hostile is true. He shows his face – whatsoever it is. It is ugly, certainly ugly, but he shows it. The phony has an ugly face but he has a mask. You never see his real face.The politician and the priests, these are the phonies. The Brahmins could not produce so many enlightened people – they are the phonies. They are always trying to be sweet. This is a trick to protect themselves. These are the people who are very repressed. They go on repressing all hostility. The hostility remains but goes into the basement, hides in the unconscious.The hostile is a simple person. You can always trust an angry person, remember. Never trust a person who is always smiling. I have heard about people who even smile in their sleep. They are so phony that the smile has become almost a fixed state of affairs. The lips have become paralyzed in a smile. The lips cannot do anything else. The smile has become material, concrete. It is not a thing that comes from the heart, it is a painted thing.This is the person who is very orthodox. The first kind becomes revolutionary, the second kind is orthodox. He always believes in the rule; he is very obedient to society. In whatsoever society he is, he is obedient to it. He does not bother about what he is obedient to; he is simply obedient. These people become very respectable, naturally – because they obey the society. They never do anything wrong, they are always right. Their ego trip is for the right. They ride on the right – they are the righteous people. They always do the right thing, they never do the wrong thing. Naturally they get all kinds of respect and honor from the society. These are the respectable people.The second kind is more difficult because the sleep of the second kind has more sweet dreams in it. The first kind is suffering from nightmares. Remember, when you suffer from a nightmare there is every possibility for you to awake. It always happens. When you really go into a nightmare and when the nightmare becomes too much, you are suddenly awake, your sleep is broken. The nightmare itself automatically works against the sleep. But when you are sleeping a sweet sleep and you are seeing beautiful dreams of paradise and heaven, then there is no problem – the sleep can continue. A sweet dream defends the sleep, a nightmare is against the sleep.So the second kind, the respectable person, is the least religious person in the world. And, naturally, he is very cold. He cannot afford to he hot. These are the people who, if they come to this ashram, they immediately escape.There is one woman – she has been here for one month – she only listens to me and then she escapes. She goes on writing letters to me: “I want to see you, Osho, but I can’t do your meditations. They are dangerous. And I can’t go to any group because they are dangerous too. I can only listen to you. I love what you say.”But what kind of love is this? If you love what I say, then that love will lead you naturally into what I am saying to do. If you avoid the meditations, if you avoid the groups that go on here, then what kind of love is this?With words you know that no change is going to happen. You can absorb words – you have become very, very expert at absorbing words. And with words you are free. You can interpret in your own way. You can drop a few words, you can add a few words, you can change the very quality of what I say. But you cannot change the meditation and you cannot change a group process like encounter. You will have to go into it. And one is afraid.Now this woman is a phony. She is in a deeper kind of sleep than a hostile person. A hostile person can be changed because he is hot. This woman is phony. She is cold, ice cold. When the water is hot it is very close to evaporation – just a little more heat and it will evaporate. When you have ice cubes, first you have to melt them, then you have to heat them. The process is longer.The third kind, the most difficult kind, are the zombies – the hostiles, the phonies and the zombies. The zombie is just in the middle – he is neither hostile nor phony. He is just in the middle, he is both. He is dead. He is neither hot nor cold, he is impotent. He has not taken any side, he is afraid. He just hangs in the middle. He cannot decide. So he has decided to be just a machine.These people – the zombies – are just dead. They are walking, talking corpses. They are mechanical. They only know life as a rut, as a routine. They are ritualistic. The zombies become great saints and mahatmas; the hostiles can become revolutionaries, criminals, sinners; the phonies are very respectable people, the gentleman and the lady.Just yesterday I was reading about a court decision in the United States of America. In some American state there was a case for a divorce and the magistrate ruled that a person who is divorcing his wife and a woman who is divorcing her husband should not be called gentleman and lady – they are simply man and woman.I was surprised. In the twentieth century? And in America, out of all other lands! The magistrate ruled that a person who is divorcing is no longer a gentleman, he is just an ordinary man. He cannot be addressed as “gentleman.” And the lady who is divorcing – of course, how can she be a lady? Impossible. No respect should be shown to them, that’s what the magistrate was saying.These phonies get all the respect. They are the gentlemen and the ladies. They become the priests, the politicians; they are the powerful people. And the zombies become the saints and the mahatmas. Only they can, only they can afford to. They are so dead. They sit just like dead statues.It is said that once a seeker came to Rinzai, the great Zen master. And the seeker said, “I have been to other monasteries, I have learned much. Now I come to you, the greatest master of this age.”Rinzai looked at the man. He must have seen that he seemed to be a zombie. Rinzai said, “What have you learned? Just show me.”Now this was a rare question. He had been to other masters, other teachers, other monasteries – they never asked, “Show me.” Yes, they asked questions and he answered perfectly well because he was very well-versed. For thirty years he had been in the profession of seeking, so he knew all the trade secrets – but, “Show it!” How do you show your philosophy?He could not think of anything else so he just closed his eyes and sat in a Buddha asana, absolutely like a statue. And Rinzai laughed, hit him hard on the head and said, “You fool! Get out from here! We have enough buddhas. Can’t you see in the temple?” Rinzai used to live in a temple which was known as the Ten Thousand Buddha Temple. There were ten thousand statues. He said, “Look, we have ten thousand fools like you. Marble statues. We don’t need any more. Get out! Simply don’t show your face again!”Zombies can become great mahatmas because they are so dead. Life has shrunken in them. It is not that they have become desireless, no. they have become lifeless. When there is no life there is no desire – but that is not the point. A real sage is one who has no desire and absolute life. The false saint is one who has killed his life because that is the simplest way to kill his desire. But he is dead.These are the three kinds of sleepy people and these are the three kinds of nafs. You have to watch your own – what kind of nafs do you have? If you are a hostile, be happy, things are easier. If you are a phony, be happy, things are a little more difficult but still possible. If you are a zombie then still be happy that you have understood that you are a zombie – some possibility is there!Now this beautiful dialogue.This interchange between the Sufi mystic, Simab, and a nobleman named Mulakab, is preserved in oral transmission as a dialogue often staged by wandering dervishes.Mulakab: “Tell me something of your philosophy so that I may understand.”It looks like a very relevant question. “Tell me something of your philosophy so that I may understand” – as if by telling something one can understand.We believe too much in words – as if the word itself is the truth, as if the letter is the spirit. It is not, but we have been brought up on words. All that we know is words. So naturally the seeker comes to the master, the mystic, Simab, and asks, “Tell me something of your philosophy.”Now Sufism has no philosophy. Sufism cannot be told. It can be lived, it can be experienced, but it can’t be told. And it is not that Sufis have not tried to tell it, they have tried to tell it, but it goes on slipping. That’s what I go on doing. I go on telling it but it goes on slipping. No word ever does any justice to truth; all words falsify. Sufis agree perfectly with Lao Tzu when he says, “The Tao that can be said is Tao no more. The truth that can be uttered has already become a lie.”You will have to experience it on your own. But man is imitative, so entirely imitative, that he just imitates other peoples’ words, their philosophies, their beliefs.I have heard….Two men and a young lady were on the Pullman going to California and decided they had better get acquainted.One man said, “My name is Paul, but I’m not an apostle.”The other said, “My name is Peter, but I’m not a saint.”The girl muttered, “My name is Mary, and I don’t know what the hell to say.”That’s how it goes. We just see what is happening, what people are doing, and we do it. We imitate.In sleep, man remains a monkey, and as far as sleepers are concerned Darwin is perfectly right that man is born out of the monkey. Otherwise how can you explain so much monkeyish-ness, imitativeness?The new minister stood at the church door greeting parishioners as they departed after the close of the service. The people were generous in complimenting the clergyman for his sermon, except for one fellow who said to him, “Pretty dull sermon, Reverend.”And in a minute or two the same man appeared again in line and said, “Pretty dull sermon, Reverend.”Once again the man appeared, this time muttering, “You really didn’t say anything at all, Reverend.”When he got the opportunity, the minister pointed out the triple-threat pest to one of the deacons and inquired about him.“Oh, don’t let that guy bother you,” said the deacon. “He’s a poor soul who goes around repeating whatever he hears other people saying.”Just watch your mind. What have you got there? Anything original? Anything authentically yours? Or do you just go on repeating what other people are saying? Drop that repetitiveness, then the door opens to experience. Philosophy is not going to help – only insight into your being will help.An elderly lady had a parrot that was using offensive language. Every time the lady would come into the room it would say, “I wish she was dead, I wish she was dead.”She told her pastor about it and he said, “I have a parrot, too, but it is never rude. You bring your parrot over and leave it for several weeks, and maybe it will take up my parrot’s good behavior.”So she did. Returning for it after a time, she opened the door and walked in. Her parrot saw her and said, “I wish she was dead.” Then the minister’s parrot chimed in and said, “Amen, Lord, grant her request.”Even parrots are not as parrot-like as man. Man is more of a parrot than the so-called parrots. And if parrots repeat and imitate, they can be pardoned, forgiven, but man cannot be forgiven. Never forgive yourself for imitativeness otherwise you will remain an imitator. Stop forgiving yourself for imitativeness. Let imitativeness be the original sin. And when I say original sin, I mean it.The word sin is very beautiful. It means separation. If you are imitative you will remain separate from your real self; if you are imitative you will remain separate from God – because only your original self can have a meeting with God. This false, this pseudo mask cannot have any encounter with God. The false cannot encounter the real, only the real can encounter the real.Mulakab: “Tell me something of your philosophy so that I may understand.”The mystic replied: “You cannot understand unless you have experience.”Understanding is a by-product of experience, a shadow of experience, a consequence of experience. It is not a pre-requirement. You need not have understanding to experience – just the reverse is the case. You need experience to understand a thing. You cannot understand unless you have experienced. And God is not a hypothesis, God is not speculation, it is not that we think God is – God is, whether we think or not. We can go on denying God, that doesn’t make any difference – God still is. God is existential. Whether you believe or disbelieve has no effect on reality. Your belief, your disbelief, is not going to change that which is. So what is the point of belief, disbelief? Drop them and try to see whatsoever is the case. When that has been looked into, understanding arises.Mulakab: “I do not have to understand a cake to know whether it is bad.”Very logical. In life you need not experience many things – still you feel that you know. But the same logic cannot be extended towards God.In life you are living with sleepy people who function through belief. If you follow their belief you will have a convenient life. Your belief will help you to remain comfortable and convenient. But with God you are not searching for convenience or security or safety, with God you are hankering for truth.Just the other day I was reading about a college in America. Suddenly it got a great donation, a great endowment, and it decided to become a university. So they wanted a motto for the university door. They decided that the motto should be in Sanskrit, not in Latin, not in Greek, and they decided that the motto should mean something like this: Truth unfolding like a flower.So they searched in America for the greatest Sanskrit scholar and they approached a professor who was a world-renowned authority on Sanskrit. And they said, “This is what we want as a motto on the university door: Truth unfolding as a flower. Please translate it into Sanskrit. We want to put it in Sanskrit.”The professor refused. He said, “It cannot be translated into Sanskrit because the Eastern mind says that truth has no unfolding, truth simply is. It does not grow. It is not an unfolding. You discover it, you grow towards it, but truth never grows. You come close or you go away, but truth remains the same. Growth happens in you, not in truth. So truth is not unfolding, and truth is not a flower – because the flower is sometimes in the seed and sometimes in the tree and sometimes in the bud. And then it flowers. It has a temporal procession. Truth simply is; it is not evolution. It is simply there. It has no past, no present, no future. It is eternally the same.”I agree with that Sanskrit scholar. He was right. It is not that it cannot be translated into Sanskrit, it can be translated into the Sanskrit language – but it will not be the spirit of the East. The translation will be false. It will not show the right understanding about truth.If you believe or you disbelieve, you remain distant. There is something between you and truth – your belief or your disbelief.If you want to know the truth, you need not have anything between you and the truth, you have to remove all furniture – the furniture of the mind. You have just to see. Your eyes have to be completely unclouded.Simab: “If you are looking at good fish and you think that it is a bad cake, you need to understand less…”– because your understanding is wrong, upside-down. It is a fish and you think it is a bad cake. Your knowledge is not going to help you. It is better that you have less knowledge. No knowledge will be the most perfect thing, then there will be nothing to distract you from the truth. All knowledge distracts. When you know, it interferes – hence one has to be innocent. Only innocents know – because those who think they know are already corrupted by knowledge.“…you need to understand less, and to understand it better…”Now the word understanding is being used in two different senses: one in the sense of knowledge and the other in the sense of meditation; one in the sense of intellectuality, the other in the sense of intelligence.The English word meditation comes from a Sanskrit root medha. Medha means intelligence. In fact, it would be more correct to call it medha-tation rather than meditation – because meditation has a wrong connotation in the Western mind. It appears as if you are thinking about something, meditating upon it. No, to bring it closer to home it will be medha-tation. Medha means intelligence – not thinking about something, just being intelligent, alert, aware, pure, innocent.When you don’t have any knowledge, you know; when you have knowledge, your eyes are covered and you cannot know.“If you are looking at good fish and you think that it is a bad cake, you need to understand less, and to understand it better, more than you need anything else.”Now the seeker wants to know more about the Sufi philosophy, and the mystic says, “If you really want to understand more about the Sufi philosophy it will be good if you don’t know anything at all. Come with that state of mind we call not-knowing.”Mulakab: “Then why do you not abandon books and lectures if experience is the necessity?”That’s how the logical mind goes – either or. The logical mind is always divided into either or. It does not know how to connect opposite polarities. It does not know how to use the words and and both.First Mulakab wants to know about Simab’s philosophy, the Sufi philosophy; then, because he is saying there is no philosophy, there is only experience, Mulakab moves the other extreme – if not this, then the other. Then he says, Then why do you not abandon books and lectures if experience is the necessity?Many people come to me and they say to me too, “You go on saying that it cannot be said, but why do you go on talking then? You go on repeating again and again that theories and philosophies and systems are of no help, they are barriers, but you still go on talking to us. Then why, why do you talk at all?”That is the logical mind: either talk with the condition that through talk truth can be understood, or don’t talk at all. But both will be absurd positions.The master has to talk in such a way that he makes you aware that talk is not going to help. The master has to use words in such a way that you don’t get entangled with words. The master has to explain many things to you and to simultaneously keep you alert so you don’t get caught in explanation. The master has to use the mind to relate to you because you exist in mind and there is no other way to relate to you. But he has to keep you alert, he has to remind you again and again that this is not the whole thing, that this is just the beginning, that this is not even the real thing. the real is to come. He has to keep you alert so that you can move – move from words to wordlessness, from theories to truth, from philosophies to experience.A moment comes when the master can be silent, but that is possible only when the disciple has come to relate to the master in a totally different way – from the heart.Even when Buddha was alive, and when thousands of disciples were there, when he kept silent one day only one disciple, Mahakashyap, understood it – out of those thousands of disciples.It is said of a Zen master, Huen Shah, that one day he was about to preach a sermon when a bird began to sing nearby. He remained silent, pointed to the bird, and left. Later on he said he could not have improved upon the bird, that’s why he remained silent. The bird was saying the same truth that he was going to say and in a far superior way. But I don’t know what happened to the disciples – whether anybody understood it, whether anybody got the message.Even with Buddha only Mahakashyap smiled when Buddha kept silent and looked at a lotus flower in his hand. All were anxious to hear the words and he was not speaking and not speaking. And then Mahakashyap laughed and Buddha called him and gave the lotus flower to him and said to the other disciples, “That which can be said through words I have said to you, and that which cannot be said through words I have given to Mahakashyap.”Yes, there is something beyond the words, but you have to be prepared through words for the beyond.But this logical fallacy happens. The logical mind believes that either everything is possible through words or nothing is possible through words.A disciple of the Holy Yehudi had taken upon himself the discipline of silence, and for three years had spoken no words save those of the Torah and prayer. The Yehudi sent for him and said, “Young man, how is it that I do not see a single word of yours in the world of truth?”Yehudi was one of the Hassid masters.When the young man justified himself by speaking of “the vanity of speech” the Yehudi replied, “He who only learns and prays is murdering the word of his own soul. Whatever you have to say can be vanity or it can be truth.”Listen to it again.Yehudi said, “Whatever you have to say can be vanity or it can be truth. Come to me after the Evening Prayer and I shall teach you how to talk. Real words are not vain; vain words are not real.”Yes, there is a reality to words too. It is not ultimate, it is only indicative. It is like a gesture. When I am pointing to the moon with my finger, my finger is not the moon. Don’t mistake it. And don’t start clinging to my finger, that is not the moon. But don’t move to the other extreme – if the finger is not the moon then how can you indicate the moon by the finger? That is absurdity again. Either you cling to the finger because you say, “You are showing the finger,” or you say, “Then don’t show the finger – the finger is not the moon.”But the moon can be indicated by the finger and the finger is not the moon. The words can become indicative; they are gestures.Mulakab: “Then why do you not abandon books and lectures if experience is the necessity?”Simab: “Because the outward is the conductor to the inward. Books will teach you something of the outward aspects of the inward, and so will lectures. Without them you will make no progress.”The outward and the inward are not so different. The outward is also part of the inward, the outermost part, of course. And the inward is also part of the outward, the innermost part of the outward, of course. But they are not separate, they are together. Never separate them. They are one reality, just like the circumference and the center. The center cannot exist without the circumference, and the circumference cannot exist without the center. If the circumference is there without the center it cannot be called the circumference, and if the center is there without the circumference of which it is the center, it is not the center any more. Of what? The center depends on the circumference as much as the circumference depends on the center. The surface is part of the depth as the depth is part of the surface. This is the right understanding.Simab: “Because the outward is the conductor to the inward.” Many times it happens that people come to me and they say, “We want to be sannyasins but what is the use of the outward: the dress and mala and things like that?” A woman wrote to me, “Osho, I love you and I want to surrender to you but I cannot surrender to the orange dress and I hate your mala.”This is the logical mind. The logical mind says, “The inner is the inner and the outer is the outer, so love Osho from the inner. What is the need of any outward show?” But when you are hungry, you eat something from the outside. You don’t say, “Hunger is inside and I cannot go to Vrindavan and I don’t care a bit about food. What is the need of food? Hunger is inside.”But the inside hunger is fulfilled, satisfied, by outside food – because the outside is constantly changing into the inside. When you eat, you chew, you digest; it becomes the inside. And what is inside is constantly becoming your outside. Life is changing always – moving from the inside to the outside, from the outside to the inside. It is a tremendous movement between polarities.So don’t create such logical problems for yourself. Don’t divide. You are one. In and out, you are both. Hence sannyas has to be both together – inner and outer.Just look at the absurdity. You say, “I love you, Osho, but I hate your mala.” This is not possible. One thing must be wrong: either you don’t love me or you can’t hate the mala. If you hate the mala you can’t love me; if you love me you can’t hate the mala. But I can understand why the statement is possible. You divide the outer and the inner.When you love a man or a woman you divide the outer and the inner. You say, “I will not touch your body because I love you from the inside and what is the point of touching your body? I love you but I hate your body.” Have you said that to any woman some time? – “I love you but I hate your, body.” She will never forgive you. Have you said that to any man, “I love you tremendously but don’t touch me, don’t make any outward show. What is the point of hugging and kissing and embracing? No need. We can love as inner centers.” But is that love going to grow? Is that love going to fulfill? Is that love going to become a contentment? It is not possible.Simab: “Because the outward is the conductor to the inward. Books will teach you something of the outward aspects of the inward, and so will lectures. Without them you will make not progress.”Mulakab: “But why should we not be able to do so without books?”Logic wants to be consistent and life is not consistent. Logic says that if books are not needed then they are not needed. Then why can’t we do without them? Then why don’t you be consistent? Why are you not consistent? Either say books are useless and burn them or say they are useful and worship them.But a man who understands life is not an extremist. He says, “Books can be used, but there is no need to worship them. Books can be used, but there is no need to burn them.” Both are extremist, partial standpoints.Sufis will not agree with the Zen masters burning scriptures, because when you burn the scriptures it shows that you are still too much attached to them – otherwise why burn them? Why take so much trouble? You have some attachment, some obsession – either you can worship or you can burn but you cannot just use them. Sufis are more down to earth.People simply jump from one extreme to another the logic always can deceive you because it pretends a kind of consistency.A little man tip-toes up M.G. Road, stopping at intervals to scatter some kind of powder here and there on the street from a bag in his hand. His behavior is so odd that he soon attracts a crowd of followers. A policeman decides to investigate and approaches the man.“What’s in that bag?” says the policeman.“Woffle dust,” says the little man.“What’s that?” asks the policeman.“Woffle dust is my own discovery,” says the man, “and is for the eradication of most varieties of poisonous snakes, lions, tigers, elephants, et cetera, et cetera.”“But there are no snakes, no lions, no tigers, no elephants on M.G. Road,” explains the policeman.“I know,” says the little man. “This is pretty powerful stuff.”This is very consistent. It is because of this stuff that you will not see any elephants, tigers, lions. This is pretty powerful stuff.Logic is very self-fulfilling. It creates a very consistent world of concepts. If you decide that the scriptures are useful then logic says: “Worship them. Put them on a high pedestal. They are truth, embodied truth.” Or if you say: “Truth is not in the words,” then scriptures are meaningless, then throw them away, burn them. Either worship them or insult them.But the really practical man, the pragmatic man, will use them. He will neither worship nor insult them – because both are emotional attitudes. You don’t worship a timetable and you don’t burn a timetable either – you simply use it. All scriptures are timetables for the inner journey. They are not the inner journey, remember, they are maps. The map of India is not India. Seeing the map of India you have not visited India, but there is no need to burn it because it is not India. It can be helpful. It can be helpful. It can be of tremendous help. It can bring you to the real India.And a road map is a must when you are traveling in a strange land. A road map contains many things – except one thing: how to fold it! It can be used. That is the pragmatic standpoint.Mulakab: “But why should we not be able to do so without books?”Simab: “For the same reason that you cannot think without words. You have been reared on books; your mind is so altered by books and lectures, by hearing and speaking, that the inward can only speak to you through the outward. Whatever you pretend you can perceive.”We have been reared on books. Our mind is nothing but words, logic, philosophy. If this mind has to be converted then it has to be approached in a way it can understand. Hence masters use words, masters even use logic. Masters use all that is of any help to you.But their whole effort is to take you beyond yourself. They use words to go beyond words and they use your mind to drop it, to become mindless, to become a no-mind.Mulakab: “Does this apply to everyone?”Again this is logic trying to find consistency. “Does it apply to everyone?” Logic always generalizes, and reality is not a generalization. Unique individuals are here, there are no generalizations. Have you ever seen a human being? You see Teertha, you see Maneesha, you see Sudha, you see Sheela, you see Madhuri – you see many people. but you never see a human being. A human being is a generalization. You will never come across a human being. You will always come across concrete men, women, not human beings. Concrete. Logic lives in generalizations.Mulakab asked: “Does this apply to everyone?”Simab: “It applies to whom it applies. It applies above all to those who think it does not apply to them!”This is of tremendous importance. Keep it always in your consciousness.“It applies above all to those who think it does not apply to them!”Because that is the last deception the mind can play. That is the last trick, strategy, of the mind to protect itself – “It does not apply to me.” You always become a victim of that trick – “It does not apply to me.”Here people write to me: “Osho, what you said was perfectly beautiful. Many people will be benefited by it, many – but not me.”I have heard about a man who used to come to a church to listen to a priest, and every day, whenever he was leaving, he would say to the priest, “You did well. You hammered well. All those people needed it.”By and by it became a kind of drag to the priest. This man was so egoistic. It was an everyday thing. Whenever the priest would speak, in the end the man was waiting and he would say, “You did well. You hammered well. These people needed it. They deserved it. You put them right. That is going to help them.”And the priest was waiting for the right opportunity to talk to this man. Then one day it happened. It was raining hard and only this man turned up. Nobody else was there. So the priest thought, “Now, let us see what he says.” And the man was waiting.When the priest finished and the man was going out he said, “You did well. They would have been benefited very much if they had been here. Poor fellows. They missed. I feel sorry for them!”Remember that all that is being said by masters is said to you, to you in particular. Don’t bring others in. And if you feel that it does not apply to you then it applies to you certainly and absolutely. Whenever you want to make an exception for yourself, beware. You are being befooled by your mind. Beware, and escape from the trap. And if you are aware and you escape from the trap you can become the exception. By not thinking you are the exception, you can become the exception. By not thinking you are great, you can become great. By not thinking you are very humble, you can become humble. All that is good is unselfconscious, it is innocent.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Every time I fall in love, things start to crash all around me. I guess that I lose my center but in this state I don't know if I have a center or not. Things get confused and crazy.The question is from Krishna Priya.The first thing: you don’t yet have a center. That which you feel as a center is just the ego. It is not your true center. It is a pseudo feeling, very illusory. So when you fall in love, ego has to disappear. In love, the ego cannot exist. Love is something far more true, far more authentic than you are. That’s why you will always feel that things start getting a little bit crazy – because you cannot control them. The controller is no more. When the ego is not there, who is there to control or to discipline? Then you are in a chaos.But that chaos is far more beautiful than the ugly ego. Out of that chaos all the stars are born. Out of that chaos you are born anew. It is a rebirth. Each love affair is a new birth.So don’t take it negatively. Don’t think that you are losing something in love – you have nothing to lose. If you have something then there is no way to lose it. If you have the real center then love supports that center, integrates it, makes it more crystallized. Truth helps truth.For example, if there is darkness in the room and you bring a lamp, the darkness is destroyed. But if there is light – there is a lamp – then the room has more light than before. The light is doubled.The ego is like darkness, a false entity. It only appears to be there, it has no positive reality. When the light of love comes, darkness goes out. If you have the real center – what Gurdjieff calls crystallization or what Hindus call atman or what Sufis call rooh, spirit – if you really have it then each love will make it more and more clear, more and more transparent, more and more available. Each love affair will be a step – and you will be moving higher in crystallization.So this is the first thing to be understood: don’t choose the ego, always choose love. When it is a question between the real and the unreal, choose the real, even if sometimes the real brings inconvenience. It does bring inconvenience. We have chosen the unreal because it is convenient – for no other reason have we chosen it. There is just one reason: it is convenient. You will have to go through inconvenience. That inconvenience is what I call tapascharya, austerity, sadhana. That’s what it means to be initiated into a path.Always choose the real, howsoever bad and howsoever painful and howsoever destructive it looks. Even if it feels like death, choose it – and you will be benefited by it. Never choose the comfortable the convenient, the bourgeois, other-wise you will live the life of a hostile – if you are fortunate – or the life of a phony if you are not so fortunate, or, if you are not fortunate at all, the life of a zombie.Love brings you out of your ego, out of your past, out of your patterned life. Hence it appears to be a confusion.Priya’s observation is right. She says: every time I fall in love, things start to crash all around me. She really falls in love. I have been watching her love affairs. When she falls, she really falls! It is never so-so, it is never lukewarm. She really goes mad, berserk. And it is happening again, that’s why she has put this question.But that’s good. There is nothing to be worried about. Lose the ego. Sometimes to be mad is a basic necessity to remain sane. If you are always sane then your sanity is suspect. Then you must be carrying a great neurosis hidden behind you, and any day it can explode, it can erupt. You are sitting on a volcano. It is good to have a few holidays from sanity. Sunday is good. Sometimes forget all about your sanity, all about your rules, discipline, controlled behavior, and all that nonsense. Sometimes be on a holiday, relax, and go berserk.If you go berserk deliberately, consciously, fully aware, it is going to be an incredible experience. and you are never in danger. When you go berserk consciously you can come back. You know how you entered into it and you know how to get out of it.When you don’t go consciously, when you are thrown by a volcano inside you, when it is not your choice, but just an accident, when it is not that you have chosen the holiday but you have been forced to go on a holiday, then it is not within your capacity to come back. That’s what happens to mad people. They become mad only when they have accumulated so much madness that now it is not possible for them to control it. It overwhelms them. And then they cannot come back.Here, living with me, I am teaching you one basic principle of remaining sane – that is, deliberately, consciously, with effort, to sometimes go mad. It is a good experience. You remain available to both polarities – sanity/insanity. You swing. You have freedom.The person who is always sane is not free and the person who is always insane is not free either. But the person who can swing from sanity to insanity, and can easily swing, smoothly, with no barrier, has great freedom. These are the people who have known what life is. All the mystics are mad and all the mad people could have become mystics, but they missed. And when you go on your own you can come back. That is my basic teaching here. I teach you to be mad consciously.So go into it. Don’t be afraid. All that you lose is not worth keeping.The second thing. She says: I guess I lose my center but in that state I don’t know if I have a center or not. That too is good observation. You don’t have one yet. The ego has to go utterly, only then will the real center be seen. When the clouds have disappeared you will see the sun.Only after you have moved in deep love and the ego has really been dropped – there is something very valuable which can be got only if you drop the ego, and that price has to be paid – when you have really loved deeply, then a new kind of integration will arise in you.Love does two things: first it takes the ego away, then it gives you the center. Love is a great alchemy.There are three kinds of love – I call them love one, love two, love three. The first love is object-oriented; there is an object of love. You see a beautiful woman, really graceful, with a proportionate body. You are thrilled. You think you are falling in love. Love has arisen in you because the woman is beautiful, because the woman is nice, because the woman is good. Something from the object has stirred love in you. You are not really the master of it; the love is coming from the outside. You may be a very unloving person, you may not have the quality, you may not have that benediction, but because the woman is beautiful you think love is arising in you. It is object-oriented.This is the ordinary love. This is what is known as eros. It is lust. How to possess this beautiful object? How to exploit this beautiful object? How to make her your own? But remember, if the woman is beautiful she is not only beautiful for you, she is beautiful for many. So there will be many people falling in love with her. And there is going to be great jealousy, competition, and all kinds of uglinesses that come in love, in so called love.Mulla Nasruddin married a very ugly woman, the ugliest possible. Naturally the friends were puzzled and they asked Mulla, “You have money, you have prestige, you could have got any beautiful woman that you wanted, why have you chosen this ugly woman?”He said, “There is a reason for it. I will never suffer from jealousy. This woman will always be faithful to me. I cannot believe anybody falling in love with her. In fact, even I am not in love with her. It is impossible. So I know nobody can love her.”With Mohammedans it is a tradition that when the wife comes for the first time she asks the husband – because the Mohammedan woman has to remain behind a purdah, behind a curtain, she cannot show her face to everybody – so the woman asks the husband, “To whom can I show my face and to whom am I not allowed to show my face?”So when the woman asked Mulla, “To whom can I show my face and to whom am I not allowed to show it?” Mulla said, “You can show it to everybody except me!”If you are falling in love with a beautiful woman or a beautiful man, you are getting into trouble. There is going to be jealousy, there is going to be murder, there is going to be something. You are in trouble. And from the very beginning you will start possessing so that there is no possibility of anything going wrong or beyond your control. You will start destroying the woman or the man. You will stop giving freedom. You will encroach on the woman from all sides and close all the doors.Now the woman was beautiful because she was free. Freedom is such an ingredient in beauty that when you see a bird on the wing in the sky, it is one kind of bird, but if you see the same bird in a cage, it is no longer the same. The bird on the wing in the sky has a beauty of its own. It is alive. It is free. The whole sky is his. The same bird in a cage is ugly. The freedom is gone, the sky is gone. Those wings are just meaningless now, a kind of burden. They remain from the past and they create misery. Now this is not the same bird.When you fell in love with the woman, she was free; you fell in love with freedom. When you bring her home you destroy all possibilities of being free, but in that very destruction you are destroying the beauty. Then one day suddenly you find that you don’t love the woman at all – because she is beautiful no more. This happens every time. Then you start searching for another woman and you don’t see what has happened; you don’t look at the mechanism, at how you destroyed the beauty of the woman.This is the first kind of love – love one. Beware of it. It is not of much value, it is not very significant, it has no value. And if you are not aware you will remain trapped in love one.Love two is: the object is not important, your subjectivity is. You are loving so you bestow your love on somebody. But love is your quality, it is not object-oriented. The subject is overflowing with the quality of love, the very being is loving. Even if you are alone you are loving. Love is a kind of flavor to your being.When you fall in love, the second kind of love, there is going to be greater joy than the first. And you will know – because this love will know – how to keep the other free. Love means to give all that is beautiful to the beloved. Freedom is the most beautiful, the most cherished goal of human consciousness, how can you take it away? If you love a woman really, or a man, the first present, the first gift, will be the gift of freedom. How can you take it away? You are not the enemy, you are the friend.This the second kind of love will not be against freedom, it will not be possessive. And you will not be worried very much that somebody else also appreciates your woman or your man. In fact, you will be happy that you have a woman whom others also appreciate, that you have chosen a woman whom others also desire. Their desire simply proves that you have chosen a diamond, a valuable being, who has intrinsic value. You will not be jealous. Each time you see someone looking at your woman with loving eyes you will be thrilled again. You will fall in love with your woman again through those eyes.This second kind of love will be more a friendship than a lust and it will be more enriching to your soul.And this second kind of love will have one more difference. In the first kind of love, the object-oriented, there will be many lovers surrounding the object, and there will be fear. In the second kind of love there will be no fear and you will be free not to bestow your love only on your beloved, you will be free to bestow your love on others too.In the first, the object will be one and many will be the lovers. In the second, the subject will be one and it will be flowing in many directions, bestowing its love in many ways on many people – because the more you love, the more love grows. If you love one person then naturally your love is not very rich; if you love two, it is doubly rich; if you love many, or if you can love the whole humanity, or you can love even the animal kingdom, or you can love even trees, the vegetable kingdom – then your love goes on growing. And as your love grows, you grow, you expand. This is real expansion of consciousness. Drugs only give you a false idea of expansion; love is the basic ultimate drug that gives you the real idea of expansion.And there is a possibility…. Albert Schweitzer has said “reverence for life” – all that lives has to be loved. Mahavira in India has said the same thing. His philosophy of ahimsa, non-violence, says love all that lives. But one man, one contemporary in America, Bugbee, has gone even one step further than Mahavira and Schweitzer. He says, “Have reverence for things too.” That is the ultimate in love. You don’t only love that which lives, you love even that which is. You love the chair, you love the pillars, you love things too – because they are also there. They also have a kind of being.When one has come to this point – that you love the whole existence irrespective of what it is, that love becomes unconditional – it is turning into prayer, it is becoming a meditation.The first love is good in the sense that if you have lived a loveless life it is better than no love. But the second love is far better than the first and will have less anxiety, less anguish, less turmoil, conflict, aggression, violence. The second kind of love will be more of a love than the first kind, it will be more pure. In the first, the lust is too much and spoils the whole game – but even the second love is not the last. There is love three – when subject and object disappear. In the first the object is important, in the second the subject is important, in the third there is transcendence – one is neither a subject nor an object and one is not dividing reality in any way: subject, object, knower, known, lover, loved. All division has disappeared. One is simply love.Up to the second you are a lover. When you are a lover something will hang around you like a boundary, like a definition. With the third, all definition disappears. There is only love; you are not. This is what Jesus means when he says. “God is love”: – love three. If you misunderstand the first, you will never be able to interpret rightly what Jesus’ meaning is. It is not even the second, it is the third. God is love. One is simply Love. It is not that one loves, it is not an act, it is one’s very quality.It is not that in the morning you are loving and in the afternoon you are not loving – you are love, it is your state. It is not a hal, it is a magama. You have arrived home. You have become love. Now there is no division. All duality has disappeared.The first kind of love is “I-it”; the other is taken as a thing. That’s what Martin Buber says “I-it.” The other is like a thing. You have to possess. My wife, my husband, my child…and in that very possession you kill the spirit of the other.The second kind of love Martin Buber calls “I-thou.” The other is a person. You have respect for the other. How can you possess somebody you respect? But Martin Buber stops at the second; he has no understanding about the third love. Martin Buber cannot understand Jesus. He remains a Jew. He goes up to “I-thou.” It is a great step from “I-it” to “I-thou” but it is nothing compared to the step that happens from “I-thou” to no dualism, to advait, to oneness, where only love remains.Even “I-thou” is a bit of a tension-creating phenomenon – you are separate and the beloved is separate. And all separation brings misery. Unless one becomes totally one with the beloved, with the loved one, some kind of misery is bound to remain lurking by the side. In the first the misery is very clear, in the second the misery is not so clear; in the first it is very close, in the second it is not so close, it is far away – but it is there. In the third it is no more.So I would like you to learn more of love. Move from the first to the second and keep it in your consciousness that the third is the goal. And don’t be worried about losing yourself. Lose yourself – because that is the only way to find yourself.The second question:Osho,It has been said: “You live only once, but if you live it right, once is enough.”Once is more than enough!The third question:Osho,Why do you tell women sannyasins not to have babies?Because I cannot tell it to men sannyasins!The fourth question:Osho,When a man lives with two women at the same time does it make any difference to his energy?Are you mad or masochistic or something? Is not one woman enough for you?I have overheard….Mulla Nasruddin’s son was asking, “Mulla, why does the law not allow men to marry two women or more?”And Mulla said, “If a man cannot protect himself the law protects him!”Even to manage one will be difficult for you right now. The question is unsigned. The person must have been afraid to ask it. The very fear shows that you have a kind of alertness about what you are asking.If you are still in love one then you will be in great trouble. You will be disrupted, torn apart between two women. With love one, one woman is more than enough.With love two there is no problem – but then it is not a question of two women. Then the question about the object of love is not relevant. Then it depends on you – how much love you have and how much you can share.But the questioner must be somewhere in the first kind of love where one wants to grab as many women as possible because it is an “I-it” relationship. Just as you would like to have two houses, three houses, just as you would like to have more money in the bank, so you want to have many more women. In the ancient days it was the only way to know whether a man was rich or not – to see how many women he had. Kings used to have hundreds. Just thirty years ago the Nizam of Hyderabad had five hundred women. In fact, he was not capable of recognizing all of the women. But it was a kind of prestige. He could afford them.But women are not things, they are persons. They are souls as much as you are.The question must have been asked by a man. You would like to possess as many women as you can. This very possessiveness shows an unloving heart. You must be somewhere in the first kind of love, where love is an “I-it” relationship. Move from there. Even one woman will be enough of a misery to you. Two will be too much.But you may be a masochist. Then it will be a different matter altogether. A masochist is one who wants to suffer, who loves being miserable, who is happy only when he is miserable. A masochist is one who wants to torture himself. If you are a masochist then it is okay. But to be a masochist is not a good thing, it is a neurosis. You will need psychiatric treatment.But if your love has moved from the first then the question will not be relevant at all. Then it is not a question of having two women or one – it is not a question of having at all. With the second kind of love it is a question of being. You love. You love as many people as are available. And you love in different ways: somebody you love as your wife, somebody you love as your friend, somebody you love as your daughter, somebody you love as your sister, somebody as your mother. and it is possible also that you can share one kind of love with many people. But first attain to the second kind of love. Then it is not a problem at all.And problems utterly disappear with the third kind of love – you are simply love. Then you can go on loving, there is no end to it. You have infinite energy. But right now you will not be able to go on loving, and never do anything beyond your capacity otherwise you will become more miserable. First learn how to love one woman – at least learn how to love one woman. Let it become an “I-thou” relationship. If you create a conflict with two women around you, you will not be able to move smoothly from “I-it” to “I-thou.”The fifth question:Osho,The Bible says: “Wait and everything shall be given to you.” Osho, what do you say?I say, “Wait, and if you receive, it shall surely be a miracle.” Just because you wait there is no obligation on existence’s part to give it to you – because you may be asking for the wrong thing.As I know people, out of a hundred, ninety-nine point nine per cent of them ask for the wrong thing. If God is compassionate he cannot give those things to you. Your desire is your desire; it is part of your mind, it is part of your ego. God cannot fulfill it, should not fulfill it. If he fulfills it you will be going more and more astray, far away. You will be moving in the dark night and you will be losing all possibilities of re-entering the source of light.No, all your desires cannot be fulfilled. In fact, your desire as such cannot be fulfilled. Your desire is going to be a wrong desire. You are wrong, how can your desire become right? There are no right desires and wrong desires, there are only right persons and wrong persons. The wrong person is the one who has desires and the right person is the one who has no desires. When there are no desires everything is fulfilled.Now this will look like a paradox. When you don’t have any desire, everything is fulfilled. Then you get that which is needed, then you get that which is beneficial. And you are always happy because it is always a gift.The sixth question:Osho,Why do you call men monkeys? Isn't it insulting to the dignity of man?Monkeys think otherwise. They don’t like to be compared with men; they think it is against the dignity of monkeys. When Darwin said that man has come out of the monkeys, has evolved out of the monkeys, monkeys were very angry. Great treatises have been written by the monkeys proving that man is a fall and not an evolution.And there are arguments for it. Man has fallen from the tree to the earth. It is a fall. And man has become less than he was. Ask any monkey. Just try to follow a monkey and it will be impossible. How strong a monkey is! Man is no longer strong. Man is almost impotent in comparison to the monkey. See the joy of the monkeys. Man is so sad.In the first place why should man think that his dignity is insulted or he is humiliated? Monkeys are beautiful people. Yes, I know they have not produced Buddha, Rumi, Junnaid – that’s true – but they have not produced Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Alexander, Adolf Hitler, either. They have not been creating wars and killing and murdering. Monkeys are vegetarians. Monkeys are very good people. And they are always happy and always in the mood of fun and always celebrating.Yes, man can rise very high – beyond humanity – but man can fall very low – below animals. And up to now, the record of going higher than humanity is not great. Once in a while, out of millions, one person rises to become a Buddha, a Junnaid, or a Mohammed. But the others remain lurking in the darkest, muddiest consciousness.I am reminded of a beautiful story. It happened just a few months ago. It happened in the election days. A few things sell very well in the election days. One of those things is the white hand-spun Gandhi cap. It sells only when there are elections. Everybody becomes a Gandhian. Once the election is over, people forget all about Gandhi – and it is good that they forget all about Gandhi because whatsoever he has taught is almost nonsensical. But when there is an election, everybody is a Gandhian; even those who are suspected of murdering him, even they become Gandhians.So Gandhi caps were in great demand and a man was doing great business. He was rushing from one town to another selling Gandhi caps. One day he was coming home from another neighboring town. He was very tired; business had been really great. He had sold almost one thousand caps. Just a few – fifty, sixty – caps were left in his bag. And he was very tired.So underneath a Banyan tree he rested for a while. He fell asleep. When he woke up he saw that the bag was empty and all the caps were gone. He could not believe it because he could not see anybody around. Then he looked up – and it was really a beautiful scene! All t he monkeys were sitting and enjoying the Gandhi caps. You could have found Morarji Desai and Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram – all kinds of people were there. And they were really grinning and smiling. It was a trip!At first the man also enjoyed. But then he thought, “Sixty caps are gone. What to do now? How to get these sixty caps back?” Then he remembered that monkeys are imitators. Only one cap was left on his head. So he shouted, “Abracadabra!” just to catch the attention of the monkeys. And they all looked at what was going on. Then he threw away his cap. The moment he threw away his cap, all the monkeys threw away their caps. They are imitators.He collected the caps, laughed loudly, and came home. The next day he had a fever and could not go selling. So he sent his young son. He told him the story – “If by chance, something like this happens, remember: first shout the mantra ‘Abracadabra!’ and then throw away your cap and you will get all your caps back. In case something like this happens, I am telling you – just to be safe.”So the son went and it was a good day and he sold many, many caps. When he was coming back, by a coincidence it happened that as he came near the Banyan tree he also felt very tired. And it was so shady, with such beautiful foliage, and it was such a beautiful place to rest. So he put down his bag and went to sleep. When he opened his eyes exactly the same thing had happened. It was a miracle! The bag was empty. He looked up – Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Jagjivan Ram were, all sitting there, all the great Gandhians with their Gandhi caps. And they were really enjoying and thumping and they looked more hilarious than the father had told in the story.But the son was not puzzled. He knew the secret. So he shouted, “Abracadabra!” and threw his cap. And monkeys almost went crazy. They went crazy with laughter and shook the tree as if it was an earthquake. And do you know what happened? One monkey who had not got a cap came down and took the son’s cap. They had learned a lesson!Monkeys are intelligent people. Now even the cap that was left had gone.Man learns more slowly than monkeys. Man goes on repeating the same mistakes again and again. What kind of dignity are you talking about? If you look at the history of man it is the same mistakes being repeated again and again. It is almost mechanical – the same wars, the same violence, the same rape on nature, the same destructiveness. Down the ages it is the same story.Only once in a while is there an oasis in this desert of so-called humanity – a Buddha, a Mansoor. But they are so rare and so exceptional they can be counted out. They need not be counted in. They are so exceptional that we cannot believe they really existed – they look like metaphors, they look like myths, maybe inventions of the human mind. Just to keep his dignity, just to keep the idea of his dignity, man has created buddhas and mahaviras and krishnas and christs. Many people suspect that they ever existed.And their suspicion has a reason. If you look around, you see man in such a state, in such an ugly and neurotic state, it is impossible to believe that a buddha is possible. Buddha is such an exception and the ordinary neurotic man is the rule. That’s why people suspect that they may be wish-fulfillments. That’s what Sigmund Freud says – that all these great people are just wish fulfillments. Man wants to be like that so he creates mythologies.What dignity are you talking about? Without man the earth will be far more beautiful. It will be less poisoned. The rivers will be again pure, the air will be again unpolluted, trees will again grow, animals will again start roaming, birds will again fly. Do you think that without man the earth will miss much? Yes, it will miss your poisoning, your pollution, your destruction, your wars, your blood. It will miss these things but it will be far more beautiful. Things will be far more silent and musical; in more harmony.And I am not saying that man has no dignity. I never agree with people like B. F. Skinner. Skinner has written a book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, in which he says man is not free and has no dignity either. No, I am not saying that. Man can have dignity, but one should not accept it as a given fact. It has to be created. It is potential but not actual. It is possible, but that possibility is only a perhaps. It has not already happened; you cannot take it for granted. Just by being born as a man you don’t have any dignity; you just have the face of a man and all kinds of animality inside.You will be surprised to know that the English word beast comes from a Sanskrit word pashu. On the surface they don’t seem to be related at all – pashu, beast. But in Egypt pashu became pasht, and then it became bast, and then it became “beast.” And your English word bastard also comes from pashu – pasht, bast, “bastard.” Bastard means not knowing your father. That is the situation with animals. Who the father is no animal can say. When a man cannot show his father, cannot identify his father, we call him a bastard.“Beast” and “bastard” come from a Sanskrit word pashu, and pashu is tremendously important. Pashu comes from another root pash – pash means bondage. One who is in bondage is a pashu, is an animal. One who is still in the bondage of the ego, still in the bondage of the mind, still in the bondage of desire, lust, thoughts, is a pashu, is an animal.So man is man only on the surface. Only a buddha is a real man in the depth. If Buddha is standing by your side, you will both look alike – but only on the surface. Your faces resemble each other but deep down you are utterly different, radically different. You live at the lowest rung and he lives at the highest rung. The difference is vast, almost infinite.Man has dignity in the sense that man can become a buddha, but not just by being a man. Nobody is born as a man. Humanity has to be searched for, discovered, created. So don’t think that because you are born like a human animal you are a man. No, not yet. You can become one, that is your dignity, but you are not it already. It is your dignity, it is your freedom, to choose to become or not to become – and millions choose not to become. Very rarely, few and far between, does somebody choose to become. So millions live in a kind of disgrace, in a kind of state of sin, a state of fallen consciousness. People live at the minimum.And unless you live at the maximum you don’t have any dignity. You can have it, but you don’t have it. Strive for it, make effort for it. Before death comes become really a man.The seventh question:Osho,Brown has said: “The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize a life of non-enjoyment.”I will not agree – because man is born with the capacity to live. Everybody is born with the capacity to live – that’s what birth means: the capacity to live. Then somewhere on the way man loses the capacity to live, becomes non-orgasmic, becomes sad, serious, dull, stupid.Each child is born intelligent, full of joy, wonder, adventure, inquiry; each child is born open-ended. But somewhere, some where near the age of three or four, between three and four, the child is distracted by the society, loses all contact with his original capacities, and becomes a false entity. Up to the age of three the child remains a part of nature, flowing, happy about nothing at all, happy for no reason, just happy. Just watch a child. What has he got to be happy about? But he looks like he is on the top of the world. With small things he can be so happy – just collecting pebbles on the seashore and he can be more happy than you are ever going to be. Even if you collect “kohinoors” you will not be as happy. Just with pebbles, colored stones, or rushing after a butterfly, a child seems to be so joyous.Somewhere near the age of three the child becomes civilized. We force him. We initiate him into civilization – and civilization up to now has been a kind of insanity, a madhouse. We force the child to become more and more intellectual and less and less intelligent. We force the child to be more and more prosaic and less and less poetic. We force the child to become more and more concerned about the non-essential – money, prestige, power, ambition – and more and more uninterested in the real joys of life. We turn the child from a playful being into a worker. The work ethic enters. Now duty becomes more important than love; formality becomes more important than informal flow; manners become more important than truth; policy becomes more important than authenticity.Once the child has learned these strategies he is no longer happy, and when a child is no longer happy then he needs some reason for why he is unhappy. First we make him unhappy, then naturally one day he is going to ask, “Why am I unhappy?” Then you have to find reasons. Hindus say it is because in your past lives you have committed bad karmas. Christians say it is because of the original sin – because Adam committed a sin of disobedience to God: that’s why. And so on, so forth.Now look at the whole stupidity of it. First you destroy the capacity to enjoy, then naturally, when the child becomes non-enjoying, when he asks, “Why am I miserable? Why am I unhappy? Why can’t I be happy? What has gone wrong?” Naturally you cannot say what has gone wrong. You may not even be aware of it. You cannot say that you have put him on the wrong track. You may not have put him on the wrong track knowingly, you may have simply given it as a heritage. Your fathers, your mothers, your society, have given it to you; you have given it to your children. Each generation gives its neurosis to the new generation. Madnesses go on living. People go on changing, madnesses go on living.You may not be aware that each child is born with infinite potentiality to be happy. Each child is orgasmic. But one day or other he is going to ask and you have to provide answers. So you create guilt. You say, “Because you have committed sins in your past life.” You or Adam and Eve, that doesn’t matter, anybody, xyz, will do – you just have to give an explanation that something has gone wrong in the past. And the past is beyond your capacity, you cannot do anything. What can I or you do about Adam and Eve? How can we manage him not eating the apple? It is impossible. He has eaten it. It has already happened. We cannot undo it. And it is not a drama that is happening right now.One day I heard two small children – a boy and a girl, a brother and a sister – playing. The boy hit the girl very hard and she started screaming. The mother came and asked, “What is the matter? Why have you hit your sister?” And the boy said, “We were playing Adam and Eve and rather than giving me the apple she ate it herself.”Now this is not a drama. We cannot change it any more. It has already happened. Adam has eaten the fruit of knowledge. You cannot do anything; you simply feel guilty.Hindus look more rational. They are. But that doesn’t make much difference. Hindus say it looks absurd that you should suffer for Adam’s sin. They make it more rational. They are rational people; they have been philosophizing for centuries. They say it is your past karmas. In your past life you have done wrong. Now who is going to suffer? You are the one to suffer for your wrong. It looks more logical.But it is not. You go on asking a Hindu pundit, “Then okay, in my previous life I did wrong. What about if I was also suffering in my previous life? How far back can you go? There must be a first life somewhere. Why did I do something wrong in my first life? There is no other life to precede it so you cannot throw the responsibility on the previous life. Why did it happen in the first place?” It is absurd. Nobody has the answer.In fact, it has not happened in the Garden of Eden and it has not happened in your past life; It has happened in your present life and it has happened in your parents’ house and it has happened in your school and it has happened in your society, in your country, and it has been done by the parents and the priests and the politicians. These are the culprits, these are the criminals.They have taken your joy and they have given you wrong things. They have taken real, nutritious food from you and they have given you lollipops. Even if it tastes good, it does not satisfy hunger. Even if it tastes good, it does not fulfill, it does not make you strong. Yes, ambition tastes good. It is a lollipop. Fame, success, taste good, but deep down you remain poor.Look at your so-called rich people, look a little deeper into them, and they are beggars, worse than beggars. Sometimes it is possible that a beggar may have something inside him – a luminous being. Buddha was a beggar, so was Mahavira. But look at your kings and your rich people – dull and dead. No joy surrounds them. They just go on dragging somehow.And you have been put on the same track. Somebody is needed to take you out of this conditioning. That’s the function of a master – to uncondition you, to take all the conditioning that your parents have given you. The master is basically against your parents and against your society and against your politicians, hence it is not accidental that the politicians and the parents and the society and the priests are always against a real master whenever he happens. That is where the conflict is.That’s what I am doing here – taking your wrong conditioning so that your joy can erupt again. It is there, that spring is there, nobody can destroy it. It is existential, it is part of your being, nobody can take it away – it has just been blocked. The spring is there and the fresh water is still running there – but rocks have been put around you. You have been blocked. Once those rocks have been taken away again you will become a child. It will be a rebirth. Again you will start flowing. Again your eyes will have luster and your face will have joy. Again you will become luminous. That’s what Jesus means when he goes on saying, “Only those who are like children will be able to enter into the kingdom of my God.”You ask: “Brown has said: ‘The ultimate problem is not guilt but the incapacity to live. The illusion of guilt is necessary for an animal that cannot enjoy life, in order to organize a life of non-enjoyment.”How have you been destroyed in your childhood? That has to be looked into. You were born capable of living – everybody is – then your capacity to live was taken away. And the way, the trick, that was used to take it away was to give you false ideals, pseudo ideals; to move you in directions which are futile, meaningless; to put you on tracks which go nowhere, which always end in a cul-de-sac. And naturally when you are in a cul-de-sac and your life is not going anywhere – or running in circles – an explanation is needed. “Why has this happened to me? Why has this happened to me and not to others?”That too is in the mind of everybody – “Everybody else is happy, only I am miserable” – because you look only at the faces. And people manage their faces. They have masks. They don’t want to show their misery – what is the point? They keep it hidden. So when you look around you may see that everybody seems to be happy – only you are miserable. And that’s how everybody is thinking – “Everybody else seems to be happy, only I am miserable.” All are miserable.Misery is there because the society has distracted you. It is not that man is born with an incapacity to live, no, that is not the problem. That’s why I don’t agree. The problem is not that man has no capacity for joy – man has – the problem is that man is not allowed to grow in a natural way.There are vested interests which don’t allow man to go into joyous ways. They need a miserable man. For their own purposes the miserable man is more suitable than a happy man, because a happy man is a rebel and a miserable man is never a rebel. A miserable man is always ready to obey, always ready to submit. A miserable man is so miserable that he cannot stand on his own; he knows that on his own he is just miserable. So he is ready to fall into anybody’s trap.Any politician can become the leader if people are miserable. Then any stupid person can become your leader, your prime minister, your president – because he can promise you things, he can promise you great things. And you are so miserable that you trust the promises. If you are happy, nobody can deceive you by promising – because you need not have any promise, you are already happy. With a happy world politicians will disappear.When you are unhappy you start thinking, “Maybe this life is wasted, maybe I could not manage this life, but if I can manage the next one, the coming one, that is more than enough to ask.” You go to the priest. The priest promises you good in the other life. The politician promises something good in the future in this life, and the priest promises you something good in the other life beyond death. Both go on promising. Promises are needed by miserable people. If you are happy, you will not go to the politician and you will not go to the priest. For what? You are already happy, you are already in paradise. Then the whole profession of the priest and the politician disappears.These are the exploiters. These are the people who are sitting on your heart and blocking your energies. They can remain in power only if you are miserable. Remember it. By being miserable you are helping a gang of exploiters. Be happy and you bring the greatest revolution in the world.Sometimes people come to me and they ask, “Why don’t you teach something so that the society can be changed?” That’s what I am doing – but I am doing it very fundamentally. I don’t teach you any social revolution. I don’t say to you, “Go and overthrow this government.” That is meaningless because those who will overthrow the government will become your exploiters. It never changes anything. Down the ages man has been changing the government and the social structure and the economic structure but basically nothing ever changes. Again and again the same thing happens. Man is caught. All hopes are hopeless.But I am doing something really revolutionary. radical – I am trying to make you happy. It may not be very obvious to you how it is concerned with the revolution of the society – it is. A happy person is beyond being oppressed, exploited, because a happy person needs no promises. A happy person is already happy so he is not worried about paradise or after-life. That is all nonsense A happy person is not worried about tomorrow; the morrow takes care of itself. Jesus says: Look at the lilies in the field They don’t think of the morrow, they don’t toil, they don’t labor. They live an unworried existence. They are just there. But I say unto you that even Solomon attired in all his beautiful, valuable dresses was not so beautiful as these lily-flowers.That’s what sannyas is all about. I would like you to become a lily, a flower, unconcerned about the future, unconcerned about the past. The past is no more and the future is not yet. Only the present is there. Bloom in it, be happy in it, rejoice in it, celebrate in it, and you bring a great revolution in the world – because you will be getting out of all the traps of the priests and the politicians.The priests and politicians create guilt in you. They do the harm and then they make you feel guilty. They destroy your capacity to live, to love, to delight, and then they throw the responsibility on you – “It is your sin, it is your wrong-doing that has made you so miserable.” Then they create guilt.But the basic problem is conditioning. Man should be helped to live a natural life, man should not be conditioned to live an unnatural life. The basic problem is not an incapacity to live – you are born with the capacity to live – the basic problem is how not to allow others to destroy that capacity. Once they destroy, they bring guilt in also. Guilt is their protection. They protect themselves behind the garb of guilt. First they kill you and then they make you guilty that you have committed suicide.The eighth question:Osho,Why do I always act out of fear?It is the same thing. Fear has been put very deep down into you. You have been made afraid, you have been frightened, you have been put into a very, very fearful state of consciousness.The child is born helpless but the child is not fearful, remember. He is helpless but not fearful. The child can go and play with a snake and the child can go and try to ride on a lion. The child is not fearful. The child is helpless, that is true. He is delicate, vulnerable. He needs your help to grow. But you exploit his helplessness; you start changing the color of his helplessness you make it, you turn it into fearfulness; you reduce it to fearfulness. And it is very easy to change helplessness into fearfulness.Because the child is helpless you can always make him feel fear. You can say to him, “We are not going to give you food today,” or “We are going to lock you in the bathroom,” or “We will give you a good beating if you do this.” Or the mother can say, “I am going to leave,” or “I am going to renounce you.” Or the father can say, “I will never come home if you do this again.” You can make the child very afraid. He is so helpless he cannot live without you. He does not even know how to survive without you. And it is not possible for him to survive without you.Because of this you can exploit him, you can make him afraid. When he is afraid you are powerful. When he is afraid, you know his buttons. Then you can manage whatsoever you want him to do and whatsoever you don’t want him to do. Then you can force your ideas, your religions, your ideologies, your patterns, on him. You have been miserable and you know that you have been miserable; now you will be forcing the same thing on him and you will make him miserable. If you really love your child there is one thing you will never do – you will never make him like you. But every father and every mother always wants the child to be just like him. People feel very happy.Once a child was born. The father was my colleague in the university. He invited me to see the child. He was thrilled. And on the way to his home he said, “Somebody has said that the child looks like me and many people are saying that the child looks exactly like me.”When I went to see I told the father, “He looks like you but please remember not to make him like you.” He said, “What are you saying? What else can I do? My child has to be like me.”Now this father is on an ego trip – as all fathers are. Why does the child have to be like you? Maybe the face looks like you, that is okay. The face does not matter. What matters is his spirit. He has his own spirit. If you try to make it like you it will be a good ego trip for you. People try to be immortal in this way. They will die but their child will live – and he will be just like them, just as fucked-up as they are, just as miserable as they are, just as neurotic as they are.I told the father, “As far as I know, you have been coming to me many times, for many years, and you have been coming to me because you are miserable. And you want this small child to be just like you? Then he will be miserable. If you really love the child then make a decision, an absolute decision and commitment, that you will avoid one thing – that is that the child should be like you. He can be anybody else – in being somebody else there is some chance of being happy – but at least one thing is certain: if he is like you he will be as miserable as you are.”But that’s what goes on. You ask me: “why do I always act out of fear?” Because you are still not free of your parents. All fear is from your parents. You may have grown in age but you have not grown in consciousness. Drop your parents.And I am not saying anything against your parents. I have all compassion for them. Their parents have done the same thing to them. They have suffered a lot. I am not saying be angry with them, I am saying just get rid of them. Drop the conditioning that they have unknowingly put into you. Be free of them, and then you will also have a great compassion and love for them. You will feel sorry for them.This new collection box has some new features. When you drop in a quarter or more it doesn’t make a sound. Drop in a dime and it tinkles a bell. A nickel blows a whistle and a penny fires a shot, arid when you don’t drop anything in, the box takes your picture.Now that’s how religion creates fear in you.I have heard….A minister went hunting up in the mountains. Suddenly a big bear went for him. He took off so fast you could play checkers on his coat tail, but he couldn’t find any place to hide.Suddenly he saw a tree – but the lowest limb was twenty feet from the ground. He made a frantic leap for it, but missed it. However, he grabbed it on the way down.You are full of fear. You are just fear and trembling and nothing else. And everybody else lives on your fear. So nobody is going to help you to drop it because everybody lives on it.Your wife will not help you to drop it because she lives on it. Wives make their husbands very afraid. Your husband will not help you to drop it, because once you drop fear you may drop the husband himself. It may be just because of fear that you go on staying with this ugly man. Your children will not like you to drop fear. Because you are afraid, your children have some power over you. Your parents will not like you to drop fear. Nobody will like you to drop fear. You have to decide to drop it – because it is against you and in favor of all. It is destructive for you and a good opportunity for everybody to exploit you.And the last question:Osho,I am suffering from writer's block! I wonder, how is it that lately, as I feel more and more overwhelming gratitude and love, I become less and less able to express it? It pains me that I cannot share what I am experiencing. Your love-sick bard, Maneesha.It happens, Maneesha. The more you feel for me, the more you will feel incapable of expressing it.Superficial feelings can be expressed easily; words are adequate for them. Deeper feelings cannot be expressed adequately words are not adequate for them. Words are too superficial. When the feeling goes very deep, it goes beyond words. You can feel it, you can be thrilled by it, you can feel the pulsation all over your body and being, but you cannot put it into words. You can try and you can feel that you have failed. When you put it into words something very tiny comes up – and it was so huge when you were experiencing it, so enormous. It was so overwhelming. Now you put it in a word and it is just a drop – and it was an ocean when you were feeling it.I can understand Maneesha’s problem. She is my bard and the deeper she goes into me and into herself, the more and more difficult it will be for her, the more and more incapable she will feel: But that’s a good sign. That’s a sign that something really tremendous is happening.Go on trying to express – because even if it cannot be expressed, it has to be expressed. Even if you cannot put the ocean of your heart into the words, don’t be worried. If even only a few drops get into them, that’s good – because even those few drops will lead people towards me, even those few drops will give them a taste, a taste of the ocean.And remember one thing, even a single drop of the ocean is as salty as the whole ocean. And even a single drop of the ocean is as much water as the whole ocean. It may be small but it has the same flavor. It may be very small but it has the same secret. If you can understand a single drop of water you have understood all the water that exists on the earth or other planets. Even if water exists on some unknown planet, it will be H20. We don’t know, but if water exists on some unknown planet, it will be H20 and nothing else. We know the secret. A single drop of water has the secret.So don’t be worried. The song is going to become and more difficult. The deeper you go. the more you will feel dumb. The deeper you go, the more you will feel that silence is needed, the more you will want to sing the song in silence. But silence will not be understood by people. And Maneesha is my bard so she cannot be allowed.So let the writer’s block be there. I will go on hammering on it and destroying it. And you go on singing your song.Enough for today.

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

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-2-09/

There was once a Sufi who wanted to make sure that his disciples would, after his death, find the right teacher of the way for them.He therefore, after the obligatory bequests laid down by law, left his disciples seventeen camels, with this order:“You will divide the camels among the three of you in the following proportions: the oldest shall have half, the middle in age one-third, and the youngest shall have one-ninth.”As soon as he was dead and the will was read, the disciples were at first amazed at such an inefficient disposition of their master’s assets.Some said, “Let us own the camels communally.”Others sought advice and then said, “We have been told to make the nearest possible division.”Others were told by a judge to sell the camels and divide the money.And yet others held that the will was null and void because its provisions could not be executed.Then they fell to thinking that there might be some hidden wisdom in the master’s bequest, so they made enquires as to who could solve insoluble problems.Everyone they tried failed, until they arrived at the door of the son-in law of the prophet, Hazrat Ali.He said, “This is your solution. I will add one camel to the number. Out of the eighteen camels you will give half – nine camels – to the oldest disciple. The second will have a third of the total, which is six camels. The last disciple may have one-ninth, which is two camels. That makes seventeen. One – my camel – is left over to be returned to me.” – which is how the disciples found a teacher for them.Sufism depends absolutely on the concept of the master. Without the master there is no Sufism. Sufism does not believe in the books, it believes in the living master. One has to come to somebody who has come to know by himself. The books may contain great wisdom, but there is no way to decode it. If you decode it, you will decode it according to your mind. That will falsify the book.Islam is known as the religion of the book – the Koran. Hinduism is also known as the religion of the book – the Veda. And so is the case with Christianity. The word bible simply means the book.But Sufism insists that the book cannot help you. No book can help you. Sufis of course have a book which they call The Book of the Books, but it is empty. Nothing is written in it – not even a single word. That is their attitude about books – that although many things will be there, for you it will remain empty, because you can read only that which you know.Just the other day I heard somebody ask Mulla Nasruddin, “Why did Jesus say ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit?’”Mulla thought for a while and then said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for they have no money to buy booze.”Another time somebody asked Mulla Nasruddin, “And what is the eleventh commandment?”He said, “Thou shalt not get caught.”Your mind will become your master when you are reading a book, and the mind is the problem. This mind can continue perfectly well with a book. The book is dead. The mind has to interpret, comment, decide what the meaning is. So when you are reading a book, you are reading your own mind in an indirect way. The book goes on throwing you back to yourself.You may become very learned but you will never become a man who really knows. You will know many things about God but you will never know God. And you will know many things about truth but you will never know truth. And to know about is just meaningless. To know is the thing, not to know about. To know about means you have missed. But the books can give you a very, very strong feeling that you know; without knowing at all you can have the feeling that you know – and that will become your greatest barrier to knowing. That will become a China Wall around you; your bridges will be broken. How to bridge? How to connect? How to attain to this connection with the divine?The divine seems so far away; the divine seems almost impossible. The God is not obvious; the God is not close by. You look all around and the existence seems to be almost empty of God. That’s what Martin Heidegger says – “I have not found a single thing in the world which I can call sacred.”From the ordinary standpoint he is right. Where can you find the sacred? The sacred is missing – not because the sacred is not there, but because you don’t know how to feel the sacred. You have not yet evolved that intuitive capacity that can feel the sacred. God is far away; the world is very close by. Matter is all around and you never come across the spirit. Hence religion remains just a theory, it never becomes an experience.Sufism believes that you can approach God only through a master.A master is one who can become a via media, who will bee just between you and the divine – a door through whom you can have a glimpse. He knows – not as knowledge but as experience. His experience has transformed him, transfigured him, transported him to another world. A master lives in two realities together, a master is a paradox. One of his feet is in the world, his other foot is in God. From one side he is just like you and from another side he is just the opposite of you. A master is a paradox. Through the paradox of the master you will be able to reach the divine; there is no other way.So the first step for a seeker is to fall in love with a master, to seek a master. If you can find a master, half the journey is over. In fact, the most arduous part is over. To find the master is the basic requirement of becoming a Sufi. Sufi seekers travel for thousands of miles in search of a master, in search of the man with whom they can feel in tune, with whom they can vibrate into the unknown, with whom they can take the first step beyond the known.So the first thing, the first and the most important thing, is to find a master. Sufis say that the greatest blessing of life is to be with a master. If you are not with a master, you have missed the whole opportunity. Then you live with the non-essential; then you never come in contact with the essential. And the only way to come in contact with the essential is to be connected with someone who is in contact.It is almost like…. Have you seen somebody in a circus or in a carnival, or in an exhibition sitting on an electric chair? The chair looks ordinary. You can’t see that the chair is an electric chair, vibrating with electricity. And you can’t see – because it is not visible to the eyes – that the man’s whole body is electrified. But if you touch the man, you get a shock. The man who is sitting on the electric chair is electrified. You cannot see, but if you touch you are immediately connected with electricity.So is the case with a master. He’s electrified by the divine. It may not be visible to those who are just spectators; it may become an experience only for those who come close and touch.Once you have touched a master or the master has touched you, something that has never been in your consciousness has happened. And from that knowing there is no way to fall back. It is irreversible. And once you have felt it, then you know it is. And then you can see the same flame in the trees and in the rivers and in the people. Maybe it is not so clear, maybe it is clouded, hidden behind smoke, asleep, but it is the same whether asleep or awake, hidden behind a cloud of smoke or burning brightly with no smoke. It is the same flame. Once you have touched a master or you have been touched by a master…Michelangelo painted the Day of Creation in the Sistine Chapel. He changed the whole story, the biblical story. And even the people who were making the Sistine Chapel, who were financing it, and the pope – even they could not detect that he had done something utterly new, something which is not in the Bible.The Bible says that God created Adam. He created Adam with mud, humus – hence the word human. And then God breathed into the nostrils of Adam – he breathed life. Now Michelangelo must have thought – I was looking in his diaries, there are many references. – he must have thought for many days, “To paint this will look a little awkward. God breathing into the nostrils of Adam? It will look a little awkward to paint it.” So he changed it. He painted one of his most famous paintings: God touching Adam, not breathing. There is just God’s finger there from the unknown. God is high in the heaven, in the clouds; Adam is on the earth. A finger just comes and touches Adam. and that touch makes him alive.Nobody thought that he had changed the whole story. It is not so in the Bible – not by touch but by breathing into him was Adam made alive. But Michelangelo was a student of Sufism. He was deeply interested in Sufism, and he must have come across the idea of the touch of the master – that the disciple becomes alive by the touch of the master.Yes, it is a touch. It is the jump of a flame from one lamp to another lamp. Once you have felt it – and it is a feeling, there is no way of describing it – once you have felt it, you have become aware of the sacred. Then it is all over, then only it is.So Sufis say that the greatest blessing of life is to find a master – one who knows, one who sees, one who is. You are only when you are in God – before that you are just empty, before that you are a house without a master, before that you are just a dwelling where nobody dwells, before that you only think that you are, but you are not. You are very momentary, you are bubble-like. You don’t have any integrity, you don’t have any center, you don’t have any soul.Gurdjieff, who was immensely impressed by Sufi ideas, who was, in fact, a Sufi master, introduced a very new concept into the Western mind. In fact, nobody had talked about it in that way before. Gurdjieff introduced the idea that you have no soul. The soul has to be created. Don’t remain placid, smug, and don’t remain confident that you have a soul. All the great religions have told you that you have a soul, that it is already there – but Gurdjieff introduced a very new insight. He said that the soul is not there; there is only a possibility of it. You can have it, but you may miss it. There is no certainty about it. You have to create it. Yes, if you want, you can create it, but don’t take it for granted. Don’t think that it is already there inside you.This is a Sufi insight. Sufis say that only the master is. You are not. One who has seen God exists for the first time. You exist only when you confront God. You exist only when God looks into your eyes and you look into his eyes. You exist only when you are touched by God and you touch God. Before that, your existence was just an emptiness, a dark night of the soul. It was just a stumbling, a hoping, a waiting. It was very insubstantial; it was dream-stuff. It had no reality in it.A master is one who is really there. He has presence. He has a kind of radiance. And you can find it and you can observe it. Sometimes just sit near a hotel or by the side of the road and watch people passing by. Start looking for one thing: can you make a distinction? Most people walk like empty shells – and they are many, they are the majority – but sometimes you come across a person who has a kind of presence. You can observe that he is surrounded by an aura, you can feel that he has magnetism. You may have unknowingly observed sometimes that while you were sitting with a few friends, another person comes and suddenly the whole company becomes alive – as if the coming of this new man infuses you with life. Just a moment before, all was dull, you were sad, you were just dragging, talking – talking rubbish. One has to talk. You were passing time. Then a man or a woman enters and suddenly there is a radiance; everything flares up, everything heightens, everything is turned on. Nobody is off. A man of presence has entered.It happens rarely, because men of presence are rare. It is very rare to find two men of presence in one company, it is very rare. But whenever a man of presence is there, it is loud and clear. If you are even a little bit alert you can see the quality. The empty man exhausts you. If you are sitting by the side of the empty man, he is a parasite. His emptiness pulls your energy into himself, and there it disappears. He is like a black hole.Physicists say there are black holes in space. If anything comes into the area of the black hole it will be simply sucked in and it will disappear out of existence. A black hole is a star which has collapsed, collapsed into itself. And a star is a big thing. This earth is very small. The sun is sixty thousand times bigger than the earth and our sun is a very, very mediocre star. There are suns – stars – which are a million times bigger. When a star collapses, dies – everything has to die, whatsoever is born has to die – when a star dies, it collapses into itself towards its center. It has great gravitation. Because of the gravitation everything is sucked in. It creates a great negative atmosphere around itself and whatsoever comes close by will be sucked in.Einstein has said that even sunlight, even sun rays coming closer, will not be able to get back. Now ordinarily it is very difficult to keep the sunlight caught; it will be reflected. But from a black hole it will not be reflected, it will simply be caught and will disappear. Anything that comes too close to the black hole will simply go out of existence.A man who is empty is a small black hole. That’s why you sometimes feel very tired by meeting a certain person. You avoid him. Even to say hello to him on the road is tiring. Just by passing him he takes something of you, a lump of energy disappears. You are poorer by just saying hello to that man or seeing that man. He is an empty, negative space. Whosoever comes by, he sucks. These people are tiring people, exhausting people, parisitical.Just the opposite is the case when a man has presence. When a man has presence he is showering energy. He has too much energy. He is overflowing with energy. Whenever you come close to such a man you are blessed. Suddenly you feel the shower. You are close by a waterfall. You feel cool, you feel tranquil, you feel vital. You feel a kind of power and also a kind of poetry arising in you – all together. You would like to be with this man again and again. Just to be in the vicinity of this man is life-enhancing.The man of presence spreads his energy all around. He is reaching people and he has something to give. He is a giver. He is an emperor. That’s why in the East we have called sannyasins “swami.” “Swami” means a master – one who has something to give, one who is not a beggar.A person who is empty, who has no soul yet, is a beggar. He is constantly begging, he is a begging bowl. He will take something from you. If you go into a crowd, and you have any understanding about your life and the way energy functions, you will always feel that you come home a little less than you went. A chunk of your being has been taken by the crowd. The crowd is always tiring, exhausting, because in crowds you will not find a man of presence; you will find only people who are absent, only people who ate sleepy, only people who are empty.The master is a man of presence. He has utter authenticity, a substantial being, he has soul. This soul has to be created – you are just a dwelling. You have to provoke the guest to come, you have to invite the guest to come. The house is ready but the guest has not come yet.Sufis say, “How are you going to learn the ways of being present unless you are in the presence of a man who is present” That’s what a master is. A master is not a teacher; a master is a magnetic force, a magnetic field of positive energy, of presence.Sufis say that whenever you come to the master you have baraka. You have grace. That is the meaning of the Hindu satsang – being in the presence of the master to receive his grace. He is giving, and you are not obliged when you receive his grace, because even if you had not been there he would have given. Even if nobody had been there he would have given – that is just natural. As rivers flow, as a flower opens and the fragrance is released, so is it the natural thing with a master. He has bloomed and the fragrances are released to the winds. Whether somebody will receive them or not, that is not the point. If somebody can receive them, he will be blessed; if nobody receives them, then too the master will go on showering. He does not shower especially for you – he cannot help it, he has to shower. Just as light goes on showering from a lamp, and fragrance from a flower, so is the case with a master.Sufis are right. They say that a master is one who knows, one who sees, one who is. That has to be remembered: one who is. To come into the presence of one who is, is the first step on the path. Before that, all is futile; before that, all is frustrating. The fulfillment starts only when you have become connected with one who is fulfilled. And this relationship between a master and a disciple is a love affair; it is not a rational thing. It is more of feeling than of thinking.So those who think too much may go on missing. Only those who feel can connect. Remember, this shift has to happen: from thinking you have to go to feeling. Feeling is closer, closer to something in you that is called intuition. Thinking is the farthest point from intuition. Thinking is a kind of tuition. You have been taught by others – that is tuition. Something that has not been taught to you and blooms in you, that is intuition. Nobody has taught you – no school, no university, no college. Nobody has said anything about it to you. It explodes in you – that is intuition. You need not go anywhere, you only need to go inside yourself. Feeling is closer to intuition.I don’t expect the impossible. I don’t say just be intuitive – that you cannot do. Just now if you can do one thing – move from thinking to feeling – it will be enough. Then from feeling to intuition it is very easy. But to move from thinking to intuition is very difficult. They don’t meet, they are polarities. Feeling is just in the middle. From feeling, thinking and intuition are at the same distance. If you go this way you reach thinking; if you go that way you reach intuition.In feeling both meet and merge. Something of thinking remains in feeling and something of intuition too. Then you can choose.To find a master means to have a change in your mind – you have to become more feeling. If you go to a master with all kinds of thoughts, those thoughts will not allow you to be there. The thoughts will not function as bridges, they will function as walls.People are so alone because they don’t create bridges, they create walls – and then they suffer. And the walls are created by you. When you are searching for a master, remember that you have to change from thinking to feeling. When you come to a man whom you can feel as a presence…. Even if you are very caught up in your thinking, the presence will be felt. It is such a vital thing that you will feel it – but then you have to allow it and you have to slip more and more into the feeling space so you can be more and more in contact with the presence that is there. Once the contact starts happening, then it takes you on the greatest journey of your life, the greatest adventure, the greatest ecstasy.The first step, Sufis say, is to come into the presence of one who is present. Before that, all is frustration; before that, there is no life. Only after that is there life. Life starts only when you are connected with a master. Before that, it was only a dream, a mirage. Before that, it was only thoughts and thoughts and thoughts, a desert land. Only feelings bloom; thoughts never bloom. Thoughts are very unproductive, uncreative, because they are borrowed. They are never original. Not a single reality can be created by thought; not a single reality can be discovered by thought. Thought is very impotent. All that is known is known by feeling; all that is discovered is discovered by feeling; all that is created is created by feeling.The second step is surrender…and then there are no more steps. The whole path is covered in just two simple steps: one is coming in contact with someone who is in contact with God, and the second is to surrender to him. Sufis say that two simple steps are enough. In two steps the journey of millions of miles is finished. The first is the most arduous. Once you have come into the presence, by and by you will start surrendering. You cannot resist long. The real thing is to come in contact.Sometimes it happens that you don’t come in contact, and you surrender. Then your surrender is false, then your surrender is from the mind, then your surrender is just pseudo. Then you are pretending that you have surrendered. but you have not surrendered. It is just a strategy – you want to exploit the man of presence. There is no way to exploit him. You want to gain something. You think, “Okay, if surrender is the condition, I will surrender.” But your surrender cannot be surrender. Surrender has to happen, you cannot do it, you cannot will it. It you will it, you can take it back. If you do it, you can undo it. Surrender is a happening.So go step by step. And there are only two steps. First be suffused with the presence of a master, be drunk – and then a surrender comes on its own. You start feeling that you are bowing down. Don’t be in a hurry. Sometimes it happens that you do things in a hurry – in this age particularly, hurry is one of the problems. Everybody is in a hurry, wants to do everything fast and soon. So if you come to a master and you hear that surrender is needed, you are ready to surrender. You say, “Why not? Let us see. If something happens, good; if nothing happens, there is nothing to lose.” But this surrender won’t help. This is not the surrender Sufis are talking about, that’s why they say it is the second step, not the first. The first is to be in the presence of the master.There is a sannyasin, Praghosh, who goes on writing to me again and again – “Why, Osho? You look very ordinary to me.” I have not answered him yet but now the right moment has come to answer. I don’t look ordinary, I am ordinary. But what is his problem? I’m not worried by my ordinariness, I’m immensely happy with it. So why is Praghosh in trouble? His trouble is that he wants me to be very, very extraordinary – a man of miracles or something. Some nonsense is in his mind. He wants me to be stupid – to produce ash or Swiss watches or do some miracles. He is in search of a magician, not of a master.This search is of the ego. He wants me to be very extra-ordinary so that his ego can feel very good that it has surrendered to an extraordinary man. If by my touch I cure people, if by my touch I make dead people alive, then Praghosh will be very happy: this is the man to surrender to. But then you will not be surrendering to me. It will be your ego-trip. You will feel very good and satisfied that you are the disciple of such an extraordinary man.Sufis don’t believe in miracles. They think they are stupid and only stupid people are attracted towards miracles. A master is ordinary. A master is a normal man – a regular. A master is so ordinary that he has no kind of ego in him. All extra-ordinariness is a kind of ego. A master is simply nobody. His ordinariness is a nobodiness. Only people who suffer from inferiority seek extraordinariness. If one has come home there is no search for extraordinariness, there is no search for speciality. To be ordinary is so extraordinarily beautiful.But I can understand his trouble. He wants to have an ego trip through me. So he is disturbed – Osho is not doing any kind of miracles. He is a sannyasin, but what kind of surrender is this? This is not surrender. He has not even come into my presence yet, he has not yet got what I call that “connectivity.” He has not been touched by me and he has not touched me yet. And he is a sannyasin. He must have been in a hurry. He should have waited a little.Just the other day his woman came – Urmi, his woman. And she was crying and she was saying, “What to do, Osho? Praghosh puts me on such a high pedestal. He almost thinks of me as if I am a goddess, and then he makes me feel guilty because I am a human being. He expects me to be a goddess, and if I don’t behave like a goddess, then he makes me feel guilty.” While she was relating her misery and story I was thinking, “So he is doing that to you too.” That’s what he wants to do with me and to me. He wants to put me on a high pedestal – to be a miracle man or something extraordinary that doesn’t happen.Once he has put me on a high pedestal he will be in control. Then he will be powerful over me because he will have the control. If he wants to take me off the pedestal – it is his pedestal, he can. That’s what he is doing to his woman too. First he puts her on a high pedestal and then he tortures her. He becomes powerful.How the ego goes on playing tricks! You have to watch. On the surface it looks just the opposite – that he is such a humble man, and he puts his woman in such a high place that she is a goddess. You will think he is very humble. He is not. He is very tricky; he is being very political. And he may not be consciously doing it; it may be just his unconscious ego trip. Once you have put the woman up as a goddess, you are powerful. Then she cannot be human, then you can find faults with her, and then she will be afraid of you. Afraid, because you can put her down any time. That is what he wants to do with me too.First he wants to put me on a high pedestal, then he becomes powerful. Now see the game. Even the disciple wants to become powerful over the master. If I am ordinary, then he is no longer powerful, then he cannot put me anywhere lower than I am. I am just on plain ground – where can he put me down to? Then he has no power. Otherwise he can come and say, “Osho, you are so high, don’t do this, don’t say that.”I have been watching this. For these twenty years I have come in contact with millions of people and this has been one of my observations – that everybody wants to control the master. People come to me and they say, “You should not say this because that will bring your image down. You should not say this.”An Indian came just a few days ago and he was saying, “You should not talk about homosexuality, even if somebody has asked the question. And even if it is not wrong, you should not say so, otherwise people will think you are in support of homosexuality.” He was saying that this would tarnish my image.People have been suggesting all kinds of things to me during these past twenty years: you should not do this. you should not say this. I used to stay in Jaina families. They would tell me, “You should not eat in the night because if you eat in the night and somebody comes to know, they will wonder what kind of saint you are.” Now if I want to be on their pedestal 1 have to be hungry!I stayed in one ashram – Vinoba’s ashram – and I got up at six. Vinoba got up at three. So his disciples came to me and they said, “What are you doing? You should get up at three, otherwise people in this ashram will wonder what kind of saint you are – because we have become accustomed to seeing the saint get up at three.”I said, “Don’t think that I am a saint – I am going to sleep up to six. What you think about me is of no value. I’m not going to disturb my sleep just to be your saint. Forget about it.”“You should not do this, you should not be that, you should not say that, you should not comment on this” – so many advisors. And they all think they love me, and they all think they are followers, disciples. They are just helping their master to have a good public image. And they go on saying, “We don’t say that you are wrong. We are just saying it because of the public image.”Now this Praghosh wants to put me on a high pedestal, then he becomes powerful. then if I want to remain on the high pedestal I have to look to Praghosh. Where is Praghosh? Otherwise I will not be on that high pedestal. Who will put me that high? Remember, Praghosh, expecting me to be extraordinary is just your ego. You want to be a disciple of an extraordinary man, then your ego will feel very, very enhanced, fulfilled.I am ordinary, and I am absolutely ordinary. I don’t look ordinary – that is again a trick. He is asking me “Why do you look so ordinary?” He is not saying “You are ordinary.” He cannot believe that I am ordinary. Maybe I’m just pretending to be ordinary, then there is some hope for him. Some day or other I will show my extraordinary miracles. Praghosh, you are hoping against hope. It is not going to happen. I am simply ordinary. It is not that I am pretending or playing a game of being ordinary. I am ordinary. And because I am ordinary there is a possibility for you to surrender. And I’m not going to do anything that can give you any notion that I am extraordinary, I am not going to do anything. Only then will your surrender be true.If you can surrender to an ordinary man, the ego will disappear. Sufis have never done miracles. Sufis have always been very, very ordinary people. That is one of the basics of Sufism – because the master exists to help you surrender and he can help you to surrender only when he is nobody. If he is somebody then being connected with him will make you feel somebody. You will feel good that you are no ordinary person – you are connected to an extraordinary person, so you are extraordinary.Connected to a nobody – that’s what surrender is. And through surrender you will come to see that the ordinary life is so full of beauty and benediction. These trees are ordinary and these birds are ordinary and this sky is ordinary and this earth is ordinary, and God is ordinary. There is no ego, so who bothers to be extraordinary? Existence is ordinary but this ordinariness is so beautiful; it is a beautitude. And to be ordinary is to be religious.Those who are here with me and who are really connected with me will know what I am talking about. Why this hankering for the extraordinary? There must be some kind of inferiority complex in Praghosh, so he’s seeking some superior being. If he cannot be superior, at least he can be the follower of a superior being. But it is an urge coming out of an inferiority complex. In surrender you surrender all – your inferiority complex, your superiority complex, your ego, your humbleness – you surrender all. A surrender has to be total. You put yourself in a bundle and you throw it at the feet of the master and you say, “I disappear from this moment.” And from that moment there is no question.How can there be a question from that moment? Then you don’t question the master. It is finished. Question before you surrender as much as you want to question, but once you have surrendered, there is no need. And if the questioning still continues, if you are still suspicious and doubtful, then the surrender has not happened.The first step is to come in contact with a master, and the second is surrender. And then, Sufis say, the whole journey is complete.How to find a master? Not by thought, of course. By thinking, you go on keeping yourself in the same rut. in the same old rut, in the past. By thinking, you remain old, you stop all possibilities of being new. And watch, you are constantly thinking, there is a constant chattering inside – the internal talk. Even while you are listening to me – look in for just a second – the chattering continues, there is a constant internal talk.This internal talk divides you from reality. Once this internal talk disappears, even for a few moments, you are one – one with reality, one with the master, one with the beloved, one with God. Whenever you want to be one with something – with your woman, with your man, with your master, with your God, with the existence – whenever you want to be one with something, in a unison, this internal talk has to disappear. That is the only barrier.Without dropping internal talk, you cannot find a master. The question arises in many people’s minds: “How to find a master?” You will have to learn ways to be silent. And when you come into the presence of somebody who is present, sit silently. Collect yourself together, calm down, don’t think – because thinking is an activity – just be. It will be difficult, but if you try, then for a few moments it will happen. They will be very, very small moments, just intervals; they come and they go. But even in that interval, like a flash, something will descend on you. You will be connected, disconnected, connected, disconnected, but it will happen. And once you have touched somebody who is, for even a single moment, you will know the taste of it. Even a drop of it will give you the taste of it. And then all other tastes start disappearing; then that taste becomes your only taste. Then all desires start converging into one desire – how to be with this man and how to be totally with him? And every day it goes on growing. One day suddenly you find you are surrendered. Yes, one day you find you are surrendered. It takes you unaware, you were not planning to surrender – it has happened.Internal talk is the way of the old self, is the way to remain hung-up with the past, is the way to remain in the ego. And you are constantly thinking, day in, day out. It is always there like an undercurrent. Once it is broken, you fall into the world of intuition.Intuition is hiding there just behind this layer of internal talk, so learn how to be without internal talk. That is the way to find a master. And it will be easier for you to learn sitting by the side of the sea, looking at the roaring waves – when there is nothing much to think about, and you can just go on looking. Lying down on the grass looking at the sky, in the night looking at the stars, watching the trees – there is nothing much to think about. There is no need to think about stars. They are there, so beautifully there, you can just be with them.Learn first to be with nature, because nature is silent. It does not respond, it knows no language. So you will be able to fall below the level of internal talk. And then start searching, then start looking for people who have a presence. When you come near a person who has a presence you will suddenly see that you are infused with energy, you are vibrating with a new rhythm. A dance has entered you. Each cell and fiber of your being is pulsating. You are very close to something immense, something incredible.It is said of Buddha that on the day he became enlightened he started feeling a few hours before that that day something immense was just around the comer. It was driving him crazy. He could not figure out what it was, but something was there around the comer, something was going to happen. That urgency became very, very penetrating. At the last moment, just a few hours before he became enlightened…. It was almost like a pregnant woman. Her nine months are over and any moment it is going to happen, the child is going to happen. But the pregnant woman knows, she has a visible symptom – the child is there kicking inside her belly. But when you are going to be reborn into buddhahood, into satori, samadhi, nothing is visible. And something is kicking in the belly.Buddha was sitting underneath the tree where he became enlightened and a woman offered him some sweets in a bowl. He ate the sweets and went to the river to wash the bowl. And it was coming, it was everywhere, he could feel it. It became so urgent that he did something which he had never done before. He put the bowl in the river and he said, to no one in particular, to existence itself, “If something is going to happen, give me some indication. Don’t drive me crazy.”Buddha did not believe in any God so he could not address God. He was not talking to anybody in particular, he was simply talking to existence, or talking to himself. “Give me a visible indication. Let this be the indication: if this bowl starts flowing upstream then I will be satisfied that something is going to happen – because it is so heavy on me.” And the story is beautiful. The story says that the bowl started floating upstream. Within seconds it disappeared upstream. Then Buddha was satisfied. Then he rested underneath the tree. “Yes, it is going to happen.” And by the morning it had happened.This is just a parable. Don’t take it literally. Don’t think that the bowl really started floating upstream. It simply says that to be connected with God is as absurd a phenomenon as a bowl floating upstream. It is against all the so-called laws, against the law of gravitation. It is against all the so-called laws that we are aware of. It is a new phenomenon, it is a new law functioning. Things are upside-down. What has never happened before is going to happen. The consciousness was always empty; now it is going to be fulfilled. The consciousness was always going outwards; now the consciousness is going inwards. That is the meaning of the bowl floating upstream. The consciousness was always going low, downwards; now it is rising high, upwards; that is the meaning of the bowl floating upstream. A new law penetrates.To be connected with a master is the beginning of a new world, a new universe. For that you will have to sacrifice the old. And to sacrifice the old, nothing else is needed – only the internal talk has to be sacrificed. That keeps you a captive in the old reality. That is the world that has to be dropped, that is the world that has to be renounced. And that is what surrender is. When you have seen something new which you have never seen before, when you have felt the presence of a man who IS, who is a man of God, then this is what is needed: you surrender your internal talk, you bow down.In the East this has been symbolic – the disciple puts his head at the feet of the master. It is just symbolic, it has nothing to do with your physical head. It is simply symbolic. The head is the symbol of thinking, of mind. The disciple puts his mind at the master’s feet and he says, “Now you take care.” And the master takes care.In fact, when you surrender to a master you have nothing to surrender. Never think for a single moment that you have done something great. In fact, the master has been really compassionate that he accepted you, because now the responsibility will be his. That is the meaning of this story.There was once a Sufi who wanted to make sure that his disciples would, after his death, find the right teacher of the way for them.Not only while he is alive will he help you, the master will even make provisions for when he is gone. He will make arrangements, because those who have trusted in him should not be left in the middle. This Sufi master is just on his deathbed. A few disciples have arrived, a few have reached, but many are still struggling.Now remember that many disciples of this master must have arrived. Why couldn’t they function as teachers? To know is one thing, but to help others to know is quite another. Not every enlightened person is a master and not every teacher is enlightened. There are people who are good teachers, great teachers, they can teach beautifully. They can be very articulate people with an immense capacity to teach or make things clear, but they may not have known themselves. Then all that they are trying to teach is borrowed and dead. And there are people who may have known, but are not capable of teaching – because teaching has nothing to do with just knowing.For example, you may have seen a beautiful sunrise, but that does not mean that you can paint it, that you can come home and paint it for your children and show them that this was the beautiful morning you have seen. And it is possible that if you describe that beautiful morning to somebody who has not seen it and who is a painter, he can paint it without seeing it. And his painting will be better than your painting. Your painting will be nothing. It will not give any idea of what you have seen or what you are talking about.The same is the case with the inner journey. There are teachers who have not heard but who are articulate people; and there are masters who have known but who are not articulate. The rare phenomenon is when a master is a teacher too, when an enlightened person is articulate too. He has known it and he has the ability, the art, to help others know it.This Sufi was dying. There must have been a few of his disciples who had become enlightened, but they were not teachers. So he must have been worried – what is going to happen to those who are in the middle? The master must provide. He must find a way for them to find a master.Now Sufis work in very, very strange ways, but they know how to work. The master could have said, “Go to Hazrat Ali” – Hazrat Ali was the son-in-law of Mohammed. “Go to Ali,” he could have said. It would have been so easy. But that would not have been right. He wanted them to find him themselves – because when you find something yourself, it has immense value. When somebody says something and you do it, it is no longer so valuable. Then you are doing your duty.If when the master is dying he says, “When I am dead you go to Hazrat Ali,” you will follow the old man. You will say, “We will have to go to Hazrat Ali.” You may like Hazrat Ali, or you may not like Hazrat Ali – it will be a kind of obligation, a duty. Then the whole point will be missed. The master wants you to seek the new master. The master wants you to grope in the dark, so that when you have found, you have the feeling that you have found. This is one of the most important things to remember.Those people who found Mohammed were immensely profited. But now there are millions of Mohammedans. They have not found Mohammed themselves, their fathers told them. It has not been their own search. Now they are just so-so, lukewarm Mohammedans – as there are lukewarm Christians. The first disciples who had searched for Jesus and found him were thrilled. They had really found something on their own. Their whole life was transformed. But now your father says, “Christ is the savior. Christ saves. He is the salvation. You go to Christ.” And he takes you to the church. You go reluctantly, because nobody likes anybody else’s truth. That is a basic arrangement in life. It is built-in – that nobody likes anybody else’s truth because anybody else’s truth is a lie to you.So the master could have said “Go to Hazrat Ali” – it would have been easier. Ali was there in the same place and he was a well known man, one of the rarest followers of Mohammed; a man of great insight. The master could have said, “I am dying, now it will be difficult for you to walk on the path that you were following with me. You go to Ali, he will help.” But that would have missed the basic thing: the master has to be found. You have to take a risk, you have to search, you have to surrender. It would have been too secure. From the old man you would have heard and you would have said, “Okay. So when you are dead we will go to Ali.” It would have been simple, but of no help.So the old Sufi created a device – a very strange one.He therefore, after the obligatory bequests laid down by law, left his disciples seventeen camels, with this order…He must have been a wandering dervish with camels. He must have been wandering all over the country with his disciples. He leaves seventeen camels with the order:“You will divide the camels among the three of you in the following proportions: the oldest shall have half, the middle in age one-third, and the youngest shall have one-ninth.”Now this is very strange and absurd, illogical – but masters are illogical, they are not much worried about logic. He used it as a device. It was something that could not be done mathematically.As soon as he was dead and the will was read, the disciples were at first amazed at such an inefficient disposition of their master’s assets.They were amazed. They must have become a little doubtful, because what kind of arrangement has he made? Seventeen camels: half to be given – so one camel will have to be cut up. Then one third has to be given – so a few camels will have to be murdered. How can you divide alive animals in this way? This is so absurd. The idea must have come to them, “Had the man gone senile or mad? He was so old, maybe he had lost all ideas about how to figure things out.” This was so absurd, so blatantly absurd. Doubt must have arisen; they must have been puzzled. that was the device. The master wanted them to be puzzled. Now watch, you will be surprised. You may not have understood that point.Before you can choose another master, the old master has to be lost – otherwise how can you choose a new master? The old man had made a perfect device. It was so absurd that they would laugh. They would say, “This old man was finished, so it is better that he is dead and we are free. It is good now to search somewhere else. If this man had been alive we would still have been clinging to him, and he has gone mad.” The master condemned himself so that they wouldn’t go on hanging on to the past master and his memory, so that the past was closed, the chapter was finished. They could start a new chapter in their lives.Some said, “Let us own the camels communally.”Now logic entered; now they started thinking about what to do. The order cannot be fulfilled as it was so they would have to find a way. Now interpretations, thinking entered. The order was simply absurd.Somebody suggested, “Let us own the camels communally.” They were trying to find a way out.Others sought advice and then said, “We have been told to make the nearest possible division.”So somebody, a wise man, a knowledgeable man, must have suggested, “It is simple. Make the nearest possible division. Don’t be foolish. You are not to cut the camels up, just the nearest possible, the approximate, will be right.”But remember, Sufis don’t believe in approximate truth. They are very exact people. They mean what they say and they say what they mean.First the disciples had thought amongst themselves that it was better to own the camels communally. That was the closest – to own them communally. Then they went to ask somebody. Now things started going farther and farther away from the master’s intention. Some said,“Make the nearest possible division.”Others were told by a judge to sell the camels and divide the money…Now things have become very, very worldly-wise. This is perfectly okay. Why bother? You can divide the money. Sell the camels.And yet others held that the will was null and void because its provisions could not be executed.This is the farthest. Some people said, “It is not possible. Drop the whole idea. The will is null and void because it cannot be done in the first place.”Now there are so many interpretations. The disciples started thinking. When a master gives you an order, it is not to be thought over; it has to be listened to, it has to be meditated upon, not contemplated. Otherwise you will miss the message. You have to meditate over it, you have to keep it in your womb, you have to sleep on it. You have to keep it there inside you and wait – just wait, keep it inside. Remember it and wait. Don’t start interpreting. Your interpretations are your interpretations and are going to be meaningless. And they are not only meaningless, they can be harmful also.A man jailed for twenty years kept his sanity by befriending an ant that used to share his cell. He even made a two-story home for him in a matchbox. To while away the hours the convict made a tiny guitar, and in five years he taught the ant to sing and play the guitar. In the long winter evenings the ant was of great consolation, giving recitals and concerts for his benefactor.In another five years the convict had taught the ant to dance and by his twelfth year he was also an accomplished uillean pipe player.As the day of his release approached, the convict began to realize that he had in his possession the greatest television performer ever known. He would be rich, famous….On the day of his release, the ex-convict rushed to the nearest pub to celebrate his liberty. He ordered a pint and while he drank it he produced the matchbox, shook the ant onto the counter of the deserted bar and asked for a tune. The ant rose to the occasion with a lovely rendering of The Heart Bowed Down. He was powerful. His owner, so overcome with joy, called over the barman and nodded towards the ant.“What do you think of that?” he said.Whereupon the barman raised his hand, brought it down on the counter and killed the ant.“Sorry about that, sir,” he said, “it is the hot weather.”Now the barman had his own interpretation. He did not look at this ant. It must have been an everyday thing – somebody, a customer, would call and would say, “Look at the ant on the table,” and he would kill it and say, “It is the hot weather.”Now he has killed one of the most precious ants. That’s what happens when you bring your interpretations in.The master left a great device through which the disciples were going to find their new master. But the interpretations would kill the ant. all the things that were suggested to them were against the will. And nobody had even an inkling of an idea about what the master really meant.An old Irish Catholic lady was lying on her deathbed. The priest was called to issue the last rites. The priest took her hand and said, “Now Mary, you know where you are going, don’t you?”“Yes, Father,” she said.“And you have been good all your life, not sinned, said your prayers every day and been a pious woman?”“Ah yes, Father, I have always been a good Catholic,” said Mary.“Then I have a question to ask you, Mary, before you go to meet St. Peter. Are you ready to answer, Mary?” said Father Patrick.“Oh yes. Father. ask me anything.”“Well Mary, what I want to know is, do you want a white lining to your coffin, or a purple lining?”“What is the difference, Father?” said Mary.“Well,” said the Father, “if you have really been a good woman, not lusted, committed adultery, never stolen, envied, been greedy, or used the name of the Lord in vain, and been a good Catholic, you shall have a white lining to your coffin. But, if you have been a sinner, lusted, committed adultery, been greedy, vain, envious, stolen or used the Lord’s name in vain and been a bad Catholic, you will have to have a purple lining to your coffin. Now what I want to know is, what color will you be wanting in your coffin?”Mary closed her eyes, thought for a moment and said, “Well Father, I would like a white lining with a little dash of purple here and there.”Your interpretations are going to be reflections of your mind. Whatsoever you say reflects you. So when a master gives you a device, you are not to think about it – otherwise you will miss it. Thinking is the sure way to miss it. You have to meditate upon it. And meditation does not mean thinking, it simply means keeping it in your awareness, just keeping it there, not forgetting it – that’s all. Sitting silently, keeping it there, not forgetting it – that’s all. Not doing anything positive about it, just letting it be there. And sooner or later something will open inside you and you will have a vision. And that vision will be the meaning of the device. Your internal talk will have to disappear to know the meaning. If your internal talk continues…Not only did the disciples think about it themselves, they went to ask other people. Now that was foolish. What has a judge to do with it? It is not a legal matter. In fact, it is not a will. The master is not concerned with the camels and how they are to be divided. How can a master be concerned with such non-essential things?Then they went to a lawyer. Now how is a lawyer concerned with it? It has nothing to do with the law. It has nothing to do with this ordinary world. They must have gone to wise people – so-called wise people – wise in the ways of the world: clever, cunning, calculating. They suggested all these things, but the disciples were fortunate that they didn’t get involved in any interpretation.Then they fell to thinking that there might be some hidden wisdom in the master’s bequest, so they made inquires as to who could solve insoluble problems.Then they came upon one thing, stumbled upon one thing: that the problem seemed to be insoluble. Whatever solutions were given didn’t seem to be pertinent, adequate. No solution seemed to fit the situation perfectly. The problem seemed to be insoluble, and it became more insoluble as they collected advice from people. So now one idea arose in their consciousness: they should seek somebody who could solve insoluble problems. That’s what Zen people call a koan, an insoluble problem. It can be solved, but it is not solved by logic and reasoning. It is solved by intuitive energy. It is solved by silence, not by words, not by figures. It is solved by utter silence. Now they were coming closer to the point. So they started looking for the man who could solve insoluble problems.Now Sufis are known to solve insoluble problems. In fact, all great problems are insoluble because life is a mystery, it cannot be solved. And Sufis are interested in the mystery, not in solving it. All religious people, all religious search, is concerned with the insoluble.First they went to the magistrate, the lawyer, the mayor, and people like that. Then they became aware that the problem seemed to be insoluble and no solution seemed to be adequate. So they thought, “We must go to somebody who is interested in insoluble problems, in the mystery of life.”Everyone they tried failed, until they arrived at the door of the son-in law of the prophet, Hazrat Ali.He said, “This is your solution. I will add one camel to the number. Out of the eighteen camels you will give half – nine camels – to the oldest disciple. The second shall have a third of the total, which is six camels. The last disciple may have one-ninth, which is two camels. That makes seventeen. One – my camel – is left over to be returned to me.”Now Sufis say that your problems cannot be solved as they are unless the master adds something of his being to you. That is the meaning of the whole story.There are seventeen camels. You are those seventeen camels. there is no way to solve anything unless you come to a man of compassion who is not only ready to solve your problem but is ready to be involved with you – that is the meaning. The story is tremendously beautiful.They had gone to many people but nobody had thought that one camel could be added – and once the camels are eighteen in number, things become simple, they become divisible.The master is one who is ready to get involved with you. When you surrender to a master, he opens all his doors to you, he is available to you, he becomes involved with you. You are committed to him, he is committed to you. You surrender nothing. You don’t have anything to surrender. You surrender only that which you don’t have, and the master starts giving you that which he has.Now these people came with a problem. The problem in itself was insoluble, but Hazrat Ali solved it. And the device was that he added one of his camels to their camels. So the first thing to be remembered is that a master is one who can give his being to you, who can become associated with you, who can come to you and hold your hand, who can make your problem his problem, who does not think from the outside as a spectator, who becomes a participant.When you come to me with your problems, never think for a single moment that I am standing there like a wise man, aloof, away, and advising you – not for a single moment. I get involved with you, I become you, I stand in your shoes. Your problem becomes my problem; only then can I be of any help. Unless I become you, I cannot help you. Unless I become you, I cannot even understand you – what to say about help? Unless your problem starts becoming my problem, unless I am surrounded by your problem, there is no way to solve it. That is the difference between a therapist and a master.A therapist stands outside. He brings his expertise, his knowledge to help you. A master? – he does not bring any expertise, he has none. He does not bring any knowledge to help you, he has none. He brings his being, he brings his knowing. He lends you his eyes. He lends you his eyes, not his knowledge. He lends you his vision, his clarity, his transparency. He becomes you for a moment. Those who have loved me will understand it. While talking to them I become so involved with their problem that they are almost an observer. It becomes my problem. And whenever it becomes the problem of the master, help arises. That’s why the disciple’s utter surrender is needed, so that the master can come and have a deep meeting with your being.He said, “This is your solution. I will add one camel to the number. Out of the eighteen camels you will give half – nine camels – to the oldest disciple. The second shall have a third of the total, which is six camels. The last disciple may have one-ninth, which is two camels. That makes seventeen.”And then comes the last beautiful thing: One – my camel – is left over to be returned to me.”Because whatsoever the master gives to you always goes back to him. You are transformed between the master’s coming to you and his going back. But whatsoever is given goes back to the master, because in the very nature of things it cannot be given. It can be only loaned, at the most. It is his being. How can he give it to you? The being cannot be given, he can only loan it to you for a moment. But even in that single moment, things become clear, and then whatsoever is the master’s, goes back to him.This is one of the most beautiful parables Sufis have invented. First the master gives to the disciple, then the disciple’s problems are solved, then whatsoever is given comes back to the master. The master gives you his being, transforms you through it, you become luminous, and he does not lose anything – because whatsoever is his comes back to him. That is why the master can go on giving to millions and nothing is lost.Many times there are questions from you, “Osho, now you have so many disciples, so many sannyasins, in the thousands. It will be difficult for you to help us.” Not at all, because it is not something that can be divided. I can give my vision to as many people as are ready to take it and receive it, and yet it remains intact. It always comes back to me. You cannot take it away. Numbers don’t matter. One or one million, it makes no difference. Remember this. Only one who is ready to get involved with you can solve your life problems. Outsiders cannot solve them. The master has to become your inside.And remember that when you have arrived home – sooner or later – and your light is lit and your flame is burning bright, don’t be a miser. Remember, you will not be losing anything. You can go on giving to as many people as you want and you will not lose anything. It is not possible to lose. That which is yours you cannot lose, only that which is not yours can be lost. Money can be lost, stolen, divided. Naturally, if a father has four sons then four sons will divide the money. If he has sixteen then sixteen will divide the money. And the more sons he has, the poorer the sons will be.But not so with a master. A master can have a million disciples or ten million disciples. It does not make any difference. It does not make the disciples poor, remember – because the master can go on giving to everybody, nothing is lost. So when you become masters in your own right – you will become masters one day – then don’t be misers. Share it! The more you share the more you become beloved by God.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,As a U.S. psychiatrist I am well-trained. Experienced and have been successful by outer standards – but now, what to do? I no longer feel that I am a doctor or therapist or analyst, only a person, and perhaps a teacher. You and others like you are to blame for this. Now I am only listening to the inner voice for direction. Is there any more I can do?First, there is no success as far as the outer is concerned. All success is just an effort to cover failure. There is only one success, there are not many successes – and that one success is to know oneself, to be oneself.I understand what you mean by being successful by outer standards. Man has created outer standards of success to deceive himself. You can have money, you can have a name, you can have prestige, but if you are not, what does it matter? You can have the whole world but if you are not, what does it matter?In fact, man tries to possess things because he does not possess himself. This is a strategy to hide the fact that he does not possess himself. This is a strategy to hide the fact that he does not possess himself; this is a way of explaining away the inner emptiness; this is a way to feel, “Look, I have so many things, what else does one need?” When you are surrounded by too many things – what you call “success by outer standards” – what exactly are you doing? You are trying to create a substitute of “having” for an emptiness which you are feeling inside. Being is missing, and you are trying to replace it by having. And it cannot be replaced by any having.This is the whole struggle of human mind. These are the two directions: having and being. In the West you have worked very hard to have more; in the East we have worked hard to be more. Yes, sometimes it happens that even a beggar may have more being than a rich man, than a king. Somebody who has nothing, may have himself; and in that very having there is peace, there is bliss, there is benediction.So the first thing I would like to tell you is that there are no outer standards of success. They are efforts to cover up your inner emptiness, efforts to deceive yourself and to make you feel that you have not failed. There is only one success, absolutely only one – that is to be. Through that, one attains to ecstasy; through that, one attains to the ultimate.So it is good that I and people like me have destroyed your illusion. Once that illusion goes you will be in a deep crisis. That is what is happening to you.The questioner’s name is Walter Hoffman – that’s what is happening to you, Hoffman. Now you will have to take a very decisive step, a radical step. You will have to learn the ways of inner success. Now the outer will never appeal to you. Yes, I and people like me are to blame. The outer will never appeal to you any more. So don’t go on making efforts in the outer. Direct your energy towards the inner. Now only that can have any meaning.Right now you are in a limbo. The outer is there but has no meaning; the inner seems to have meaning but is not there. This is the critical stage. But every seeker has to pass through it. I understand this pain, this anguish, and I have all sympathy for you. But although it looks like pain right now. once you have started contacting the inner, you will be surprised – it was not pain, it was a growth pain, it was a birth pain. And you will feel blessed that it happened because you will be reborn out of it.You say: “as a U. S. Psychiatrist I am well-trained, experienced, and have been successful by outer standards….” Something important is to be understood. Each age creates its own myth to live by. The modern myth is the myth of the completely analyzed person. People are trying to be completely analyzed in the hope that if they are completely analyzed. there will be joy. It does not happen. Even the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was not a joyous man. And if it did not happen to the founder, it is not going to happen to anybody.You can go on analyzing – it is infinite. The mind is very creative, it goes on creating. It is not a limited phenomenon – that one day you can come to the end of the mind by analyzing it. You can go on analyzing and something will still remain to be analyzed. You can still go on and something will still remain to be analyzed. It is a non-ending process.The East has worked in a totally different way. The East says that the mind has not to be analyzed, one has to drop out of the mind. The problem has not to be solved, the problem has to be dropped. In solving, you will remain in it; in solving, you will create more and more problems. And this is happening. People who can afford analysis – it is a costly thing, millions cannot afford it – but those who can afford it go into it for years. They go on changing from one analyst to another analyst in the hope that if it has not happened with this one, it will happen with somebody else.It is not going to happen. Through analysis mind can never come to a state in which you can become something beyond mind. By analyzing, you will remain it. You may become a little more smooth in your life but you will be as neurotic as anybody else. Yes, there will be one difference – you will be more smooth in your neurosis, more adjusted, a little more understanding, but that does not make any radical change. The radical change comes from the understanding that through analysis there is no way. One has to jump out of the mind.That’s what meditation is. Meditation is just the contrary to analysis. Meditation means that, seeing that the mind is infinite, there is no need to bother about it – you can get out of it. You are not the mind – why go into it? You can slip out of it. The mind remains in its same place but you are out of it. And once you are out of it, you are the master of your mind. Then you can use it; then you will not be used by it.This myth of the completely analyzed person is a new dream. Man likes to dream, man likes to invent new ideas to hope for. Sometimes it is moksha, nirvana; sometimes it is money, power, prestige; sometimes it can become the completely analyzed person.I have many psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and other kinds of therapists here. The greatest number of any profession that has come to me is from therapy. There is a reason for it. Those who have been working in therapy have by and by become aware of one fact – that it keeps you moving in a circle. It does not lead you anywhere, it only pretends. It promises but it never delivers the goods. It is just an infinite circle – one can go on and on and on. It keeps you hoping, waiting, but that’s all. Once you have become aware of it then forget about analysis and try something totally different – that is meditation. Meditation does not mean that you have to think about the mind – you have to drop out of it. Meditation is an escape from the mind. meditation is creating a distance from the mind, meditation is a transcendence.And once you are standing above the mind, away, aloof, a watcher on the hills, things are totally different. Then those problems are no longer relevant. When you are in them, they are relevant. It is just like having a dream, a nightmare, at night, and being really troubled by it. A lion is following you and you are running and running and the lion is coming closer and closer every moment. You can feel his breath on your back. It is terrible! And you start climbing a tree and the lion starts climbing it with you – because in a dream everything is possible. Your heart is in a turmoil, your whole body is perspiring. And when you reach the top of the tree the lion is also there with you. A scream comes out of you, and because of the scream you become awake. And suddenly you start laughing, although the body is still trembling and your breath is not rhythmic. and your body is perspiring; you can see the beads on your forehead. But now you start laughing. You laugh at the whole thing, the ridiculousness of it – it was just a dream.What has happened? Just a moment ago you were in it. It was not a dream because you were in it, you were identified with it, you thought it was a reality. The idea that it was real was driving you crazy. Now that you are out of it, aloof, alert, you can see that it was just a dream. Mind is a dream – sometimes very sweet and sometimes very nightmarish. But it is a dream.The effort that we have been making in the East down through the centuries, is not to solve the problems. For example, in your nightmare you try to solve the problem of what to do with this lion who is following you. That’s what psychoanalysis is. Or you start trying to find out where it comes from, how it happened in the first place – “Why is this lion following me? And from where is this fear coming? And why am I climbing the tree?” And you meet somebody who is very expert in analyzing things, in explaining, in creating theories, in telling you how it happened in the first place. Maybe it is a birth trauma or maybe your parents have not treated you well. Or maybe this lion is nobody. Just look directly into its eyes – it is your wife or your husband and you are afraid of your wife or your husband.But all these explanations take one thing for granted – that it is real. And that is the basic problem, not where the lion has come from or what the symbolic meaning of the lion is. That is not the real problem. The real problem is that the lion is real. Psychoanalysis does not help you to become aware that mind is an unreal thing – illusion, maya. In fact, it takes you more into the mud and the mire. It takes you deeper, to the roots. But an illusion cannot have any roots. You will always be getting to the roots but you will not arrive. An illusion cannot have any cause.Now let me repeat it, because this will make the difference very clear. An illusion cannot have any cause, so you cannot search for the cause. You can go on and on, you can go into the unconscious of man…. Freud did that, and did it perfectly, but that didn’t solve anything. Jung had to go deeper. He had to find something like the collective unconscious. And you can go on. Then you can find the universal unconscious, and so on, so forth, layer upon layer. You can go on analyzing – that maybe it is a birth trauma, that you became very much afraid when you came out of the birth canal from your mother’s womb. But things don’t end there because you were in your mother’s womb for nine months. Those nine months cannot be simply dropped. In those nine months much happened to you. You have to go into analyzing that.And if you go deep enough you will have to enter into your previous life – that’s what Hindu analysts have done. They say “previous life,” and then “previous to previous,” and go on and on backwards. And you reach nowhere. Either way you come to a point where you see the whole futility of it.To see the futility of the mind and to see that an illusion cannot have any cause and cannot be analyzed, the only thing that can be done is to make yourself a little bit alert, aware. In that very awareness the dream disappears. It has no grip over you. And once the mind is not there gripping you, you are a totally new man. A new consciousness is born in you.And Hoffman must be aware of the futility. He has been helping people, analyzing – but it has not even helped himself. That analyzing has not even helped himself. Maybe it makes things a little more clear, maybe it helps things to be a little more categorized, pigeon-holed – it is a kind of labeling – but nothing essential happens. And if something happens sometimes, it is not because of analysis. If something happens sometimes, it may have some other causes; it has to have some other causes.A man may become very much fed-up with the whole thing called analysis. That very fed-upness with analysis, may create a new awareness in him. He may get bored. One day he may understand that enough is enough. Rushing from one psychotherapist to another psychotherapist, from one school to another school, a time comes when one thinks that now it is enough, one need not bother about it. It doesn’t matter. In that indifference something is possible.Or, something is possible through the magnetic personality of the therapist. My own understanding is that the therapist helps more than the therapy. If the therapist has a charisma – as Freud had, Jung had, Adler had – if the analyst has a charisma, a magnetic personality, a certain kind of presence, that helps, that is therapeutic. That is why it happens again and again that when the therapist is alive, it works; but when the therapist is gone, by and by it disappears. The therapy works no more.Psychoanalysis died with Sigmund Freud. It was his charisma not analysis itself. Freud had a certain magnetism of personality, something that is very mysterious. One has it or one does not have it. Whatsoever he was doing would look meaningful, because he put the meaning into it. When a man of charisma, magnetic energy, does anything, that thing seems to be very important. In another’s hand it may become very ordinary, mediocre. that’s what it became.Jung helped people not by what he was saying, not by what he was analyzing, but just by what he was.But therapists are as yet unaware of the fact that it is the personal factor that helps – not the theories and the dogmas and the principles. It is something mysterious, the personal factor, that helps.Have you watched it sometimes? You are ill and your doctor comes. And the moment he enters the room you start feeling good. He has not given you any medicine yet, he has not even diagnosed what kind of illness you have, he has not even touched you. He just enters. The moment you know your doctor has come, your physician is there, something that was a worry disappears. You need not worry. The tension is there no more. Now the doctor will take care. If the doctor has some personal aura in him, even while he is testing you, taking your blood pressure and your pulse, you have already started to be healed. Before he prescribes any medicine you are fifty per cent healed. The medicine may not do much but the doctor has done much. It is your confidence in him, your trust in him, his personal aura, his certainty – “Don’t be afraid. Now I am here.”Psychotherapy has not yet become fully alert of the phenomenon that it is not the therapy that helps but the personal factor. The person may not be aware himself that he is functioning as a healing force. If you understand me rightly, it is always God who heals. God is the only healer. If somebody is alive, flowing, then God flows through him. Psychotherapy has yet to understand this magic, this mana, this energy.In the East a person will simply go to his master, touch the feet of the master, and be healed. The master is not doing any analysis, any therapy, nothing, the master has no expertise about it – it is just the personal energy, the aroma that surrounds the master, and the trust that the patient brings. What psychoanalysis is doing in the East is nil because there are so few psychoanalysts in the East. But people are more psychologically healthy, far more psychologically healthy, than the Western counterpart.And much is going on to help people in the West, great energy is being put into helping people psychologically, but still they remain psychologically ill. Psychoanalysis has not yet come home; it has yet far to go. And when it really comes home it will be found that it is not the theory but the person that helps.Now, Hoffman says: “but now what to do? I no longer feel that I am a doctor or therapist or analyst, only a person, and perhaps a teacher. You and others like you are to blame for this.” If you are not feeling like a doctor, not feeling like a therapist, not feeling like an analyst, you are coming close to the point which I am talking about. You are becoming a person. A person means a presence. If you are feeling like a person you will be able to help many more people than you have ever helped before, but now be conscious of the phenomenon that everything else is secondary.The most primary thing is the presence that the therapist brings to the patient. The patient has lost hope, the patient has fallen into a negative space, the patient is in despair, the patient cannot trust any more, the patient has become shrunken into himself, he has collapsed. The real therapist will bring his presence, his positivity, his aliveness, his streaming energy to the patient. He will come there like a fresh breeze, new sun rays. He will bring something of the divine to the patient, something of prayer and meditation. He will overwhelm the patient, he will surround him from everywhere, he will become a womb, a warm womb for the patient, and things will start happening. Miracles start happening.And I am not saying that you should drop your expertise. Use it – but it is secondary. First have a person-to-person contact with the patient, first let him share something of your presence so that he starts hoping again, so that his negative space starts turning into a positive space. Let him feel your joy, let him feel your trust in life, let him feel you – that you are there. Let him see that life is not meaningless. Sing a song or dance around him but let this message be very loud and clear to him – that life has meaning. Let him see that it has meaning for you, why can’t it have meaning for him? And he will start coming out of his despair. You have reached him, you have taken his hand in your hand; you can pull him out of his confusion, you can pull him out of his anguish.Once he is pulled out of his despair, healing forces start working. Healing forces are always around, God is always around. When you fall into a negative space you cannot connect with god and then you need a link – one who can connect with God.So, Hoffman, perfectly good! Become a person. Forget therapy, forget analysis. Become a person. And when I say “forget therapy, forget analysis” I don’t mean don’t use them – but don’t be identified with them. They will be there, your whole knowledge, your experience, will be there; but now let this experience and knowledge become secondary to your presence. It will help to a certain extent, it will be good.In Zen they say that if you really want to become a painter then learn painting for years. Then for a few years forget all about painting. Throw away the brush and the canvas and the color and do something else and become completely oblivious to the fact that you know anything about painting. First learn, then unlearn – and then one day, suddenly, you will be painting. And your painting will have innocence – the innocence of a child – and the expertise of one who knows. Both will be there. And when both are there, there is great art.Remember, you may be very, very feelingful, you may be very poetic, but you may not know how to put it into color, you may not know the technique. then your painting will be just worthless, amateur. Or you can become a great technician, you can know everything about color and the brush and form, you can have studied in an academy, you can be a great technician, but you don’t have any feeling, you don’t have any love, you don’t have any poetry. Your heart has no song. Then you can paint – and your painting will be perfect technically – but it will be dead. The real artist has both qualities – the innocence of a child and technical expertise. But when he paints he forgets all technicalities. They are there, from the deep unconscious they are working, but he forgets all expertise. He becomes innocent. He paints like an amateur. He does not know anything he paints from the mind of not-knowing – so there is freshness, there is vision. And the expertise goes on functioning from the unconscious. It is there, it is in his blood, in his bones. There is no need to remember it, there is no need to be self-conscious about it. Then something of the unknown descends into the known.And the same should be the principle for every kind of life you are going to live. Know it well technically and then forget the techniques. Then go into it very innocently. If you are feeling like a person, that is the best thing that can happen to a person.…And perhaps a teacher. Good. That word perhaps is beautiful. If you were very certain about being a teacher I would have told you to drop that idea; it is dangerous. “Perhaps” is good, hesitation is good. A good teacher is always “perhaps.” He is not dogmatic, he is not rigid; he is liquid, he is flowing, he is spontaneous. He cannot destroy; he can only create. When you become very dogmatic and certain, you become destructive. You become a pedagogue, not a teacher.So both things are good, Hoffman. Go inwards, become a person and perhaps a teacher.You say: now I am only listening to the inner voice for direction. Is there any more I can do? No, if you do anything you will disturb the whole thing. You simply wait. Simply wait, prayerfully, meditatively. Things are happening. The inner voice will start leading you. And when the inner voice starts leading you, don’t be cunning, don’t choose. Don’t say, “This I will choose and this I will not choose” Then it will not be of any meaning. Then even if it does come from the inner voice, if you remain the chooser you decide from the ego. Now relax into the inner voice. Let it take possession of you.It will be difficult for you because you say you are “experienced, well-trained and successful.” It will be difficult for you because one never knows where the inner voice is leading. The inner voice may say to you “become a sannyasin” – that’s what my feeling is. But then don’t bring your experienced mind and successful past and your well-trained state into it. Don’t interfere. If the inner voice says “become a sannyasin,” then become a sannyasin – there is nothing to do on your part. Just be possessed. The more you trust the inner voice, the more clear and loud it will become. And the more you trust and act accordingly, by and by you will see there is no need to think about anything.God goes on giving you hints, but you don’t listen. God goes on saying what has to be done, but he whispers – that’s true. He does not shout. And we are so full of noise that that whisper is lost. Listen to the inner voice, that is God’s voice. And don’t only listen, act on it. Move into commitment, into involvement.When you start acting on the inner voice…. Sometimes it will be very risky, but take the risk – because only when there is risk is there life, only when there is risk is there growth. Live dangerously. If the voice says “do this” then do it and don’t bother too much about consequences. Nothing else matters.And sometimes your mind will tell you that this is too much – think about it. If you think, the inner voice will be lost. It is lost in thinking. Don’t think. Act. And you will see that each act brings you closer and closer to the voice. And when you have acted many times and have seen that the voice always takes you to the right place, then there will be no doubt. And then thinking can be dropped. It is a substitute. Because we have forgotten how to listen to God, we have to think.The real man of awareness need not think. God goes on supplying him with all that is needed, whenever it is needed.The second and third questions are connected:Osho,Do you have some sort of contraption in your room with which you control or alter the moods of everyone in the ashram, putting everyone into the same or similar mood at the same time? It seems that everyone goes through the same cycle or phases, not as individuals but as a community. What's up?And the third:Osho,Is there a collective unconscious at the ashram? Every other question I have thought to ask has been asked by someone else, or you have answered it anyway.The second is from Big Prem and the third from Anand Samatha.That is the meaning of a commune. A commune slowly, slowly grows a soul. And if the soul is missing, the commune is not a commune. then it is a crowd. A crowd has no soul. When a crowd has a soul, it is a commune. Then there is a center where all meet.I am your center. You are here because of me. You are all here because of me; each of you is deeply involved with me. I am functioning as a center to you all. Prem is involved with me, so is Samatha involved with me. And when you all are involved with me, naturally you become involved with all. Each becomes involved with all.I am your space, your bridge, from where you move into each other. If you really love me, this is going to happen more and more. Before you have asked the question, it will be answered. Before you have asked the question, many will have asked it. You need only to wait a little.And there will be moods – when the whole commune will pass through a phase and a cycle simultaneously. This is going to happen. The closer you come to me, the more it will be happening. Yes, something is up. And Prem has felt it rightly.You are disappearing as separate units.This is the meaning of a church, really. This is the meaning of a church, a commune. We pool our consciousnesses into one space and then each affects each other. Then great energy is released. Alone you cannot go very high. Alone, you are alone. Alone, you have all kinds of limitations. When you are one with many, infinite energy is available. And many things will start happening which cannot happen alone.For example, a solo guitar player is one thing. An orchestra is totally different. Yes, it is beautiful, a solo guitarist is beautiful, but there is a kind of limitation. It cannot be very rich, because it will not have many dimensions to it. It is solo. The orchestra is far more rich. Many dimensions, many directions, meet in it. Many kinds of instruments and many artists pool their energy and a harmony arises. This is what a commune is – an orchestra.You are pooling your energies with me. and, naturally, you will start feeling the same kind of rhythm, the same moods passing through the whole commune.If you are alone it is difficult to keep awake. But if you are with a few people – laughing, talking, joking – you can keep awake the whole night very easily. It would have been difficult for each to remain alert the whole night, but together it is simple. The total energy is so much – laughing, joking, singing, talking – that it keeps you alert.And this whole experiment is to bring a kind of buddhahood into the world. This commune is not an ordinary commune. This is an experiment to provoke God. You may not be aware of what is going to happen. You may be aware of only your problems. You may have come to me only to solve your problems. That is secondary. I am cooking something else.I am trying to create a space where God can descend more and more. This commune will become a connection. The world has lost the connection. God is no more a reality. As far as this century is concerned, Nietzsche is right that God is dead. The connection is broken. God can only be through the connection. God will be there, we are here, but there is no bridge. So how do we know?This commune is an experiment to create the bridge. Fall more and more in harmony. Pool your energies. And remember, a small stream cannot reach the ocean. It will be lost somewhere, it is so far away. It will be lost in some desert land, some wasteland. But if many small streams pool into one, they become a Ganges. Then it can reach the ocean. Even the Ganges cannot reach alone.If you go to the source of the Ganges it is just drops dripping. In Gangotri, the source of Ganges, there is a marble cow mouth and the Ganges comes out of it. So small. How can you hope it will reach the ocean? But millions of tributaries, millions of small streams and rivers, pool their energies and the Ganges becomes a great river. then nothing can hold it. Then it reaches the ocean.A commune is an effort to create a Ganges of consciousness. It is happening. And it will be happening more and more if you become more cooperative and more conscious of it. Don’t create any conflict here. Don’t be resistant about small things. Relax, cooperate. Even if you have to lose something, don’t be afraid – because your losing will be a gaining in the end.Don’t bring your egos in, otherwise you destroy my work. Throw your egos away. Something far more valuable is happening here. And soon many will be coming, and you will become the precedent, you will become the pattern of what will happen to them. Soon many will be coming, in thousands. Before they start coming you have to prepare the orchestra, otherwise there will be a great noise.Have you watched it? If thirty persons are singing in rhythm, in harmony, and you join in, immediately you start falling into rhythm and harmony. But if they are just noisy, and there is no rhythm and no harmony and there is just chaos, you also become a chaos.I am working slowly – slowly I am adding more people to your commune. Soon there will be thousands. I want to create a small city, sooner or later, where people will be living totally egolessly. And the more people there will be, the greater is the possibility for happenings, for miracles – because God will be more available. The sky will come more close to you.Remember it always – whenever your small ego comes in as a conflict. When a small river comes to meet the Ganges, naturally the ego will come in. The ego will say, “What are you doing? You will be lost. You will no longer be yourself. You will lose your identity. If you move with the Ganges you will be called Ganges – your name will be lost.”That’s what sannyas is. The moment you take sannyas you are part of me; you are lost. You will be known by me, you will not be known by yourself. That is courage. By taking sannyas you are simply merging into a totally different kind of existence because you are merging into me. Sannyas is your death, and a rebirth – death as an ego, and rebirth as a consciousness.But if the small river thinks, “I am not ready to lose myself in the Ganges,” then the river will be lost in a desert. And that will be suicide. With the Ganges it is not suicide. With the Ganges, the river becomes the Ganges. It is only a question of how you look at it. If you look positively, the river becomes bigger. It is no longer small, no longer confined to its own small banks. Now the Ganges is what she is, now the Ganges’ being is her being. That is another way of looking at it. And that should be the attitude.When you join me as a sannyasin, you are dropping yourself, disappearing. When you join the commune then you have to utterly efface yourself. If a little bit is hanging there, then you will be a trouble to yourself and to the commune too. And you will not be benefited by me.This is happening, and this is going to happen more and more. Be prepared for it.The fourth question:Osho,Ayn Rand, the originator of objectivism philosophy, went mad and committed suicide. How could this happen to such a rare, logical mind?Precisely! It happened because of such a logical, rational mind. The rational mind cannot go beyond suicide and madness. That is the ultimate that has to happen. If some logical person is not mad it simply means that he is not logical enough. If some logical person has not committed suicide yet, it simply means that he is mediocre. He has not touched the pinnacle of logicality. If you reach to the pinnacle of logicality, life loses all meaning – because logic cannot give any meaning. Logic takes away all meaning. Logic is destructive, poisonous.It is love that gives meaning to life, it is love that blooms and flowers, it is love that sings and dances, it is love that becomes celebration. A logical mind by and by loses all possibility of loving – because love is so illogical it cannot exist with logic. They prohibit each other, they exclude each other. If you love, you become illogical; if you are very logical, you become unloving. and without love, what is there to live by, to live with, to live for? What is there?Ayn Rand was a very egoistic, rationalistic, realistic woman. Her philosophy is that of absolute selfishness. If you are absolutely selfish, how can you be loving? It is impossible. Her philosophy is absolutely realistic, materialistic. When there is only matter, what is there to bloom into? There is no soul. All search disappears. Life is flat and dull. There is no mystery. With the soul enter mystery and life. With mystery there is joy, because there is a possibility to inquire, to explore, to expand. There is a possibility that something may happen, can happen.Man is more than he knows. You are more than you know. Not only that, you are more than you can ever know, because your intrinsic reality remains mysterious, always remains unknown, unknowable. You can go on knowing more and more and more but that does not reduce your mystery. That’s what we mean by soul – utterly mysterious.For Ayn Rand there was no mystery. When there is no mystery, how can there be life? Then what is there to live for? Suicide seems to be the logical conclusion. And if you don’t commit suicide, then madness is the conclusion. Those seem to be the two alternatives. Either go mad – mad means go illogical, drop your rational mind – or commit suicide, drop this useless life.Jean Paul Sartre has said: “Man is a useless passion.” Now my feeling is that Sartre is not very, very logical, otherwise he would have committed suicide. If man is a useless passion, if there is no meaning in it, if life is meaninglessness, then why go on living? Why think of tomorrow – that you would like to exist tomorrow? That is very irrational. If nothing is going to happen, if nothing has ever happened, if nothing happens in the very reality, then why go on living? Why go on eating and why go on sleeping and getting up again and again? It is nauseating.Another book of Sartre’s is Nausea. But it seems it is still philosophical, he has not taken it existentially – otherwise suicide would be the logical conclusion to the philosophy. Beware. These possibilities are in you too. If you become too logical, madness or suicide or both will be the conclusion.That’s why I teach you love not logic, feeling not reasoning, heart not mind. Then life has such beauty, such beautitude, such joy, that one cannot contain it. It is so much, it is so over-flowing, so overwhelming.You ask me: “Ayn Rand, the originator of objectivism philosophy, went mad and committed suicide. How could this happen to such a rare logical mind?” The question is from Sudheer Saraswati. I say “Precisely.”The fifth question:Osho,I am very afraid of dying. Can you tell me what the secret of achieving a long life is?Keep breathing!The sixth question:Osho,I have been thinking and thinking about taking sannyas for five years, yet I cannot decide. What should I do?Get lost!And the seventh question:Osho,Should one love one's neighbor?Make sure that her husband is not at home.So you like one-liners! But God has not heard about it!I have heard….God called together his writers, “Gentlemen, I have a big show coming up next week on Mount Sinai and I need some material.”“How about: ‘Thou shalt not steal’?” one of them volunteered.“Thou shalt not kill,” suggested another.“Thou shalt not….”“Wait!” thundered the Lord. “How many times have I told you I can’t use one-liners!”But people like them! Sometimes just a single word, unexplained, unelaborated, goes deep, falls like a seed in the heart, can open doors.The eighth question:Osho,If you do not do miracles, then how is it that miracles are happening to me?The question is from Chaman Bharti.I do not do miracles, but they happen. The happening is a totally different phenomenon. They are happening every day. I am not doing them, you are not doing them, they are happening. We are creating a space where it becomes possible for them to happen.The real miracles are never done, they happen. And those which are done are not miracles, they are just magic tricks. When the doer is there, how can there be a miracle? A miracle means something out of God, something from the beyond, something that nobody has done but has suddenly concretized out of nothing.Christians have a very wrong notion when they say, “Jesus did this, Jesus did that.” Jesus never did anything, not a single miracle. Miracles happen, that is true. Miracles always happen. The whole life is so miraculous! If you have a little alertness you will see miracles and miracles all around. A bud opening into a flower – you don’t call it a miracle because you have become so accustomed to it. A seed sprouting, coming out of the earth – you don’t call it a miracle. What more can a miracle do? A dewdrop just slipping down a grass leaf, with the sun reflected in it – just a dewdrop. It looks so precious; the whole existence is reflected in it. A star in the night, a small baby smiling, a woman crying with eyes full of tears – all is miraculous because all is mysterious.You are dull, dead, insensitive, so you go on missing it. Otherwise it is all over the place. And there is no need to do. One has just to be receptive.The ninth question:Osho,I like my name but I like women too.The questioner is Swami Prabhu Anuragi. The name means: lover of God – hence the question.He says: “I like my name but I like women too.” But who has told you that God is against women, or that God is not in women? In fact, God is far more in women than in men. Men. have gone further astray than women have; women are still closer to nature, closer to feeling, closer to God.When you love a woman, what do you really love in her? It will be different with different people and it will be different at different times. If love really grows, this is the way: first you fall in love with the woman because her body is beautiful. That is the first available beauty – her face, her eyes, her proportion, her elegance, her dancing, pulsating energy. Her body is beautiful. That is the first approach. You fall in love.Then after a few days you start going deeper into the woman. You start loving her heart. Now a far more beautiful revelation is coming to you. The body becomes secondary; the heart becomes primary. A new vision has arisen, a new peak. If you go on loving the woman, sooner or later you will find there are peaks beyond peaks, depths beyond depths. Then you start loving the soul of the woman. Then it is not only her heart – now that has become secondary. Now it is the very person, the very presence, the very radiance, the aliveness, that unknown phenomenon of her being – that she is. The body is very far away, the heart has also gone away – now the being is.And then one day this particular woman’s being becomes far away. Now you start loving womanhood in her, the femininity, the feminineness, that receptivity. Now she is not a particular woman at all, she simply reflects womanhood, a particular form of womanhood. Now it is no longer individual, it is becoming more and more universal. And one day that womanhood has also disappeared – you love the humanity in her. Now she is not just a representative of woman, she is also a representative of man as much. The sky is becoming bigger and bigger. Then one day it is not humanity, but existence. That she exists, that’s all that you want – that she exists. You are coming very close to God.Then the last point comes – all formulations and all forms disappear and there is God. You have found God through your woman, through your man. Each love is an echo of God’s love.So no need to be worried, Prabhu Anuragi. I have given you the name lover of God, but that does not mean you have to destroy your love for women, that does not mean you have to destroy your love for anything. It simply means you have to deepen it, you have to go on deepening it. Dig more and more, dig deeper, and one day you will find your beloved has disappeared and God is standing there – because God is hiding in every being, in every form. He is dwelling in every house. Your woman is a house, is a temple; so is your man.I am for love. Even when you fall in love with the body, I am not against it. It is the farthest from God, but still it is related to God. It is a very faraway echo but still it is an echo – the original is still there somewhere. Never let your love stop anywhere.The tenth question:Osho,How to drop judging people?There is no need to stop or drop judging people; you have to understand why you judge and how you judge.You can judge only the behavior because only the behavior is available. You cannot judge the person because the person is hiding behind, the person is a mystery. You can judge the act but you cannot judge the being.And the act is irrelevant. It will not be right to judge a being through the act. Sometimes it happens that a man is smiling. The act is there on the surface and deep inside he may be sad. In fact, he may be smiling because he is sad. He does not want to show his sadness to anybody – why bring one’s wounds to everybody? Why? That seems embarrassing. Maybe he is smiling just because he is crying deep down.Nietzsche has said, “I go on smiling. People think I am a very jolly person and that is absolutely wrong. I go on laughing because I am afraid that if I don’t laugh, I may start crying. So I have to convert my energy somewhere otherwise it will become tears. Before it becomes tears it has to become laughter.” The insight is perfectly true. Nietzsche is one of the most perceptive men ever born on the earth. Tears and smiles are very close.In Indian villages women say to their children, “Don’t laugh too much otherwise you will start crying.” And that happens. If a child laughs too much he starts crying. Tears and smiles are very close. If you want to hide your tears the best way is to smile – that’s why people are smiling. Just by seeing a smiling face you cannot judge what is happening inside. The inside is not available to you. The inside is private; it is not available to anybody.So the first thing to understand is that you can look only at the behavior and the behavior does not mean much. All that is really significant is the person behind. And you don’t know. Your judgments are going to be wrong. And you know it – because when people judge you by your acts, you always feel that they have judged you wrongly. You don’t judge yourself by your acts, you judge yourself by your being. So everybody feels that all judgments are unjust. You feel that judgments are unjust because to you your being is available – and the being is such a big phenomenon and the act is so tiny and small. It does not define anything. It may be just a momentary thing.You said something to somebody and he became angry, but don’t judge him by his anger because it may be just a momentary flash. He may be a very loving person. If you judge him by his anger you misjudge him. And then your behavior will depend on your judgment. And you will always wait for the man to be angry and you will always think that he is an angry man. You will avoid the person. You have missed an opportunity. Never judge anybody by their action – but that is the only thing available to you. So what to do? Judge ye not.By and by become more and more aware of the privacy of being. Every being inside his own soul is so private there is no way to penetrate it. Even when you love, something at the deepest core remains private. That is man’s dignity. That is the meaning when we say man has a soul. Soul means that which can never become public. Something of it will always remain deep, lost in some mystery.I have heard….Two men were called to a home and asked to haul some trash to a garbage heap. After they had loaded the truck the back of the truck was overflowing with all the trash.One man said, “You may get into trouble with the police if we drive through town and the trash blows onto the street.”The other man said, “Don’t worry, I have an idea. You drive and I will spread my body over the trash and that will keep it from blowing about.”On the way to the garbage heap they passed under a bridge. As they drove under it, two men standing on top of the bridge happened to look down and saw the man lying on top of the garbage, arms and legs spread wide.One of the men said, “Will you look at that! Someone is throwing away perfectly good men!”From the outside that’s what we can judge. From the outside it is always wrong.Seeing it again and again, understanding it again and again, penetrating it again and again, you will not need to drop judgments, they drop of their own accord.Just watch. Whenever you judge, you are doing something foolish. It does not apply to the person at all, it can apply only to the act. And that act too is taken out of context because you don’t know his whole life. It is as if you tear a page from a novel and you read it and you judge the novel by it. It is not right; it is out of context. The whole novel may be a totally different thing. You may have taken a negative part, an ugly part.But you don’t know anybody’s life in its totality. A man has lived for forty years before you come to meet him. Those forty years of context are there. The man is going to live forty years more when you have left him. Those forty years of context are going to be there. And you saw the man, just a single instance of him, and you judged him. That is not right. That is just stupid. It will not have any relevance to the man himself.Your judgment will show something more about you than about the man. “Judge ye not so that ye may not be judged” – that’s what Jesus says. Your judgment shows something about you, nothing about the person you have judged – because his history remains unavailable to you, his being remains unavailable to you. All contexts are lost, there is just a momentary flash – and your interpretation will be your interpretation. It will show something about you.Seeing this, judging disappears.The last question:Osho,Are all words useless?Not all. How can all words be useless? Words are useful as far as the world is concerned, the outer; words are useless as far as you are concerned, the inner. When you start moving inwards you have to drop words. They are not needed. They are an unnecessary load on you, a disturbance, a noise.But when you go outwards and you meet people, you need language. When you are talking about things, you need language. Language is perfectly adequate for the world – otherwise there would be great difficulty. If you go to the market and you want to purchase something, you will be in difficulty without words. And it will be an unnecessary wastage of time. Words are tremendously useful instruments.If you want to see it, one day go into the market and try to purchase things without words. Each small thing will take so much time and so much trouble, and each shopkeeper will try to avoid you – “You please go somewhere else.” You will be such a nuisance.In the world, words are perfectly useful. In the inner journey they are not useful because in the inner journey they are not needed at all. You are alone, so what are the words needed for? When you are with somebody, words are needed.If you are working in some objective reality, some scientific work, words are useful. Thinking is needed. You have to be very precise and very exact. You are thinking with your logic. But if you are meditating, going towards God, words are not needed. Silence is the medium there.So listening to me and hearing again and again that words are not needed, that words are useless, don’t misunderstand me. Meditate over this small story….A man went to his local doctor and said, “Doctor, I want to be castrated.”“What?” said the doctor. “That’s a very drastic operation – are you sure?”“Quite sure,” said the man.“Are you married, or do you have a regular girl friend?” said the doctor.“I’m married,’ said the man, “but what has that got to do with it?”“Well,” said the doctor, “it would be a good idea to discuss it with your wife – it will affect her too.”“Yes, true, but only for a time.” said the patient.“Nevertheless,” said the doctor, “I think you should ask her about it tonight and if you still want to go ahead tomorrow, I’ll book you into the hospital. It’s very quick and you’ll be in and out in one day.”The next day the man returned, affirmed the situation and was booked in that morning. The operation was completed and he was lying in bed that afternoon, coming out of the anesthetic. Looking round with a smile, feeling good. he winked at the man in the next bed and said cheerily, “Hello, and what are you in for?”“Oh,” said the other, “I’ve come in to be circumcised.”The castrated patient clicked his fingers, whistled through his teeth and said, “Shit, that’s the word I was trying to think of!!!”And the really, really last question:Osho,I have found the answer. My heart is filled with joy where there was always pain. I feel with great surprise that it is true – I have a choice. I bow in gratitude. Vani.This is significant. This is significant to you all. There is always a choice. If you are miserable, it is your choice. Never throw the responsibility onto anybody else. If you throw the responsibility onto somebody else, you will remain miserable. By throwing the responsibility onto somebody you are throwing away your freedom, you are throwing away your freedom to choose.This has to be one of the most fundamental principles around here – that misery or happiness is your choice. Let it sink deep in you. You choose it. When you are unhappy you have chosen to be unhappy. There is no other excuse. Once you understand this you will be freed from the prison. Then it is up to you.I have heard about a great Sufi mystic who was always happy, always cheerful, always blissed-out.A disciple asked him, “Master, you always look so happy. I have been watching you for many years, in many situations. Day in, day out, for years I have observed you. All kinds of situations have passed, must have passed, but you always remain happy. What is your secret?”The master said, “There is no secret in it. Whatsoever situation confronts me, I always have the choice: to be happy or to be unhappy. And I always choose to be happy.”Try it. This is a magic formula. In each situation, look before you become unhappy or happy – look. Is there a possibility of being happy? And you will always find that the possibility is there. There is always something to be happy about. If you want to be unhappy then there is always something to be unhappy about.The world is full of thorns and full of flowers. It is neither a rose-bed nor a thorn-bed – it is full of both. It depends on you. You can choose flowers and you can make a bed of flowers and sleep on the bed of roses. Or you can choose thorns and suffer. Hell is your creation, so is heaven.Vani is an important case. Vani had been asking to come into the ashram again and again for two, three years, and I was postponing it. I told her, “You are needed there.” She was a hostess, well-paid in the German airlines. But she persisted.Why was I postponing? Why was I saying to her, “You just wait a little more?” – because she was always so miserable and I don’t want miserable people to be around here. One miserable person is enough to create much misery in others, because others are just coming out of their misery and when they see somebody, a great miserable person, they tend to fall back into their old habit. Then they start competing with the miserable person – “What! Do you think you are ahead? I can beat you.”So I put Vani off but she persisted – the German persistence – and finally she came. And, of course, she has remained miserable for these few months she has been here. She got more and more miserable.But this is beautiful of her – that she has understood the fact. I have been telling her again and again in so many ways that it is her choice. She has come out of it. I hope she will remain out of it. It will be difficult. Old habits die hard. One tends to slip back into them. They are very comfortable and cozy. One feels very good falling into the old habits. One knows them, one has known them so long. They are so familiar and so friendly. The new is so strange.So, Vani, this is good. I was waiting for this to happen some day. It has happened. You say: “Osho, I have found the answer. My heart is filled with joy where there was always pain. I feel with great surprise that it is true – I have a choice. I bow in gratitude.”Continue to remember it. Don’t forget it for a single moment. For just a few days you will have to remember it. Once it has become your climate then the old cannot win over it. The old was so ugly, the new is so beautiful. The new is so heavenly, the old was nightmarish and hellish. It cannot win over it. But the new needs a little time so that it can take root in your being.I am happy, Vani. With all my blessings go deeper into your new space.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Sufi ancient, Junnaid, taught by demonstration, through a method in which he actually lived the part which he was trying to illustrate. This is an example:Once he was found by a number of seekers, sitting surrounded by every imaginable luxury.These people left his presence and sought the house of a most austere and ascetic holy man, whose surroundings were so plain that he had nothing but a mat and a jug of water.The spokesman of the seekers said, “Your simple manners and austere environment are much more to our liking than the garish and shocking excesses of Junnaid, who seems to have turned his back upon the path of truth.”The ascetic heaved a great sigh and started to weep.“My dear friends, shallowly infected by outward signs which beset man at every turn, know this, and cease to be unfortunates! The great Junnaid is surrounded at this moment by luxury because he is impervious to luxury. And I am surrounded by simplicity, because I am impervious to simplicity.”The belief in the myth of change is the most dangerous kind of belief. Man has suffered much from it – much more than from any other kind of belief. The myth of change – that something better is possible, that man can improve upon himself, that there is some place to go to, that there is somebody to be, that there is some kind of utopia – has corrupted human mind infinitely down the centuries. It has been a constant poisoning.Man is already there. Man has been all along that which he wants to be. Man need not change in order to be. All that is needed is an understanding, an awareness – not a change. Becoming is never going to give you being. Through becoming you will remain constantly in anguish, in tension – because becoming means that the goal is somewhere else, that the goal is never here, never now, that the goal is far away. You have to strive for it and your whole life is wasted in striving. And you can go on striving and you will not find it because the goal is here and now, and you are looking then and there.Your being is in the present, and all ideas of becoming are projections into the future. By projecting into the future, you go on missing the present. That is a way of escaping from the reality. The idea that you have to become something is the idea that takes you away from your real being, from your authentic being. You are already that – that’s why I say the myth of change is one of the most dangerous myths.It has two dimensions to it. One is political, the other is religious.The political dimension is that the society can be improved, that revolution can help, that there is a utopia that can be realized. Because of this, politicians have been able to torture, to murder, to exploit, to oppress. And people have suffered in the hope that revolution is going to happen. That revolution never happens. Revolutions come and go and society remains as it has always been.Hitlers, Stalins, Maos, can exploit people for their own sake. And if you want to get to the utopia, to the wonderland, to paradise, you obviously have to pay for it. This is the secular dimension of the myth – that something better is possible. Right now it is not there, but some day it can be – you have to sacrifice for it. Millions of people were killed in Soviet Russia, tortured inhumanly, for their own good. And logic says that if you want to have a better society, who is going to pay for it? You are going to pay for it, naturally. So the people cannot even revolt, they cannot even resist. If they resist, they look like enemies of the revolution. And the myth is so deep-rooted in the mind that they accept all kinds of humiliations in the hope that maybe if they cannot live in a golden age, their children will. This is the secular direction of the same neurosis.The religious dimension is that you can have a better future – if not in this life, then in the next. Of course, you have to sacrifice. If you sacrifice the present, you will have the future.That future never comes. The future in itself cannot come. The tomorrow is not possible, it is always today. It is always the present that is there. The future is just in the mind, in the imagination. It is a dream; it is not part of reality.The political myth has been taken up by the sadists – those who want to torture others. and the religious myth has been taken up by the masochists – those who want to torture themselves. Torture yourself. Fast. Don’t sleep. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. This is the whole secret of the so-called ascetic attitude towards life: torture yourself. And naturally, your body is helpless, your body is defenceless. It cannot protest. It cannot go against you.There is a possibility that people may revolt against the politicians, but what is the possibility that your body may revolt .against you? There is no possibility. The body is very innocent, helpless. You can go on torturing it and you can go on feeling that you have immense power because you can torture it. You can go on killing it, and feel powerful. And you can attain to a great ego.There are two kinds of people in the world: the sadists and the masochists. Sadists are those whose enjoyment consists of torturing others, and masochists are those whose enjoyment consists of torturing themselves – but it is the same violence, it is the same aggression. The sadist throws it on somebody else; the masochist turns it upon himself. Because the sadist throws it on others, sooner or later they will revolt. But when the masochist throws it upon himself there is nobody to revolt.In fact, all revolutionaries; once they are in power, by and by lose respect. Sooner or later they are dethroned; sooner or later their power is destroyed; sooner or later they are thought to be criminals. Your whole history consists of these criminals. Your history is not the history of humanity because it is not the history of humanness. How can it be the history of humanity? It is not the history of humanity, it is only the history of politics, political conflicts, struggles, wars.It is as it you write the history of robbers and murderers and you call it the history of humanity. The revolutionaries are great murderers, they are no ordinary murderers – otherwise they would have been in the jail or sentenced to death. They are powerful people. They possess power. Until their power goes, they are worshipped like God. But their power goes sooner or later. A day comes when Hitler is no longer honored; he becomes an ugly dirty name. A day comes when Stalin is no longer honored. Just the reverse happens.But with the other dimension, the religious dimension, of the myth – the ascetic, the self-torturer, the masochist – people never come to know their reality because they never torture anybody else. They torture only themselves. And people go on respecting them. People respect them very much because they are not harmful to anybody except to themselves. That is their business. The ascetics have always been worshipped. But asceticism is a kind of neurosis; it is not normal.To eat too much is abnormal; to fast is also abnormal. the right amount of food is normality. To be in the middle is to be normal. To be exactly in the middle is to be healthy and whole and holy.If you go to one extreme, you become a politician. If you go to the other extreme, you become a religious fanatic, an ascetic. Both have missed balance.So the first thing to be understood is that the religion that we are creating here – and it has to be created again and again because it becomes corrupted again and again – the religion that we are invoking here is not political and is not in the ordinary sense even religious. It is neither sadistic nor masochistic. It is normal. It is to be in the middle.And what is the way to be in the middle? The way to be in the middle is to be in the world but not to be of it. To be in the middle means to live in the world but not to allow the world to live in you. To be exactly in the middle and to be balanced means you are a witness to all that happens to you. Witnessing is the only foundation for a real authentic religion. Whatsoever is, has to be witnessed – joyfully, ecstatically. Nothing has to be denied and rejected. All denial, all rejection, will keep you in limits and you will remain in conflict. Everything has to be accepted as it is.And you have to be a watcher. Pleasure comes – watch. Pain comes – watch. Neither be disturbed by pleasure nor be disturbed by pain. Let your calm remain unperturbed. Let your silence, your tranquillity, remain undisturbed. Pain will come and go and pleasure will come and go. Success will come and go and failure will come and go. And soon you will come to understand the point that it is only you who remains. That is eternal. This witnessing is eternal.The contents that flow in the consciousness are temporary. One moment they are there, another moment they are gone. Don’t be worried about them; don’t be either in favor of them or against them. Don’t try to possess them, don’t hold onto them, because they are going to go. They have to go. It is the very nature of things that they cannot be permanent.Something pleasant is happening. It cannot be permanent. It will have to go. And following it, something unpleasant is already getting ready to happen. It is the rhythm of life – day and night, life and death, summer and winter. The wheel goes on moving.Don’t hold on and don’t try to make something very, very permanent. It is not possible. The more you try, the more frustrated you will become, because it cannot be done. And when it cannot be done, you feel defeated. You feel defeated because you have not understood one simple thing: nothing can be static. Life is a flux. Only one thing is eternally there and that is your consciousness, that innermost watcher.Sufis call it “the watcher on the hills.” The valleys go on changing but the watcher remains on the top of the hill. Sometimes the valley is dark and sometimes the valley is light and sometimes there is dancing and singing and sometimes there is weeping and crying – and the watcher sits on the hill-top and just goes on watching.By and by the content of consciousness does not matter Only consciousness becomes significant. That is the essential foundation of all true religion. And this is the understanding of the Sufis.Before we enter into this small parable today. Let me tell you that there are four ways to approach truth, to be connected with truth.The first is known in the East as karma yoga – the way of action. Man has three dimensions in him: action, knowing, feeling. So three ways use these three directions: action, knowing feeling. You can act, and you can act with total absorption, and you can offer your act to God. You can act without becoming a doer. That is the first way – karma yoga: being in action without being a doer. You let God do. You let God be in you. You efface yourself.In this, the path of action, consciousness changes the content. These two things have to be understood: consciousness and content. This is all that your life consists of. There is something which is the knower in you and something which is the known. For example, you are listening to me. Now two things are there: whatsoever I am saying will be the content, and whatsoever you are inside, listening, watching, that is the consciousness. You are looking at me. Then my figure in your eyes is the content and you, who are looking at that figure in the eye, are consciousness – the object and the subject.On the path of action, consciousness changes the content That is what action is. You see a rock. Somebody may stumble upon it – because it is getting dark, night is falling. so you remove the rock from the path. This is action. What have you done? Consciousness has changed the content.On the path of action, content is important and has to be changed. If somebody is ill and you go and serve him and you give him medicine, you are changing the content. If somebody has fallen in the river and is drowning, you jump in and you save him from drowning. You have changed the content.Action is content-directed. Action is will – something has to be done. Of course, if the will remains ego-oriented, then you will not be religious. You will be a great doer, but not religious. And your path will be of action but not towards God. When you allow God to become your will, when you say, “Let thy will be mine,” when you surrender your will to the feet of god and his will starts flowing through you, then it is the path of action – karma yoga.The goal of karma yoga is freedom, moksha – to change the contents so much that nothing antagonistic is left there, nothing harmful is left there; to change the content according to your heart’s desire, so that you can be free of limitations. This is the path of Jainism, yoga, and all action-oriented philosophies.The second path is the path of knowledge, knowing – gyana yoga. On the second path consciousness is changed by the content. On the first, content is changed by consciousness; on the second it is just the reverse – consciousness is changed by the content.On the path of knowledge you simply try to see what is the case – whatsoever it is. That’s what Krishnamurti goes on teaching. That is the purest path of knowing. There is nothing to be done. You have just to attain to clarity, to see what is the case. You have just to see that which is. You are not to do anything. You have simply to drop your prejudices and you have to drop your concepts, notions, which can interfere with reality, which can interpret reality, which can color reality. You have to drop all that you carry in your mind as a priori notions – and then let the reality be there. Whatsoever it is, you just see it. And that changes you.To know the real is to be transformed. Knowing the real as the real, you cannot act in any other way than the way of reality. Once you have known the reality, reality starts changing you. Consciousness is changed by the content.The goal of the path of knowledge is truth. The goal of karma yoga, the path of action or will, was freedom. The goal of the path of knowing – Vedanta, Hinduism, Sankha, and other paths of knowing, Ashtavakra, Krishnamurti – is truth, brahman. Thou art that. Let that be revealed, then you become that. Once you know that, you become that. By knowing God, one becomes God. Thou art that – that is the most essential phenomenon on the second path.The third is bhakti yoga – the way of feeling. Love is the goal. Consciousness changes the content and the content changes consciousness. The change is mutual. The lover changes the beloved, the beloved changes the lover. On the path of will, consciousness changes content, on the path of knowing, content changes consciousness; on the path of feeling, both interact, both affect each other. The change is mutual. That’s why the path of feeling is more whole. The first path is half, the second path also half, but the path of love is more round, more whole, because it has both in it.Vaishnavas, Christianity, Islam, and other paths; Ramanuja, Vallabha, and other devotees – they say that subject and object are not separate. So if one changes the other, then something will remain unbalanced. Let both change each other. Let both meet and merge into each other, let there be a unity. As man and woman meet and merge into each other, let there be a unity. As man and woman meet and there is great joy, let there be an orgasm between consciousness and content, between you and reality, between that and thou. Let it not be only a knowing, let it not be only partial – let it be total.These are the three ordinary paths. Sufism is the fourth. One of the greatest Sufis of this age was George Gurdjieff. His disciple, P. D. Ouspensky, has written a book called The Fourth Way. It is very symbolic.What is this fourth way? If it is neither of action, nor of knowing, nor of feeling – because these are the three faculties – then what is this fourth way? The fourth way is the way of transcendence. In India this is called raja yoga – the royal path, the fourth way. Neither consciousness changes the content, nor the content changes consciousness. Nothing changes nothing. All is as it is with no change. Content is there, consciousness is here, and no change is happening. No effort to change is there.This is what I mean by being. With all the three paths something remains in the mind that has to be done. With the fourth, all becoming disappears. You simply accept whatsoever is. In that acceptance is transcendence. In that very acceptance you go beyond. You remain just a witness. You are no longer doing anything here, you are just-being here.A goal is not possible with the fourth way. There is no goal. With the first, the goal is freedom; with the second, truth; with the third, love. With the fourth there is no goal. Zen and Sufism belong to the fourth. That’s why Zen people say “the pathless path, the gateless gate” – because there is no goal. The goal-less goal. We are not going anywhere. We are not striving for anything. All that is needed is already here. It has been here all along. You have just to be silent and see. There is no need to change anything. With the fourth, the myth of change disappears.And when there is no need to change, joy explodes – because the energy that gets involved in changing things is no longer involved anywhere; it is released. That released energy is what is called joy.Sometimes it happens to you too, unknowingly. Sometimes sitting alone, doing nothing, you feel something happen. You cannot believe what it is. You cannot even trust what it is. It is so incredibly new, so unknown. It happens to everybody – in rare moments, for no reason at all. You cannot figure it out; you cannot reckon why it has happened.You have been lying in your bathtub and suddenly something happens. The mind is not rushing in its usual way; the body is relaxed in the hot water. You are not doing anything; you are just being there. suddenly it comes – the silence of the house, the birds singing outside, the children playing in the street. All is there as it has been, but with a new quality. There is great restfulness, a relaxation. Something in you is no longer striving for anything. You are not goal-oriented, you are just herenow.If you start thinking about what it is, you miss it immediately. If you start trying to get hold of it again, you will never get hold of it again. It comes when it comes. It comes when the right situation is there. But you cannot create that right situation. If you try to create it, you will fall into one of the first three ways. If you try to change the content, you will become a follower of the path of action. If you try to change your consciousness through the content, you will become a follower of the second path – the path of knowledge. If you try to make both meet and mingle and merge, then you will become a follower of the third path.But if you don’t do anything – not willing, not knowing, not feeling – if you just relax, then there is witnessing. Witnessing is not knowing; witnessing is totally different. In fact, it cannot be said that you are witnessing. You are not doing anything – not even witnessing. You are just there. Things are happening. Suddenly a bird starts singing outside and you hear it – because you are there, you hear it. There is no effort to hear it, there is no deliberate concentration for it.Just the other day I came across a Sankhya sutra of immense beauty: dhyanam nirvishayam manah – that’s how Sankhya sutras define dhyana. Meditation is mind without thoughts, without feelings, without will. Meditation is consciousness without any striving. Dhyanam nirvishayam manah. There is no longing for any object. You are not striving for anything. Then you are in dhyana, then you are in meditation. You are not doing anything; on no plane are you doing anything. All doing has simply disappeared. there is utter silence inside you, and absolute rest.Let this word rest be remembered by you. Relaxation. You cannot do it, remember. How can you do it? If you do it you cannot relax, because then relaxation becomes a goal and you become a doer. You can only understand it. You can only allow it to happen; you cannot do it, you cannot force it. It has nothing to do with your doing. You can only understand how it happens and you can remain in that understanding. And it comes.Dhyanam nirvishayam manah. When the mind is, with no desire, no object, no goal, not going anywhere, then how can it be tense? It is not a state of concentration . It is not concentration at all because concentration will need striving; concentration is a kind of tension. It is not even attention, because attention is also a kind of tension.The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the word meditation as concentration. That is absolutely wrong. Meditation is not concentration. Concentration means mind striving, forcing, willing, trying to do something. Putting one’s whole energy into one direction – that’s what concentration means. Meditation means you are not putting your energy into any direction; it is simply overflowing. It is not going in any particular direction, it is simply overflowing like a fragrance, a fragrance overflowing from a flower, unaddressed – neither to the north nor to the south. It is not going anywhere, or, it is going everywhere. Wherever the winds will take it, it is ready to go. It is utterly relaxed.This moment happens sometimes to you. I would like you to remember that it is not something rare that happens only to religious people. It happens in ordinary life too but you don’t take note of it. You are afraid of it.Just a few days ago, I received a letter from a woman. She had been here, then she went home. For six months she was trying and trying to meditate and it did not happen according to her idea of meditation. She must have had some desire about what it should be like. She must have had some expectations, and it was not happening.She has written a letter to say that one day she was just sitting in the room. There was nothing to do. The husband had gone to the office; the children had gone to school; the house was empty. She was just sitting, not doing anything, there was no desire to do. She was just sitting in the chair with closed eyes – and it happened. It was suddenly there, with all its benedictions. But she became frightened. She became frightened because when it happened suddenly a fear came to her – because it was there, meditation was there, but she was not there. That became a great fear and she simply pulled herself out of it. It felt as if she was disappearing.Yes, it happens. Your ego cannot exist there. Your ego is not possible there. Your ego is nothing but all your tensions together. Your ego is nothing but a bundle of past tensions, of present tensions, and of future tensions. When you are non-tense, the ego simply falls to the ground in pieces.She became afraid. For six months she had been trying to meditate and nothing was happening, and then one day it happened. It came while she was completely unaware of it. She was taken aback. It was there. And she had been provoking it and desiring and asking and praying, and it had not come. And then it came. But she missed. It was there but she became frightened. It was too much. She felt as if she might disappear into it and might not be able to come out of it. She pulled herself out of it. Now she writes that she is crying and weeping, and wants it back.Now this wanting it back won’t help – because it came that day without any wanting. Without any idea of what was going to happen, suddenly it came. It always comes like sudden lightning.This is the fourth way, that’s why it is called raja yoga – the royal path. The king is not supposed to do anything. Servants do. The king is not supposed to do anything. He simply sits on his throne and things happen. There are so many people to do it. That’s why it is called raja yoga – the path of the king. The other three are ordinary; the fourth is really exceptional. The king is not expected to do anything; he simply sits there relaxed. That’s what we mean by one who is a king. Doing has disappeared, knowing has disappeared, feeling has disappeared – the king is utterly relaxed. In that relaxation it happens.Sufi and Zen are raja yogas – the royal paths. Neither consciousness changes the content nor the content changes consciousness. This is the fundamental principle: nothing changes, there is no change happening. Things are. The flower is there and you are there. You don’t change the flower and the flower does not change you. Both exist together. It is existence with no motive.Zen people call it nirvana, the goal, the no-goal – nirvana. One simply ceases to be. the word nirvana is beautiful. It means: as if somebody has blown out a candle. Just a few minutes before it was there, the lamp was burning bright, and then you blew it out. Now the flame has disappeared into the infinity. It has become part of the cosmos. You cannot find it. You cannot trace where it has gone, where it is. It has simply disappeared.There is a Sufi parable.A Sufi mystic was entering a village and he came across a small boy who was carrying a lit candle. The boy was going to the mosque. The night was coming and the boy was going to the mosque to put the candle there – as an act of worship.The mystic saw the boy, the innocent boy, his face lighted by the light of the candle. The mystic asked the boy, “Have you yourself lighted the candle?” And the boy said, “Yes, sir.”The mystic jokingly asked, “Then you must have seen from where the flame comes. Can you tell me from where the flame comes?” The boy laughed and blew out the candle and said, “Now you have seen it going. Can you tell me where it has gone?”Nobody knows from where it comes and nobody knows to where it goes. It comes out of nothingness or out of all – which means the same – and it goes back into nothingness or into the all – which is the same. That is nirvana.Sufis have the word for it – fana. It means exactly the same. One is utterly lost.There is no need to do anything on the path of will or on the path of knowledge or on the path of feeling. Nothing is needed to be done – because if you do something you will remain, you will persist a little. Something of the ego may linger on. No change, no improvement, no effort to make you better is needed – just be.Mohammed says: “Be in this world as a stranger or as a passer-by.” Be in this world but don’t be of it. Be in this world but don’t allow the world to be in you. “Be for this world as if thou were to live a thousand years, and for the next as it thou were to die tomorrow.” Live this moment as if you are going to live forever and yet be mindful that the next moment may not come. So live totally, and yet remain a witness. Be involved in it, but still keep yourself like a watcher on the hill.That is what Junnaid was doing.Now this story.The Sufi ancient, Junnaid, taught by demonstration…Sufis always teach by demonstration. There is no better way. So it always happens that when outsiders come to a Sufi master, they are always puzzled – because they cannot understand what is happening. They don’t know the whole story. They only take the fragment that is in front of their eyes. It may be a demonstration. It may be something in which the disciples and the master know what is going on.Gurdjieff used to do that. And outsiders were always puzzled. And there are hundreds of books written on Gurdjieff by outsiders. Naturally they are all against him, because they don’t know the whole story. It is only possible for art, insider to know the whole story.For example, if you had suddenly reached Gurdjieff, you might have been surprised. He might have been shouting – humiliating somebody, using abusive words. He was a past master in using abusive words. And when he was in a rage, he was really in a rage – it was as if he was going to murder.If you saw it, naturally you would wonder what kind of master he was. He did not seem to be at all enlightened – because you have a certain idea about enlightenment: that the master will be such and such. He should fulfill your expectation. But masters don’t exist to fulfill your expectations. They have something else far more important to do than to go on fulfilling your expectations. They are not here for that kind of work. They are not asking for your respect or for any respectability. They are not bothered by public opinion; they are not asking for your vote. They are doing something which is immense, which is possible to understand only when you are an insider.The insider knows on whom Gurdjieff is throwing all kinds of abuse. He knows – or maybe in some moments he knows and in some moments he also misses. There are some moments when you will feel, “What kind of man is this? Why is he abusing me so hard? What have I done?” You may have done a very small wrong, negligible, and he is being mad out of all proportion – as if you have committed a sin. Sometimes even the insider may miss. But the insider will be able to remember. Gurdjieff has said, “You have to be watchful. I will provoke you. I will provoke you in many ways, so that you can lose your watchfulness.”Now something is transpiring between Gurdjieff and his disciple. You as an outsider will miss it. He is not in rage. The rage is just acting, and the disciple is being provoked into being angry. If the disciple gets angry, he misses the point. He loses an opportunity. If the disciple remains calm and quiet, watchful; does not allow the content to change this consciousness; and does not try in any way to change Gurdjieff and his behavior – that is consciousness trying to change the content…. The content is there – Gurdjieff is mad. So okay, Gurdjieff is mad. And one is there watching – neither the consciousness is affecting the content nor the content is affecting the consciousness. And you cannot deceive Gurdjieff – because a slight change in your consciousness and your whole behavior changes. Your face changes, your aura changes, your energy pattern changes – you are no longer the same person.If the disciple can remain undisturbed, unperturbed, can remain as he was before Gurdjieff started going into this rage, he has taken one step into the inner journey. He has come closer to the master.But it will be difficult for people who come from the outside. If you had gone to Gurdjieff…. It was a rare phenomenon. Every night he would invite all his disciples. The whole community would gather together. And there would be eating and drinking – so much that anybody from the outside would think that these people were just mad. What were they doing? And Gurdjieff would go on forcing people to eat and to drink. He would force people to drink so much alcohol that you would think that this was an epicurean phenomenon. What kind of religion was this? Just eat, drink, and be merry? And that too was going to extremes. And Gurdjieff was very insistent about going on drinking. He himself used to drink as much as a man could drink, but he was never drunk. That was the whole point. He would tell the disciple to drink.And there comes a point when you lose control. Immediately your reality comes up, surfaces. You can never see the real person unless he is drunk. People have repressed themselves so much that only alcohol can bring them up from their reparations. It was one of the greatest experiments ever done by any master.In the East we know it has been done by tantrikas down the ages, but Gurdjieff was the first man to do it in the West. Whenever he saw that a disciple had drunk too much and had come to his reality – that now he was no longer the same person that he was pretending to be – then he would watch. Now he could be helpful. Now he knew your unconscious. What psycho-analysis does in years, he did in one day. Psychoanalysis goes on poking you to bring your unconscious up. The psychoanalyst will sit, day in and day out, by the side of the couch and listen to all kinds of nonsense and rubbish, for years – just to help you to go on throwing out rubbish. By and by the real will start-coming up. When the top rubbish is thrown out, then the inner rubbish-will start coming up. But it takes years.Gurdjieff used to do it in a master-stroke, in a single day. The first day the disciple was there, the first initiation would be through alcohol. The master wants to know the unconscious immediately because there the real work is to be done. He does not want to waste time with the conscious personality. That is a -mask. Once he has known, then there will be no need. But he will take you into deep drunkenness.Now, if somebody comes from the outside – the so-called religious people – they will be puzzled, very puzzled. What is happening! If somebody comes who has been tasting. Gurdjieff will give him too much to eat, and if somebody comes who has been eating too much, he will put him on a fast. He will disturb your old patterns, because when patterns are disturbed, your reality comes up. It is like changing gears. When you change one gear to another, just in the middle you have to pass through the neutral.If a man – for example, a Jaina – has never eaten meat in his whole life and he goes to Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff will force him to eat meat. This is destroying his whole personality. For fifty years he has not eaten, never touched, maybe has never seen, meat. Now his whole personality will revolt. He will feel nauseous. The very idea may be nauseous.My own grandmother, when she was alive, would not even allow tomatoes in the house because they looked like meat. That was her idea. Tomatoes – such innocent people! They were not allowed in the home.So if a person who has not even eaten tomatoes is forced to eat meat, you can understand what turmoil the master is throwing him into. He is putting him upside-down. it will really be a destruction of all his patterns. He will vomit, he will fall ill, he may have fevers, he may have nightmares – but this will destroy all his learned patterns and he will become again a child. And from there work can start.If a man has been eating meat, drinking, Gurdjieff will put him on vegetable food. He will tell him not to drink at all. He will make him a vegetarian, a teetotaler – he will force him to be as holy as possible. The technique is the same – to disturb the past, to put things upside-down so that the facade no longer functions and the mask can be removed and the reality can be seen.A master has to put his disciples into their childhood again because from there they have been distracted. Somebody has become a Mohammedan, somebody has become a Hindu, somebody has become a Christian – from that moment they have been distracted. The master has to put them back into their childhood so another kind of life, another kind of reality, starts growing.The Sufi ancient, Junnaid, taught by demonstration, through a method in which he actually lived the part which he was trying to illustrate. This is an example….He will live the part that he is going to illustrate. But how can an outsider know it – know what is going on? It is a drama. It is a psychodrama. Only the people who are inside, who know the inside information – what is going on – will be able to see. Even they may miss many times. Suspicion will arise even in them.For example, a naked woman is dancing. There are wine flasks. Wine is being poured into glasses, is handed over to people. There is luxury all around. There is dancing and music – a kind of orgy is going on. And Junnaid is sitting just in the middle of it – the master of the ceremony.You see it. And you have an idea of how a master should be. It is very rare to find a man who does not come with any idea. It is natural. It can be forgiven. Everybody comes with an idea. If a Christian comes to me, he has the idea of Christ. He starts looking at me – am I behaving like Christ or not? If he feels I am not, then I cannot be anything. A Jaina comes; he has the idea of Mahavira. He looks; he is expecting me to behave like a Mahavira. I am neither Christ, nor Mahavira, nor Buddha – I am just myself. I exist in my own right. I have no borrowed authority; my authority is my own. But people come with ideas. They have been trained. So it becomes very difficult. They look from the prejudices, hidden behind the prejudices. If I fulfill their prejudice, then it is okay; if I don’t, then they will think that this is not the master, this is not the true master. They will have to go somewhere else.And remember, no true master has ever fulfilled anybody’s desire. He cannot, if he wants to help you. He has to annoy you, he has to shock you. He has to be shocking because his whole work is to shock you into awareness.Once he was found by a number of seekers sitting surrounded by every imaginable luxury.These people left his presence and sought the house of a most austere and ascetic holy man, whose surroundings were so plain that he had nothing but a mat and a jug of water.Now Junnaid is one of the greatest Sufi masters. An ordinary man will fulfill your desire – in fact, only an ordinary man will fulfill your desire, he will pretend to be whatsoever you can expect him to be – but no real man is going to be defined by you. He remains indefinable. No real man can be put into categories. He remains uncategorized. A real man is like mercury – you cannot hold him in tight compartments. A real man is freedom. If you want to see the real master, you will have to put all your notions aside.And how can you have the right notion? You don’t even know who you are, and you pretend to know what a master should be! You are completely oblivious of your own reality and you want to believe that you can know the ultimate reality or the ultimate expression of reality. It is pretentious, and it is dangerous, and only you will be the loser. If you want to seek the real master, you will have to drop all expectations. You will have to go nude, naked. You will have to go without any mind – only then is there any possibility of any contact.Just the other night a young man took sannyas. I was watching him. He was very closed. I was watching him. Whatsoever I said to him – and I talked to him for almost half an hour – was not heard by him. I was watching. His ears were closed. His mind was very much clouded. And then finally I asked, “Have you something to say to me?” He said, “Yes, I am a Christian, how can I have two names? I have been given a Christian name, I have been initiated into Christianity. And you are giving me another name. Now there will be difficulty.”I was watching – he had not heard a single word. I asked him, “If you really know that you are growing, if you know that you are silent, happy, blissful, if by being a Christian you are contented, then there is no need to be a sannyasin. You are already a sannyasin. Why have you come here then? For what? If things are going perfectly well wherever you are, be there with all my blessings. Why have you come for sannyas? Nobody has asked you. You have come on your own. You have asked me to initiate you and now you bring a problem. If you are not growing, if you are not happy where you are, then drop the past.”Now this young man is carrying a notion. He thinks he is a Christian. How can you be a Christian if you have not contacted Christ? The so-called priest in the church cannot make you a Christian. Only when you partake of Christ do you become a Christian. The ordinary priest himself is not a Christian – what to say about the ordinary man? Even the Vatican pope is not a Christian. He cannot be – because to be a Christian does not mean to belong to a church, it means to enter into Christ-consciousness.Jesus is not the only Christ. Buddha is also a Christ, so is Mohammed, so is Junnaid, so is Kabir and so is Nanak. Christ is a state just as Buddha is a state. It is the same thing; it is the same state. These two names indicate the same state. Jainas call it the state of Jina, the conqueror – because they follow the path of will. Buddhists call it the state of Buddha: the state of awakening, awareness, witnessing. They follow the fourth path. Christ is a state, the ultimate state – when you are no longer a man but you become God, when you transcend humanity, when you surpass humanity.But you can become a Christian only if you partake of a Christ – otherwise your Christianity will be false and your false Christianity will prevent you from making contact with any living Christ. But people come with their minds. It can be understood, it can be forgiven, but forgiving does not mean that you have to cling to it. It has to be dropped.Now this young man can become Christian for the first time – if he enters me and allows me to enter him. For the first time he has come around a Christ-consciousness, but he is afraid. He is afraid because he is a Christian and naturally he cannot think of me as Christ because he has an idea of Christ. If he sees me crucified only then will he believe – but then it will be too late.And I am not going to repeat the drama! Once, it is good twice, it is boring!Now these seekers came to Junnaid. Junnaid was sitting surrounded by every imaginable luxury. They must have interpreted. They must have been shocked and annoyed. What kind of master is he?Just the other day Maitreya brought me a Hindi magazine. They have written an article against me as the cover story. And on the cover page the title is: What Kind of God? Naturally, they have a certain idea – what kind of God? I am not Rama, I am not Krishna, I am not Mahavira – so what kind God am I? And these are the same people who, when Mahavira was there, were asking, “What kind of God?” – because he was not Rama and he was not Krishna. And these are the sane people who, when Krishna was there, were asking, “What kind of God?” – because he was not Rama. These are the same people who go on asking again and again. Rama is never repeated. Nothing is ever repeated. This existence is so unique and so beautiful.So if you want to make contact with reality, you will have to drop notions. We all have notions.The Sunday-school teacher asked her class to learn an appropriate phrase from the Bible and recite it as they were putting their pennies in the collection box.On the following Sunday little Lucas came up with, “It is more blessed to give than to receive,” as he dropped his penny in the box.Richard’s quotation was, “The Lord loveth a cheerful giver.” This too was well received.And so on down the line to little Lloyd. As he grudgingly made his contribution, he mumbled, “A fool and his money are soon parted.”Now all three boys had looked in the Bible, in the same Bible, but they had found three different quotes. When you look, you always find something that reflects you.Father Duffy and Rabbi Muchnik were chattering at a town meeting.“Could I ask you a question?” inquired Father Duffy.“Of course,” said Rabbi Muchnik.“It has always been my understanding that the apostles were Jews. Isn’t that correct?”“Absolutely right!” replied the Rabbi.“Then how the deuce did the Jews let go of a good thing like the Catholic Church and let the Italians grab it?”Now that is a relevant question. How did the Jews allow such a beautiful business to be lost? The richest business in the world is the Catholic Church. The question is relevant – how did the Jews allow it to be lost? How did they miss it? This is not very Jewish.Our minds work continuously.In a small class the teacher asked, “Who is the greatest man in the world?”One boy said, “Abraham Lincoln.”Another boy said, “Mahatma Gandhi.”Another boy said, “Washington.”Another boy said, “Karl Marx.”And so on and so forth.And then came the little Jewish boy who said, “Jesus Christ.”The teacher was surprised and said, “Aren’t you a Jew? How come?”The little boy said, “n my heart of hearts I know that the greatest man in the world is Moses – but business is business.”Whenever you interpret something, rather than thinking that it is objective, always remember it is a reflection of your mind.Now these seekers were very puzzled at seeing the luxury and Junnaid sitting there. These people must have been very, very attached to things; these people must have been very, very desirous of having, possessing; these people must have been very, very materialistic. Seeing Junnaid surrounded by all these luxuries, a deep jealousy must have arisen in them which was not visible to them. and whenever people are very indulgent they have a religious idea that people who are indulgent are not religious. How can they be religious? They are indulgent. So people who are religious must be far away from all kinds of indulgence. If you are too much of a money maniac, then you will have an idea that the real man of God will not have any desire for money.This has to be understood. You always put the opposite higher than you because you condemn yourself utterly. You know that you are mad about money, so immediately the idea comes, “So he is just like me. He is nothing special. He is just like me.” If you are too sexual, if your mind is continuously fantasizing about sex and you see Junnaid sitting with a beautiful woman, immediately Junnaid is condemned in your mind. So he is just like you. This is what you would like to do – so what is the point of making this man your master?People go on searching for the opposite. People only respect the opposite. This has to be understood – this tendency. People are attracted by the opposite but the opposite cannot change you – because the attraction of the opposite is a very natural law. Man is attracted to woman; woman is attracted to man. The poor is attracted to the rich and – you will be surprised – the rich is attracted to the poor. Rich people always think that the poor are enjoying great things – they have beautiful sleep, they have good appetite. Rich people always think that there is great joy in living in nature – in living in a hut, in a cottage. Rich people always think that in small villages far away there is joy and bliss. In great cities how can there be joy? They live in the great cities and they hanker for the village.And ask the villager. He hankers for Bombay, New York London. His hankering is to reach the biggest city possible. His hankering is to live in a big skyscraper. He wants all that the rich people have.Remember, rich people are interested in the poor – so whenever they see an enlightened person living in poverty their heads bow down. They say, “This is the right thing.” If they see a janak, a rich man, enlightened, they cannot believe it. It is impossible for them. Their understanding becomes a barrier.Now an enlightened person has no bondage. He can live in poverty if he feels this is going to help his disciples; he can live in riches if he feels this is going to help his disciples. His whole life is a teaching. It is a deliberate device. It is a situation. It depends on him what he chooses. He has no bondage to anything. And he can change from one to another. He is utterly free.They thought that this was not the right man. They left Junnaid. They missed a great opportunity.These people left his presence and sought the house of a most austere and ascetic holy man, whose surroundings were so plain that he had nothing but a mat and a jug of water. They must have thought that this was the right man. They were all worldly people. Seeing Junnaid surrounded by worldly luxuries they thought that he was just like them.Look into your so-called religious people and see who they respect – you will be surprised. For example, in India, the Jainas are amongst the richest people. They are the Jews of India. They have all kinds of luxuries. It is a small community but it has one of the biggest portions of this country’s wealth. See their saints. They are naked; they don’t possess anything. This is rare. The community is rich and the community worships somebody who is absolutely naked, possesses nothing. It looks strange logic but it is not. The opposite is attractive.The rich people can only worship the poor. They live in luxury; they can only worship somebody who lives in austerity. If you want Jainas to be your disciples, you will have to become a masochist. You will have to torture yourself. The more elan and thin you become – just bones – the more and more respect will be coming to you. You will have to commit slow suicide. The more dead you are, the more people will be coming to worship you.And this is strange! These people are living wealthy, rich lives. But the opposite attracts. It is always the opposite that attracts.Another example…. Mohammedans are poor people in this country. When their religious festival days come, they will purchase new clothes, new perfume. They will prepare good food for themselves and invite friends. When the Mohammedans’ religious function comes, they will wear new clothes because that is the only time they purchase or they can purchase. Then the whole year they will use the same clothes. And they will prepare good sweets. delicious foods, invite people. Those days will be of great joy. And they will spend money. They cannot afford to spend money the whole year round – only once or twice in a year.Now the Jainas, the richest community in India, when their religious festival days come, they fast. They don’t eat at all! The whole year round they eat too much. Jainas are the only people in India who go on diets. They eat too much. They are the only people who are interested in naturopathy. And when their religious days come, they fast. On their religious days, they live very saintly lives. They will not use their ordinary clothes, they will use just white clothes. They will look saintly. They will go in saintly robes to their temples. This is only for ten days – the whole year round they are just the opposite.What is happening? The opposite attracts. Remember always that just because something is opposite to you, it does not mean it is true. It may be opposite to you, but it may not be opposite at all. Or the person who is being opposite to you, may just be trying to attract your respect. It is very easy to gain respect by just becoming opposite to people.And people very, very much respect those who are masochistic. They think this is great. They are torturing themselves for the other world. Their sacrifice is great. It is nothing! It is simply neurosis! Those people are ill. They need psychiatric treatment – because it is natural to be joyous, to be healthy, to be hungry, to eat. It is natural to live comfortably. It is unnatural to create discomfort. It is very normal to find a way of life which is less and less inconvenient. A person who seeks inconvenience is somehow pathological.So they left the presence of Junnaid and they came to a very, very ascetic and austere man whose surroundings were so plain that he had nothing but a mat and a jug of water. It appealed to them.The spokesman of the seekers said, “Your simple manners and austere environment are much more to our liking than the garish and shocking excesses of Junnaid, who seems to have turned his back upon the path of truth.”– as if they knew what truth was and what the path of truth was; as if they knew what was transpiring there between Junnaid and his disciples; as if they knew that it was a psychodrama. They knew nothing. From the very outside they judged. Never judge anything from the outside.And when you go inside, the deeper you go, the more totally different will be the vision. Then you will see the real; then you will see what reality is. Never watch it from the outside.It happens here every day. People come to watch. They see you dancing, singing, and they say, “What is this? Dancing and singing? How is dancing and singing related to religion?” They have a certain idea that religion means that somebody should be sitting under a tree with closed eyes, in a yoga posture. If people see you all sitting here under trees with closed eyes in yoga postures, then we will be mobbed. Then the whole country will start rushing here. So many saints!But I prevent them. I have my own devices – simple devices! If they see a man and woman holding hands, they escape! This is not the place. This is what they always wanted to do and have not. They feel jealous – “This can’t be a religious place. These people are just living in the world, being very worldly – laughing, dancing, singing, loving.” This is not their idea of religion.But they don’t know what is transpiring here. It is possible that a man who is sitting under a tree with closed eyes in a yoga posture will be a murderer.It happened once….A man murdered somebody and escaped. The police followed him and were coming closer and closer. Then the murderer came to a river which was flooded. He was puzzled because he did not know how to swim and it was dangerous to go into the river. Looking around he saw a man, a saint, sitting under a tree. He had rubbed ashes on his body. So he threw his clothes in the river, became naked, rubbed ashes on his body, and sat under the tree. The police officers came and looked at these two great ascetic saints. They touched their feet – in India that’s how things are – they touched their feet. The murderer laughed inside. This was a miracle! Just a few minutes ago they were after him. If he had been caught he would have been sentenced to death. But now they became his followers. They started coming to him for satsang, to sit by his side. And in India every stupid person knows things about spirituality, so he started talking about spirituality. By and by greater officers came. Finally the king came. and when the king touched his feet he could not believe what was happening.But this happens. You look only at the posture, you look only at the outside. It is possible that when people are dancing they may be in a state of utter silence. The music is outside, the noise is outside, their bodies are moving, there is great movement, but there may be a point deep inside which is not moving at all. In fact, to attain to that point which is not moving, movement is the best background. When everything is moving around you, the wheel is moving fast, just at the center of it – the center of the cyclone – nothing is moving.You may see a man sitting silently with closed eyes and he may be fantasizing about women. And it is possible that a man may be holding the hand of his woman and may not be sexual at all in that moment. But that is something inner. In fact, as I see reality, to be with a loving woman and to be with a loving man is the best way to get beyond sexuality. If you love, sex disappears. If you have enjoyed, penetrated, got involved with love energy, sooner or later you will find that sex disappears. If you want to remain sexual, starve yourself of sex – and you will remain sexual. And your mind will go on fantasizing.You can just try a small experiment. If you eat well – I’m not saying too much, just the right amount, what Buddha calls samyak ahar, right food, whatsoever is needed by your body – you can forget about food. If you fast one day, you will think about food the whole day. And you will fantasize. Fantasy comes out of unlived experiences. Your so-called saints sitting under trees in austerity may be just the opposite. Deep inside they may be fantasizing about all kinds of things, they may be fighting with them.I am creating a totally different kind of situation – where you are allowed to be natural so you can see everything that your mind wants to see. Then you can go beyond.That was the situation – but they missed. That’s what was happening there. Junnaid was sitting in luxury with his disciples, creating a situation in which they could become very, very silent and witness.“Your simple manners,” they said to the ascetic, “and austere environment are much more to our liking than the garish and shocking excesses of Junnaid, who seems to have turned his back upon the path of truth.”The ascetic heaved a great sigh and started to weep.The ascetic knew far better about his own inside. He must have been a sincere man. Otherwise it is very difficult when people are respecting and worshipping you to say, “No, you are wrong.” He must have been a sincere man.“My dear friends, shallowly infected by the outward signs which beset man at every turn,” he said, “Know this, and cease to be unfortunates! The great Junnaid is surrounded at this moment by luxury because he is impervious to luxury. And I am surrounded by simplicity, because I am impervious to simplicity.”He said something tremendously meaningful, tremendously significant – “Know this. Don’t be befooled by shallow, outward signs, otherwise you will remain always unfortunate. You will miss the real person because the real will not in any way fulfill your expectations. He has no obligation to fulfill your expectations. The unreal and the pseudo will always be ready to fulfill your expectations, and you will fall into the trap of the unreal. And you will remain unfortunate.”He said, “Know this, and cease to be unfortunate. Know one thing: that the outward is not a sign for the inward.” If you want to see the inward, you have to see it directly, immediately. You are not to see from the outward signs.“The great Junnaid is surrounded at this moment by luxury because he is impervious to luxury.” He can be surrounded by luxury because he can remain beyond. He is impervious to it. There is no passage inside his being for luxury to enter and affect him. He is a watcher on the hills. He is there and yet not there. Luxury is surrounding him but he is not surrounded by luxury. That’s why he is sitting there.“And as far as I am concerned,” the ascetic said, “I am surrounded by simplicity because I am afraid of luxury. I am still weak. I am still desirous. I am pretending to be simple. Junnaid is simple. He can afford to be surrounded by luxury because he is simple. He knows his simplicity cannot be destroyed and corrupted by anything. He is so beyond the material that it does not matter. The material matters no more. He can be in the marketplace and yet be in his deep meditation. I cannot afford that because I am not impervious to luxury. On the contrary, I am impervious to simplicity. Although simplicity is all around me it is not entering me. There is no passage.”The man must have been an authentic, honest man. Of course, he was still moving in the wrong direction, but he was not a fake. He was moving in the wrong direction but moving with sincerity. When you move in the wrong direction with sincerity, sooner or later your sincerity will bring you to the right direction.The story does not say anything else, but one thing is certain: this man understands Junnaid. How long can he remain away from Junnaid? He will have to go to the master. And he understands his problem – how long can he go on pretending by arranging simplicity around him? One day or other he will get out of it, and he will start looking for the right key. The right key is the fourth way.The fourth way means content not affecting consciousness; consciousness not affecting content. The world is there, I am here. There is no bridge. There is no meeting. This is the path of Sufism, the path of Zen, the path of all essential religions.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,I am always in a hurry and always worrying whether I will be able to reach or not.There is nowhere to reach and there is no one to reach. The whole idea of the goal is illusory. Then you start living in the future, and the time is now, and the place is here. Then you start living there – somewhere far away. Then and there become more important than now and here. That is the whole art of becoming miserable, that is the whole basis of anguish, anxiety. It divides you; it divides you from your present reality. The goal becomes more important and the moment becomes less important; and the moment is real and the goal is just a dream. When you live for a dream you will suffer, because the dream cannot be fulfilled. The dream can never become reality; the dream will remain a dream. And you will be wasting precious life.I am against all goals. God is not a goal, truth is not a goal. Truth is already here. If you are also here, there will be a meeting. But you are not here. God is waiting here for you and he never finds you here; you are somewhere else – on some other planet, in some other time, in some other place. It is not a question of you going to God, the question is of you coming to God. It is not a question of going, it is a question of coming back home. God is waiting for you here.And once you have this idea…. Everybody has it, because down the ages only one thing has been taught to man: that he has to become something, that he has to improve upon himself, that he has to progress. This idea has gone into your bones, into your very marrow. And it goes on driving you mad! It never leaves you at ease, it does not allow you rest. It is not possible to relax with this mind. But you have always been taught: push, rush, hurry, time is short and time is money. Push, hurry, do something before time is lost. What do you want to do? Be! And being is possible only herenow. Becoming is a poisoning idea. If you are in the trap of becoming you will remain neurotic.There is nothing really that you need. All is already given to you. That which you want to become, you have been all along. Never for a single moment have you missed it. Even though you are in misery, never for a single moment have you missed your reality, your truth. How can you miss your reality and your truth?I am not giving you a goal here, because all goal-orientation will make you more and more unhappy. I am making an effort to take all goals, all ideals, away from you, and to leave you herenow, in a totally different kind of space, a different presence. This moment is beautiful, this moment is perfect.You ask me: “I am always in a hurry, and always worrying whether I will be able to reach or not.” Where do you want to go? What do you want to reach? The seeker is the sought. To know the one who is hidden inside you is all that is needed, and for that you need not go anywhere. For that you need not even open your eyes. For that you need not even take a single step. That’s why Lao Tzu says, “If you seek, you will miss. Don’t seek, and you will find.”Seeking is desiring. And once you start seeking you will go on going astray – from one goal to another goal. Sometimes it is money that is the goal, sometimes it is power; then sometimes it is meditation and sometimes it is enlightenment and God and nirvana. The name changes but the goal remains. And you remain tense because time is slipping by. How can you avoid tension? Time is slipping by and the goal has not come yet, and life is becoming less and less. Energy is being lost and the goal has not come yet. How can you be happy? You become more and more hectic, more and more hungry for the goal. Death is coming and the goal seems to be nowhere.Naturally, as you grow in age you become more miserable. It is not death that makes you miserable and it is not old age that makes you miserable – it is the impossibility of the goal. When you are young you can hope. Enough time is there, enough energy is there, the body is healthy, and you have not tasted frustration yet, and dreams look beautiful. By and by, as you grow in age, you will grow in frustration. All dreams will break somewhere. And you will go on creating new illusions because you cannot live without an illusion. Death comes close and the goal does not come – that is what misery is. That is what frightens.But if you don’t have any goal, you will not be frightened by death. If you don’t have any goal, you will not be frightened by anything – nothing can be taken away from you. You cannot miss in the very nature of things! It is impossible to miss.The modern mind is even more addicted to goals because the modern mind is educated, civilized. The more you are educated, the more ambitious you become – because all that education does is to create a subtle mechanism in you for ambition. Education corrupts you, corrupts your sources of joy, gives you great ambition, ego trips. The more the world has become educated, the more panicky people are – and nobody is certain whether he is going to make it or not.In Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, there is this beautiful piece:“Cheshire Puss,” said Alice, “would you tell me please which way I ought to go from here?”“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat.“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.“Then it does not matter which way you go,” said the cat.“So long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.“Ah, you are sure to do that,” said the cat, “if you only walk long enough.”Where are you going? What is the goal? Once you have a goal in your mind you start seeking for means, ways, to reach the goal. Once you have an end in mind, you start looking for paths, methods, techniques. Goal-orientation creates the path, the method, the technique. Once the goal is dissolved, there is no need for any technique or for any method. Then suddenly you are here. And you are not missing anything. The idea of missing is created by the idea of a goal. Once you have a goal then you feel you are missing.For example, if you have a goal that you need to have one million dollars, then you are missing – because you don’t have even one dollar in your pocket. And you need to have one million dollars. So you are missing one million dollars. The man sitting by your side who has not got that idea of one million dollars, who is not that mad, is not missing. Both are in the same situation, both may have the same kind of money, hut one is missing and one is not missing. It depends.You are missing God because God has become your goal. You are missing enlightenment because enlightenment has become your goal. Nobody else is missing. Make a goal and that becomes the problem. If you listen to me rightly, drop the goal. Drop all goals. And you will not be able to miss. There is no way to miss then! How can you miss without having a goal in your mind? And when you are not missing, that is the state of being a God, or being in God. When you are not missing, that is what is called enlightenment. Enlightenment is not a goal. It is the understanding that there is nothing to miss because there is nothing to achieve.Let me repeat it: enlightenment is not a goal. It is the understanding that there is nothing to achieve, nothing to miss. Then you are enlightened.You can become enlightened this very moment. Nobody is barring the-path, nothing is hindering you. But the problem is with you – that you want to become enlightened in the future. Even if I go on insisting that you can become enlightened right now, the question arises, “Right now? How can it be possible? Give us a little time, we will have to prepare. We will have to get ready. We will have to do yoga asanas and Dynamic Meditation and Kundalini and things like that. Just give us a little time. How can we become enlightened just as we are?”You are enlightened, that’s why I say you can become enlightened right now. You have never been unenlightened ever! You have always have been enlightened all along. You just don’t recognize the fact.You ask: How to become…? And in that very how, you miss, you miss the whole point. There is no how to it. Once you start trying, then you are getting into difficulty.Just the other night I was telling a story….A Zen master dropped his handkerchief and said to one of his disciples who was just sitting here, “Try to pick up the handkerchief. Try to pick it up.”Immediately the disciple picked up the handkerchief and gave it to the master. But the master was not happy. He dropped it again.And he said, “Listen to me, to what I am saying. Try to pick it up.” And the disciple again picked it up. It happened six times, and the master dropped the handkerchief again and again. When he dropped it the seventh time it dawned upon the disciple what he meant. He was saying something absurd. He was giving a koan.“Try to pick it up!” How can you “try to pick it up”? Either you pick it up or you don’t pick it up. How can you try?Then he got the point that trying is not possible. Either you pick it up or you don’t pick it up – trying is not possible. Then he laughed.And he said, “I understand.” He bowed down, thanked the master.And the master said, “Remember, never try. Either do or don’t do. There is no way to try.”Either you are enlightened or you are not enlightened. There is no way to make efforts for it, there is no way to try. Trying brings tension. And you have been trying, you have been trying in many ways. When you miss from one way you think that way is wrong. No, sir, that way is not wrong – trying is wrong. When you miss with one master you think that this master is wrong. No, not necessarily. The master may not be wrong at all. Just because you were trying you missed.You miss in the church so you go to the temple. You miss in the temple so you go to the mosque. You miss in the mosque so you go to the gurudwara. But you don’t drop your addiction to trying. Neither the temple, nor the mosque, nor the church, nor the gurudwara is going to give it to you – because you already have it.The only thing that is needed is an understanding of the absurdity of trying. This is a speed mania – first trying, and then, naturally, the second idea comes automatically: to get there soon and fast. Who knows, tomorrow life may not be there. So first one starts trying, reaching, grabbing for the goal, and then one becomes interested in how to attain speed.In day-to-day life, or in the so-called spiritual life, the problem is the same.Just the other day I was reading: “The average American spends fifteen hundred hours annually driving some seven thousand-odd miles and earning the capital needed to keep his vehicle in tow, shelter it, park it, and pay highway taxes. For each hour of his life invested, he covers only five miles in his car.“In nations where highways are few, citizens cover such distances on foot. The difference between Americans and these backward, non-industrialized folk is that Americans spend twenty-five per cent of their time each day concerned with getting to and fro, and the walking citizens of other lands spend only five per cent.”Now this great effort to reach there fast, with speed. has created only problems. It is ridiculous that the backward country people only give five per cent of their time to going to their work and coming back home, and the Americans give twenty-five per cent – with all the modern techniques, speedy vehicles. This is ridiculous! What is the point of it all?And this whole thing has happened because of speed – you have to reach fast.First, there is nowhere to reach. Second, there is no need to be so fast. Be on a pleasure trip. Let this life be a joyous journey to nowhere – from nowhere to nowhere. You come from nowhere, you go to nowhere. In the middle you exist. You come out of nothing, you disappear into nothing. In the middle is the flash of being. Enjoy it while it is there. Celebrate it. Don’t destroy it in reaching somewhere; there is nowhere to reach. And, more important, there is nobody inside to reach. The traveler exists not, the traveler is a myth.The pilgrimage is true but the pilgrim is false.Look into your deep moments of joy and you will understand what I mean. When you are really joyous, there is nobody who is joyous in you; there is only joy. When you are celebrating, there is nobody who is celebrating; there is only celebration. When you are dancing, look within. There is nobody who is dancing, there is only dance. That’s what Sufis call fana – there is nobody inside. it is all emptiness, it is all pure emptiness.You create the goal, the goal creates the ego. Then the ego needs higher and greater and bigger goals. And bigger and higher goals create bigger and higher egos, naturally. A worldly man has money as the goal; his ego is not very big. But the spiritual man – his ego is enormous, because he has a bigger goal. Money is below him, he needs God. Less than that is not going to satisfy him. Power and prestige are below him; he wants nirvana, enlightenment. So you will see more ego, more burning ego, in the spiritual man than in the ordinary, the worldly man. The worldly man is not so egoistic. His goals are very day-to-day things, trivia. With trivial goals you create a trivial ego; with great goals you create a great ego. With no goal, ego disappears – fana, anatta – no-self.So try to understand how you go on creating misery by creating goals, how you go on creating ego by creating goals. It is a vicious circle. And then speed comes into the mind – then you want to do it as fast as possible. First, there is no goal; second, there is nobody to achieve it; and third, you are creating another misery for yourself – how to reach there fast. The goal exists not, the seeker exists not, and now there is this idea of speed. That creates more and more anguish. You cannot sleep, you cannot rest, you cannot love. How can you when there is so much left to be done, when the whole life seems to be a wasteland because the goal has not happened yet?Understanding is conversion, understanding is what Sufis call toba – a return, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. You simply see the point, and you laugh, and you can have a cup of tea.That’s what enlightenment is – laughter, and a cup of tea.The second question:Osho,You believe that man should live more meditatively. How can this solve life problems or prevent wars?First, I don’t believe a thing. I am not a believer at all. Never join the word belief with me.It is not my belief “that man should live more meditatively,” it is my understanding that man can live only in meditation – otherwise there is no life. Meditation is life. Not to be in meditation is not to live. Then you only pretend that you are living; then your life is just a mask. It has no authenticity in it, it has no depth; it is just the surface, the facade.So first, I don’t believe that man should live more meditatively. Second, I have no “shoulds” and “should nots.” Never bring those words in where I am concerned. I don’t give you any “should,” because all “shoulds” bring guilt. If I say that you should do this, I am creating guilt in you. If you cannot do it, there will be guilt. You will feel that you have missed something; you will become more miserable. And the ““should” means future. I am not concerned with the future at all. Look at the lilies in the field. They think not of the morrow, hence they are beautiful. Listen to the birds in the trees. They don’t think of the morrow, hence they are fantastic, gorgeous. Each moment is so joyful.I don’t give you any “should.” “Should” means the future, ““should” means you have to do something tomorrow, or the next moment. “Should” cannot be related to the present, “should” brings the future in. My whole concern is with the present – this moment. I don’t give you any dreams. “Shoulds’ are all utopian. They say, “If you do this, then this will happen.” They are conditions. And I say to you that God is unconditionally given to you. It is a gift. There is no way to earn God, there is no way to become worthy of having God – God is not a possession. God is a gift, and an unconditional gift. it is available to each and every one, there is no “should” to be fulfilled.So even meditation is not a ““should.”And thirdly, how can you do meditation? It is not a question of doing. You can be in meditation but you cannot do it. It is like love. You can be in love, but you cannot do it. Have you ever tried doing love? Then you go on doing something else, and there is no flow, there is no glow, there is no joy. It becomes a duty. You go into empty gestures, impotent movements, but there is no soul in it. You cannot do love. Love is a state, not an act. So is meditation.Meditation is a state of silence; meditation is a state of no desire; meditation is a state of no past, no future; meditation is a state when you are not doing anything, just cherishing your being. You are just happy that you are, happy that you are breathing, simply happy for no reason at all. In those moments there is meditation.I cannot say to you that meditation is a “should,” that you should do it. I can only explain to you what meditation is. If you understand me, you will be in meditation. There is no ““should” to it. It you don’t understand me, you will not be in meditation. But then too you need not feel guilty. Guilt comes when you do something and you fail. Now meditation can become the sure way to create guilt. If you do it, you will fail! That’s how people are guilty.They try to make love and it doesn’t happen – they feel guilty. They start thinking, “I am unloving, I’m trying my hardest and it is not happening.” Naturally they think that something is wrong with them. Nothing is wrong. The only thing wrong is that you are trying to do something which cannot be tried. You are trying to do something which can only be spontaneous – it comes when it comes. At the most the only thing you can do is not resist it – when it comes, don’t resist it. When it comes, keep your doors open, that’s all. But that is not much of a doing, it is more of a non-doing. You can allow meditation to happen or you can resist meditation and not allow it to happen. “Should” cannot be made out of it.I don’t give you any commandment; I am not a commander. All commanders are dangerous people; they have destroyed humanity. All commandments have corrupted man because they have created guilt. A “should” is a goal.I am simply sharing my understanding with you. I am in no way concerned with improving upon you. I am not trying to fix you. If you want to be fixed you should go to a psychiatrist, a psychoanalyst, a therapist. They are the people who fix you.But the very idea of fixing a person is insulting. It means you have been taken as a thing. Yes, a car can be fixed in the garage, and when your bathroom is leaking a plumber can fix it – but man is not a thing. You cannot fix man.First the priest used to do it, now the psychotherapist is doing it. The priest has failed. The psychoanalyst is failing, not because something is wrong with the priest or something is wrong with the psychoanalyst, no. The whole effort is wrong. You cannot fix anybody. Man is freedom. The idea of fixing him reduces him to a thing, kills his spirit. I don’t give you any “should” and I don’t want to fix you. In fact, I am not interested in your spiritual growth at all.What I am interested in is sharing that which has happened to me. It is not that I have done it, it has happened to me. And because it has happened to me, how can I give a “should” to you? It happens. I can only make you alert about how it happens. It has nothing to do with you or with your doing. You have to be receptive. Understanding makes you receptive, understanding makes you more relaxed, understanding brings you to a kind of let-go. And in that space, meditation simply is.Meditation is a state when you are not trying for anything, not even for meditation. Meditation is a state of non-striving, utter relaxation. There is no goal, nowhere to go, nothing to be done. The sheer joy of being is what meditation is. How can you do it? By doing it you will destroy it.So I cannot give you a “should.”You ask: “You believe that man should live more meditatively.” No. All that I want to say to you is that meditation is your birthright. It is there waiting for you to relax a little bit – so that it can sing a song, so that it can become a dance. The flower is there but you are so worried about other things that you can’t see it. It has already happened. It happened the moment you were born, it happened the moment you became alive. The moment you entered into existence, meditation bloomed in you.And sometimes there are moments when you become aware of it. Just hidden beneath the surface of your day-to-day activities, have you not become aware of a substratum deep down where nothing ever happens and all is silent? In the Upanishads they say that life is like two birds sitting on a tree. One bird is sitting high on the top of the tree. unmoving, silent, as if not. Another bird is jumping from one branch to another, from this fruit to that fruit, is fighting, is struggling, is trying to reach, is very tense, tired, frustrated. The Upanishads say that these two birds are you. On the lower branch the one bird goes on jumping, rushing, in a hurry, doing this and that. On a higher branch the other bird goes on sitting, just watching the lower bird and the foolish efforts that he is making. And both are you.Deep in you, meditation is already the case. So whenever it happens that your day-to-day turmoil is a little bit less…. Maybe you are watching a sunset, and watching the sunset your constant chattering mind has become quiet, the beauty of the sunset has made it quiet. You are in a kind of awe – the wonder, the mystery, the beautiful sun setting, the night descending, the birds moving back to their nests, the whole earth getting ready to rest, the whole climate of rest. The day is gone, the turmoil of the day is gone, and your mind feels quiet. The bird on the lower branch sits for a moment unmoving. Suddenly there are not two birds any more, there is only one bird. And suddenly you feel great joy arising in you.You think that the joy is because of the beautiful sunset. That’s where you are wrong. The beautiful sunset may have functioned as a situation but it is not because of that. The joy is coming from within. The sun may have helped, but it is not the source. It may have been helpful in creating the situation, but it is not the cause. The joy is coming from you. It is arising in you. It was there; the surface mind had only to settle in a quiet space. And the joy started arising.Or looking at the moon; or sometimes listening to music – Beethoven or Mozart; or sometimes playing a flute; or sometimes doing nothing, just sitting on the grass, basking in the sun; or sometimes walking in the rain and the water goes on splashing on you and everything is cool and wet and the smell of the earth and the music of the falling rain – suddenly the joy is there, the benediction is there. It does not come from the outside, it comes from your innermost core. That’s what I call meditation.Once you have started to understand this, you will be falling more and more into that meditative state. It is not something to do, it is something to understand.And you ask: “How can this solve life problems or prevent wars?” I am not worried about life problems and I am not worried about wars. In fact, I am not concerned with society at all. My whole concern is the individual. My whole concern is you. My whole concern is the personal, not the social.Yes, if more and more people start falling into a meditative state, the society will change, automatically. But that is none of my business, I am not worried about that. If it happens, it happens. If more and more people start living in this meditative state, enjoying this meditative state of non-striving, non-ambition, non-desiring; if many, many people live in this kind of rest, they will create a vibe around themselves. And the society will naturally cool down.The society goes to war because people are tense, because people are continuously warring within themselves, because people are angry, because people are in a rage, because people are very, very complaining – they are not happy, they want to destroy. When you are happy you want to create; when you are unhappy you want to destroy. When you are in a kind of rage you become murderers or you become suicidal; when you are in a kind of gratitude you write a song or you paint a picture – you do something creative. Creativity comes out of happiness; destruction comes Out of unhappiness.People are miserable. Millions and millions of people are miserable – their misery collects like clouds. Have you sometimes seen smoke arising from every roof in an Indian village? That smoke goes on gathering, becomes a cloud, hangs over the village. Everybody has contributed to it. That’s what a war is. Rage, violence, ambition, aggression is rising from everybody’s roof, from everybody’s head, like smoke. Then it collects together, it becomes a great cloud – that’s what war is. Then one day you are all surrounded in darkness, in murder, in killing each other, in rape.After every ten years a great war is needed, because in ten years we accumulate so much anger that only war can release it. We accumulate so much pus that after each ten years the world has to become mad, neurotic, so we can release our pus and poison.But I am not directly concerned because that is not the direct thing. Nothing can be done about it directly. That’s what politicians go on doing: talking about peace, releasing peace doves. All nonsense! And they go on creating bombs. They talk about peace and they prepare for war. They even say that ridiculous thing: that they are preparing for war so that there can be peace in the world.I am not concerned directly with the society. I am concerned with the individual because only the transformation of the individual can ultimately bring another kind of society into the world. It cannot be brought directly. Those who try to bring it directly are the politicians. I am not a politician at all.The new society can come one day, if the new consciousness has come. But it will be a by-product of a new consciousness, not vice versa.Marx says, “First the society has to change, then the new consciousness will be born.” I say, “First the new consciousness has to come, then the society will change.” Consciousness is more valuable. A meditative consciousness has to be released into the world. And you cannot do anything other than become meditative. If you yourself move into that space more and more, you will be creating a kind of energy around you which will help others to become more meditative. When you sit by the side of a meditative person, something in you starts changing immediately.When you sit by the side of a person who is really angry, something in you starts getting disturbed. His anger hits you, provokes your anger. When you sit around a closed person you become closed. His closedness tends to create closedness in you. We are affected by each other because we live in one ocean. It is natural to be affected by each other. When you see somebody laughing, suddenly a smile comes to your face. You may have been in misery, but for a moment you forget. The laughter was so beautiful, so catching, so infectious that you forgot your misery for a moment; you got in tune with the person. The laughter of that person turned you on. You smiled. You will fall back into the trap – that’s another thing – but ripples around you affect you.So my approach is not towards society. To me society does not exist, because society has no soul. Only the individual exists. The individual has the soul. My approach is towards the individual, my appeal is to the individual. I provoke the individual, I call forth the individual. And if many, many individuals are in the kind of space I call meditation, then by and by there will be no more wars. It is not that we will have to arrange peace protests and we will have to arrange peace marches – all that is nonsense. Have you ever watched people protesting against war? They look so angry. They are ready to fight with anybody. Every protest of that kind ends in a fight with the police. They start throwing stones, they start burning buses. Every peace march ends in war. And you see the people shouting – how angry they are!This is another way to throw off your anger, that’s all. They are against war. The angry person needs to be against something – anything will do – but he wants to be against something so that he can show his anger and not feel guilty.I am not in favor of all these things. They are still political. They are part of the same rut; they don’t change a thing. They only create an illusion that change is going to come, and it has not come. For five thousand years man has been trying to change society, and society does not change. All that can be done can be done with the individual. Only the individual has the capacity to change because only the individual has the capacity to turn back upon himself.If many more individuals change, it will be a different kind of society. There will be no war.And you ask: “How can this solve life problems?” I am not saying it will solve life problems, I am simply saying that if you are in a meditative state, problems will disappear – they will not be solved; There is no need to solve a problem. The problem is created by a tense mind in the first place.For example, a man came to me. He was suffering from insomnia. He was a politician, a minister, in some state in India, and he wanted me to give him some meditation so that he could relax and go to sleep. I told him, “Insomnia is not your problem, ambition is your problem. What do you go on thinking about in the night?”He said, “Politics, of course. Politics, you know, is a continuous fight, so I go on thinking about it and that keeps me so hot that I cannot fall asleep.”So I said, “It is not a question of meditation to help you. The question is how to drop your ambition, how to understand your ambition.”But he was not interested in that. He said, “That is too much, I cannot drop out of politics. I have come just for your blessings so that I can sleep.”Now he wants to do a miracle. He will create insomnia and I have to bless him so that he can sleep well. And he said, “I went to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and he gave me Transcendental Meditation, and he said ‘Everything will be okay. Your problem will be solved.’”I told him, “This is foolish. You will be creating the problem continuously. It is not a question of solving it. You go on pouring water onto the roots of a tree and you go on pruning the tree. Stop watering it, otherwise pruning is not going to help. In fact, pruning may make its foliage more thick. I cannot give you any meditation but I can show you, make you understand, how you are creating your insomnia. Your ambition is the cause. If ambition disappears, insomnia will disappear.”Life problems are not to be solved. Why they are there in the first place has to be understood.A meditative mind has insight. He can see how he himself creates his problems. And then, naturally, one stops creating them. It is not that one solves them – they are no longer created.And there are three kinds of problems. The first are those that you create – they are almost ninety per cent of the problems of your life. You go on creating them and you go on saying that you don’t want them – but you go on creating them. You have to see the absurdity of it, the foolishness of it. Ninety per cent of the problems simply disappear when you are in a meditative state – because you can see. And by seeing, you stop creating them.Then there are the second kind of problems – nine per cent – those you don’t create. They are created by living with people. Through meditation, a few of them will be solved, but a few of them will not be solved because you will not be the source of them. For example, you are jealous of your wife. That will be solved. But if your wife is jealous of you that will not be solved by your meditation. In fact, that is not your problem at all. How can it be solved by your meditation? Your problem will be solved – you will no longer be jealous. If your wife is jealous, that is her business, she will suffer. But you don’t take any responsibility for it any more, and you don’t suffer for it. Seeing that it has nothing to do with you, that it does not arise in you, you have transcended it. It is something the wife has to do: she has to become meditative.So there are problems which arise in other people and are reflected in you, and sometimes because you are not meditative you identify yourself with those problems. They will not be solved by you, they cannot be solved by you, but they have nothing to do with you. You can live in spite of them, beautifully, happily. Once you understand that they have nothing to do with you, you are finished with them.Ninety per cent will be solved; nine per cent will not be solved by your meditation but will be dissolved because they will not concern you at all. One per cent remains. It has nothing to do with you or with others – that one per cent is part of existence itself.Then, if it is part of existence itself…for example, death. It is not a problem – nobody is creating it, neither you nor others. It is not a problem at all. When ninety-nine per cent of the problems have disappeared, that one per cent will be seen not as a problem but as a mystery. The whole outlook changes; it is a mystery.There are those kinds of things around us which are mysterious. We convert them into problems because we are problematic. We convert everything into a problem. Even if solutions are given to us, we convert those solutions into problems.For example, I go on talking about enlightenment to help you understand. You make a problem out of it. You say, “How to attain it?” You have made a problem. You say, “What methods to use? What paths to follow?” You have made it a problem.I was trying to share my understanding, I was trying to share my love, I was trying to share my being, and you have made a problem out of it. Now you are worried, now you will not be able to sleep well. Now you will constantly think, “When and how am I going to become enlightened? I have not become enlightened yet.” It will create misery.And you will do many things and all the things will fail. I say all. Not a single thing can succeed because enlightenment is not something in which you can succeed. Enlightenment is something which arises in you when you have utterly failed, when you have done all that you can do and there is no more to do – in that very state the let go happens. It happens because you cannot do anything any more, you have done all – so you relax. There is no more to do. You get off your trip. In that failure…enlightenment. That utter failure is the door.I share my understanding with you – you make a problem out of it. I tell you about meditation and the beauty and the benediction of it, and you immediately make it a desire. Then the problem arises.One per cent will remain, but that will not be seen as a problem at all. In fact, it will become something immensely valuable. It is a mystery. Birth is a mystery, love is a mystery, death is a mystery, existence is a mystery. There is no way to explain it. It cannot be explained. Its very stuff is made of mystery. You can go on knowing it. The more you know, the more you will feel you don’t know. When you become really wise – when you have known all – suddenly you will become ignorant. You will say, “I don’t know anything at all.” Ultimate wisdom is innocent of knowledge.So these are the three kinds of problems: ninety per cent will become simply meaningless because you will not create them. Nine per cent will remain there, will not affect you at all because you have nothing to do with them. And one per cent will remain, but they will no longer be problems, they will be mysteries – beautiful mysteries to be lived, to be gone through.In that state, when there is no problem hovering around you, there is joy.The third question:Osho,The family has been the basic social unit for thousands of years, yet you doubt its validity in your new world. What do you suggest can replace it?Man has outgrown the family. The utility of the family is finished; it has lived too long. It is one of the most ancient institutions so only very perceptive people can see that it is dead already. It will take time for others to recognize the fact that the family is dead.It has done its work. It is no longer relevant in the new context of things; it is no longer relevant for the new humanity that is just being born.The family has been good and bad. It has been a help – man has survived through it – and it has been very harmful because it has corrupted human mind. But there was no alternative in the past, there was no way to choose anything else. It was a necessary evil. That need not be so in the future. The future can have alternative styles.My idea is that the future is not going to be one fixed pattern; it will have many, many alternative styles. If a few people still choose to have a family, they should have the freedom to have it. It will be a very small percentage. There are families on the earth – very rare, not more than one per cent – which are really beautiful, which are really beneficial, in which growth happens; in which there is no authority, no power trip, no possessiveness; in which children are not destroyed; in which the wife is not trying to destroy the husband and the husband is not trying to destroy the wife; where love is and freedom is; where people have gathered together just out of joy – not for other motives; where there is no politics. Yes, these kinds of families have existed on earth; they are still there. For these people there is no need to change. In the future they can continue to live in families.But for the greater majority, the family is an ugly thing. You can ask the psychoanalysts and they will say, “All kinds of mental diseases arise out of the family. All kinds of psychoses, neuroses, arise out of the family. The family creates a very, very ill human being.”There is no need; alternative styles should be possible. For me, one alternative style is the commune – it is the best.A commune means people living in a liquid family. Children belong to the commune, they belong to all. There is no personal property, no personal ego. A man lives with a woman because they feel like living together, because they cherish it, they enjoy it. The moment they feel that love is no longer happening, they don’t go on clinging to each other. They say good-bye with all gratitude, with all friendship. They start moving with other people. The only problem in the past was what to do with the children. In a commune, children can belong to the commune, and that will be far better. They will have more opportunities to grow with many more kinds of people. Otherwise a child grows up with the mother. For years the mother and the father are the only two images of human beings for him. Naturally he starts imitating them. Children turn out to be imitators of their fathers, and they perpetuate the same kind of illness in the world as their parents did. They become ditto copies. It is very destructive. And there is no way for the children to do something else; they don’t have any other source of information.If a hundred people live together in a commune there will be many male members, many female members; the child need not get fixed and obsessed with one pattern of life. He can learn from his father, he can learn from his uncles, he can learn from all the men in the community. He will have a bigger soul.Families crush people and give them very little souls. In the community the child will have a bigger soul he will have more possibilities, he will be far more enriched in his being. He will see many women; he will not have one idea of a woman. It is very destructive to have only one single idea of a woman – because throughout your whole life you will be searching and searching for your mother. Whenever you fall in love with a woman, watch! There is every possibility that you have found someone that is similar to your mother, and that may be the thing that you should have avoided.Each child is angry with his mother. The mother has to prohibit many things, the mother has to say no – it cannot be avoided. Even a good mother sometimes has to say no, and restrict and deny. The child feels rage, anger. He hates the mother and loves the mother also because she is his survival, his source of life and energy. So he hates the mother and loves the mother together. And that becomes the pattern. You will love the woman and you will hate the same woman. And you don’t have any other kind of choice. You will always go on searching, unconsciously, for your mother. And that happens to women also, they go on searching for their father. Their whole life is a search to find dad as a husband.Now your dad is not the only person in the world; the world is far more rich. And in fact, if you can find the dad you will not be happy. You can be happy with a beloved, with a lover, not with your daddy. If you can find your mother you will not be happy with her. You know her already, there is nothing else to explore. That is familiar already, and familiarity breeds contempt. You should search for something new, but you don’t have any image.In a commune a child will have a richer soul. He will know many women, he will know many men; he will not be addicted to one or two persons.The family creates an obsession in you, and the obsession is against humanity. If your father is fighting with somebody and you see he is wrong, that doesn’t matter – you have to be with the father and on his side. Just as people say, “Wrong or right, my country is my country!” so they say, “My father is my father, wrong or right. My mother is my mother, I have to be with her.” Otherwise it will be a betrayal.It teaches you to be unjust. You can see your mother is wrong and she is fighting with the neighbor and the neighbor is right – but you have to be with the mother. This is the learning of an unjust life.In a commune you will not be attached too much to one family – there will be no family to be attached to. You will be more free, less obsessed. You will be more just. And you will have love from many sources. You will feel that life is loving. The family teaches you a kind of conflict with society, with other families. The family demands monopoly. It asks you to be for it and against all. You have to be in the service of the family. You have to go on fighting for the name and the fame of the family. The family teaches you ambition, conflict, aggression. In a commune you will be less aggressive, you will be more at ease with the world because you have known so many people.That’s what I am going to create here – a commune, where all will be friends. Even husbands and wives should not be more than friends. Their marriage should be just an agreement between the two – that they have decided to be together because they are happy together. The moment even one of them decides that unhappiness is settling, then they separate. There is no need for any divorce. Because there is no marriage, there is no divorce. One lives spontaneously.When you live miserably, by and by you become habituated to misery. Never for a single moment should one tolerate any misery. It may have been good to live with a man in the past, and joyful, but if it is no longer joyful then you have to get out of it. And there is no need to get angry and destructive, and there is no need to carry a grudge – because nothing can be done about love. Love is like a breeze. You see…it just comes. If it is there it is there. Then it is gone. And when it is gone it is gone. Love is a mystery, you cannot manipulate it. Love should not be manipulated, love should not be legalized, love should not be forced – for no reason at all.In a commune, people will be living together just out of the sheer joy of being together, for no other reason. And when the joy has disappeared, they part. Maybe it feels sad, but they have to part. Maybe the nostalgia of the past still lingers in the mind, but they have to part. They owe it to each other that they should not live in misery, otherwise misery becomes a habit. They part with heavy hearts, but with no grudge. They will seek other partners.In the future there will be no marriage as it has been in the past, and no divorce as it has been in the past. Life will be more liquid, more trusting. There will be more trust in the mysteries of life than in the clarities of the law, more trust in life itself than in anything – the court, the police, the priest, the church. And the children should belong to all – they should not carry the badges of their family. They will belong to the commune; the commune will take care of them.This will be the most revolutionary step in human history – for people to start living in communes and to start being truthful, honest, trusting, and to go on dropping the law more and more.In a family, love disappears sooner or later. In the first place it may not have been there at all from the very beginning. It may have been an arranged marriage – for other motives, for money, power, prestige. There may not have been any love from the very beginning. Then children are born out of a wedlock which is more like a deadlock – children are born out of no love. From the very beginning they become deserts. And this no-love state in the house makes them dull, unloving. They learn their first lesson of life from their parents, and the parents are unloving and there is constant jealousy and fighting and anger. And the children go on seeing the ugly faces of their parents.Their very hope is destroyed. They can’t believe that love is going to happen in their life if it has not happened in their parents’ life. And they see other parents also, other families also. Children are very perceptive; they go on looking all around and observing. When they see that there is no possibility of love, they start feeling that love is only in poetry, it exists only for poets, visionaries – it has no actuality in life. And once you have learned the idea that love is just poetry, then it will never happen because you have become closed to it.To see it happen is the only way to let it happen later on in your own life. If you see your father and mother in deep love, in great love, caring for each other, with compassion for each other, with respect for each other – then you have seen love happening. Hope arises. A seed falls into your heart and starts growing. You know it is going to happen to you too.If you have not seen it, how can you believe it is going to happen to you too? If it didn’t happen to your parents. how can it happen to you? In fact, you will do everything to prevent it happening to you – otherwise it will look like a betrayal to your parents. This is my observation of people: women go on saying deep in the unconscious, “Look, Mom, I am suffering as much as you suffered.” Boys go on saying to themselves later on, “Dad, don’t be worried, my life is as miserable as yours. I have not gone beyond you, I have not betrayed you. I remain the same miserable person as you were. I carry the chain, the tradition. I am your representative, Dad, I have not betrayed you. Look, I am doing the same thing as you used to do to my mother – I am doing it to the mother of my children. And what you used to do to me, I am doing to my children. I am bringing them up in the same way you brought me up.”Now the very idea of bringing up children is nonsense. You can help at the most, you cannot bring them up. The very idea of building up children is nonsense – not only nonsense, very harmful, immensely harmful. You cannot build…. A child is not a thing, not like a building. A child is like a tree. Yes, you can help. You can prepare soil, you can put in fertilizers, you can water, you can watch whether sun reaches the plant or not – that’s all. But it is not that you are building up the plant, it is coming up on its own. You can help, but you can not bring it up and you cannot build it up.Children are immense mysteries. The moment you start building them up, the moment you start creating patterns and characters around them, you are imprisoning them. They will never be able to forgive you. And this is the only way they will learn. And they will do the same thing to their children, and so on, so forth. Each generation goes on giving its neurosis to the new people that come to the earth. And the society persists with all its madness, misery.No, a different kind of thing is needed now. Man has come of age and the family is a thing of the past; it really has no future. The commune will be the thing that can replace the family, and it will be far more beneficial.But in a commune only meditative people can be together. Only when you know how to celebrate life can you be together; only when you know that space I call meditation can you be together, can you be loving. The old nonsense of monopolizing love has to be dropped, then only can you live in a commune. If you go on carrying your old ideas of monopoly – that your woman should not hold somebody else’s hand and your husband should not laugh with anybody else – if you carry these nonsensical things in your mind then you cannot become part of a commune.If your husband is laughing with somebody else, it is good. Your husband is laughing – laughter is always good, with whom it happens it doesn’t matter. Laughter is good, laughter is a value. If your woman is holding somebody else’s hand…good. Warmth is flowing – the flow of warmth is good, it is a value. With whom it is happening is immaterial. And if it is happening to your woman with many people, it will go on happening with you too. If it has stopped happening with anybody else, then it is going to stop with you too. The whole old idea is so stupid!It is as if the moment your husband goes out, you say to him, “Don’t breathe anywhere else. When you come home you can breathe as much as you want, but only when you are with me can you breathe. Outside hold your breath, become a yogi. I don’t want you to breathe anywhere else.” Now this looks stupid. But then why should love not be like breathing. Love is breathing.Breathing is the life of the body and love is the life of the soul. It is far more important than breathing. Now when your husband goes out, you make it a point that he should not laugh with anybody else, not at least with any other woman. He should not be loving to anybody else. So for twenty-three hours he is unloving, then for one hour when he is in bed with you, he pretends to love. You have killed his love. It is flowing no more. If for twenty-three hours he has to remain a yogi, holding his love, afraid, do you think he can relax suddenly for one hour? It is impossible You destroy the man, you destroy the woman, and then you are fed-up, bored. Then you start feeling, “He does not love me!” And it is you who created the whole thing. And then he starts feeling that you don’t love him, and you are no longer as happy as you used to be before.When people meet on a beach, when they meet in a garden, when they are on a date, nothing is settled and everything is liquid; both are very happy Why? Because they are free. The bird on the wing is one thing, and the same bird in a cage is another thing. They are happy because they are free.Man cannot be happy without freedom, and your old family structure destroyed freedom. And because it destroyed freedom it destroyed happiness, it destroyed love. It has been a kind of survival measure. Yes, it has somehow protected the body, but it has destroyed the soul. Now there is no need for it. We have to protect the soul too. That is far more essential and far more important.There is no future for the family, not in the sense that it has been understood up to now. There is a future for love and love relationships. “Husband” and “wife” are going to become ugly and dirty words.And whenever you monopolize the woman or the man, naturally you monopolize the children also. I agree totally with Thomas Gordon. He says, “I think all parents are potential child-abusers, because the basic way of raising children is through power and authority. I think it is destructive when many parents have the idea: ‘It is my kid, I can do what I want to do with my kid.’” It is violent, it is destructive, to have the idea: ‘It is my kid and I can do whatsoever I want with it.’ A kid is not a thing, it is not a chair, is not a car. You cannot do whatsoever you want to do with him. He comes through you but he does not belong to you. He belongs to God, to existence. You are at the most a caretaker; don’t become possessive.But the whole family idea is one of possession – possess property, possess the woman, possess the man, possess children – and possessiveness is poison. Hence, I am against the family. But I am not saying that those who are really happy in their families – flowing, alive, loving – have to destroy it. No, there is not need. Their family is already a commune, a small commune.And of course a bigger commune will be far better, with more possibilities, more people. Different people bring different songs, different people bring different life styles, different people bring different breathings, different breezes, different people bring different rays of light – and children should be showered with as many different life styles as possible, so they can choose, so they can have the freedom to choose.And they should be enriched by knowing so many women that they are not obsessed by the mother’s face or the mother’s style. Then they will be able to love many more women, many more men. Life will be more of an adventure.I have heard….A mother visiting a department store took her son to the toy department. Spying a gigantic rocking-horse, he climbed upon it and rocked back and forth for almost an hour.“Come on, son,” the mother pleaded, “I have to go home to get father’s dinner.” The little lad refused to budge and all her efforts were unavailing. The department manager also tried to coax the little fellow, without meeting with any success. Eventually, in desperation, they called for the store psychiatrist.Gently he walked over and whispered a few words in the boy’s ear, and immediately the lad jumped off and ran to his mother’s side.”How did you do it?” the mother asked incredulously. “What did you say to him?”The psychiatrist hesitated for a moment, then said, “All I said was, ‘If you don’t jump off that rocking-horse at once, son, I will knock the stuffing out of you!’”People learn sooner or later that fear works, that authority works, that power works. And children are so helpless and they are so dependent on the parents that you can make them afraid. It becomes your technique to exploit them and oppress them, and they have nowhere to go.In a commune they will have many places to go. They will have many uncles and many aunts and many people – they will not be so helpless. They will not be in your hands as much as they are right now. They will have more independence, less helplessness. You will not be able to coerce them so easily.And all that they see in the home is misery. Sometimes, yes I know, sometimes the husband and wife are loving, but whenever they are loving it is always in private. Children don’t know about it. Children see only the ugly faces, the ugly side. When the mother and the father are loving, they are loving behind closed doors. They keep quiet, they never allow the children to see what love is. The children see only their conflict – nagging, fighting, hitting each other, in gross and subtle ways, insulting each other, humiliating each other. Children go on seeing what is happening.A man is sitting in his living room reading the newspaper when his wife comes over and slaps him.“What was that for?” asked the indignant husband.“That is for being a lousy lover.”A little while later the husband goes over to where the wife is sitting watching TV and he gives her a resounding smack.“What was that for?” she yelled at him.To which he answered, “For knowing the difference.”This goes on and on, and the children go on watching what is happening. Is this life? Is this what life is meant for? Is this all there is? They start losing hope. Before they enter into life they are already failures, they have accepted failure. If their parents who are so wise and powerful cannot succeed, what hope is there for them? It is impossible.And they have learned the tricks – tricks of being miserable, tricks of being aggressive. Children never see love happening. In a commune there will be more possibilities. Love should come out into the open a little more. People should know that love happens. Small children should know what love is. They should see people caring for each other.Here in this ashram, people, particularly Indians, come to me and they say, “Why is this so? Sannyasins showing so much love towards each other – in public?” It offends them. This is one of their problems, their great problems.Just the other day a magazine came – a Marathi magazine – and a man had written an article against me. He said, “Everything is okay, but I can’t understand…. When Osho goes, after his discourse, there is much hugging and kissing – that is very ugly.”That is not one man’s idea – that is a very ancient idea, an old idea. The idea is that you can fight in public but you cannot be loving in public. Fight is okay. You can murder, that is allowed. In fact, when two persons are fighting, a crowd will stand there to see what is happening. And everybody will enjoy it. That’s why people go on reading and enjoying murder stories, suspense stories, detective stories. Murder is allowed, love is not allowed. If you are loving in public it is thought to be obscene. Now this is absurd. Love is obscene and murder is not obscene? Lovers are not to be loving in public and generals can go on walking in public showing all their medals – these are the murderers and these medals are for murder! Those medals show how much they have murdered, how many people they have killed. That is not obscene.That should be the obscene thing. Nobody should be allowed to fight in public. It is obscene; violence is obscene. How can love be obscene? But love is thought to be obscene. You have to hide it in darkness. You have to make love so nobody knows. You have to make it so silently, so stealthily…naturally you can t enjoy it much. And people don’t become aware of what love is. Children, particularly, have no way of knowing what love is.In a better world, with more understanding, love will be there all over. Children will see what caring is. Children will see what joy it brings when You care for somebody. You can see it happening here. You can see little Siddhartha holding a girl’s hand in a great caring, in great love. If they watch, they learn. If they know it happens, their doors open.Love should be accepted more, violence should be rejected more. Love should be available more. Two persons making love should not be worried that no one should know. They should laugh, they should sing, they should scream in joy, so that the whole neighborhood knows that somebody is being loving to somebody – somebody is making love.Love should be such a gift. Love should be so divine. It is sacred.You can publish a book about a man being killed, that’s okay that is not pornography. To me, that is pornography. You cannot publish a book about a man lovingly holding a woman in deep, naked embrace – that is pornography. This world has existed against love up till now. Your family is against love, your society is against love, your state is against love. It is a miracle that love has still remained a little, it is unbelievable that love Still goes on – not as it should be, it is just a small drop not an ocean – but that it has survived so many enemies is a miracle. It as not been destroyed completely – it is a miracle.My vision of a commune is of loving people living together with no antagonism towards each other, with no competition with each other, with love that is fluid, more available, with no jealousy and no possession. And the children will belong to all because they belong to God – everybody takes care of them. And they are such beautiful people, these children, who will not take care of them? And they have so many possibilities to see so many people loving, and each person lives in his own way, each woman loves in her own way – let the children see, play, enjoy. While their parents are making love, let them be there, let them be a part of it. Let them watch what happens to their mother when she makes love – how ecstatic her face becomes, what glow comes to her face, how her eyes close and she goes deep into herself; how their father becomes orgasmic, how he screams with joy. Let the children know!Let the children know many people loving. They will become more rich. And I tell you that if these children exist in the world, none of them will read Playboy; There will be no need. And none of them will read Vatasayana’s kama sutra, there will be no need. Nude and naked pictures will disappear. They simply show starved sex, starved love.The world will become almost non-sexual, it will be so loving. Your priest and your policeman have created all kinds of obscenity in the world. They are the source of all that is ugly. And your family has played a great part. The family has to disappear. It has to disappear into a bigger vision of a commune, of a life not based on small identities, more floating.In a commune, somebody will be a Buddhist, somebody will be a Hindu, somebody will be a Jaina, somebody will be a Christian, and somebody will be a Jew. If families disappear, churches will disappear automatically, because families belong to churches. In a commune, there will be all kinds of people, all kinds of religion, all kinds of philosophies floating around, and the child will have the opportunity to learn. One day he goes with one uncle to the church, another day he goes with another uncle to the temple, and he learns all that is there and he can have a choice. He can choose and decide to what religion he would like to belong. Nothing is imposed.Life can become a paradise here and now. The barriers have to be removed. The family is one of the greatest barriers.The last question:Osho,Through the ages, incarnations like Jesus and Buddha have accepted to come and help humanity. If life is no more than a joke, why do they take the trouble?That too is part of this great cosmic joke. Buddha and Christ – they are part of this great game, this play, this leela. Don’t take them seriously, they are not serious people. They are playing a game. It is all a joke.When I say “It is all a joke” I simply mean don’t take it seriously and don’t take it sadly. Let it be fun.Nobody is a savior – neither Buddha nor Jesus – nobody is a savior. I am included in it. Nobody is a savior. Then what is a buddha? A buddha is just a salvation. Not a savior, a salvation. If you understand him, if you look into him, if you partake of him, your life is no longer a misery. It is a bliss.Not that Buddha saves you, not that Jesus saves you. Nobody can save anybody. Only you can save yourself. But they are salvations. And the secret of salvation is: be joyful, don’t be sad. The secret of salvation is: don’t go on creating misery. And the serious face, the long face, is the unreligious face. That’s why I say, “This life is a cosmic joke.” It is not to disparage it, it is not disrespectful. It is the greatest respect that I can show to it – that it is a play. That’s why Hindus call it leela, a play.Be playful, and in that playfulness is your salvation. And it is you and only you who can save yourself. I can make my heart available to you. I’m not a savior, I am a salvation.Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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A Sufi of the order of the naqshbandis was asked, “Your order’s name means literally ‘the designers.' What do you design, and what use is it?”He said, “We do a great deal of designing, and it is most useful. Here is a parable of one such form:‘Unjustly imprisoned, a tinsmith was allowed to receive a rug woven by his wife. He prostrated himself upon the rug day after day to say his prayers, and after some time he said to his jailers, "I am poor and without hope, and you are wretchedly paid. But I am a tinsmith. Bring me tin and tools and I shall make small artifacts which you can sell in the market, and we will both benefit."‘The guards agreed to this, and presently the tinsmith and they were both making a profit, from which they bought food and comforts for themselves.‘Then, one day, when the guards went to the cell, the door was open, and he was gone.‘Many years later, when this man’s innocence had been established, the man who had imprisoned him asked him how he had escaped, what magic he had used. He said, "It is a matter of design, and design within design. My wife is a weaver. She found the man who had made the locks of the cell door, and got the design from him. This she wove into the carpet at the spot where my head touched in prayer five times a day. I am a metal-worker, and the design looked to me like the inside of a lock. I designed the plan of the artifacts to obtain the materials to make the key – and I escaped."“That,” said the naqshbandi Sufi, “is one of the ways in which man may make his escape from the tyranny of his captivity.”Man is born without a definition. He knows he is, but he does not know who he is. He comes into the world absolutely undefined, uncategorized, unlabelled; he comes into the world as a freedom. The whole life’s task is to define himself, to know who he is..Man is the only animal who asks the question, “Who am I?” Only he can ask, because every other animal has a perfect definition. A rose is a rose and a dog is a dog – a man is not just a man. A man has much more in him, infinitely more. The rose is a closed phenomenon, defined; a man is open-ended. The rose is predictable, man is not so. One never knows. One may be a sinner today and tomorrow become the greatest of saints – or vice versa. Man remains open, man remains liquid, man remains flowing. Man is more like a process than like a defined thing. That is man’s glory, and his misery too – because he constantly hankers to know who he is. And again and again he stumbles into the darkness of his being. His being is not illumined – hence the search, the inquiry.On this point man has to be understood. because only from this understanding can he start working towards a definition, towards realization, towards truth.When I say “man is born without definition” I mean that man is not born ready-made. What existentialists say is true – they say that in man, existence precedes his essence. In a tree, the essence comes first, then the existence. The same is true about everything else, except man. Essence comes first – the seed, the essential program, the essential design. The blueprint comes first. Then the blueprint unfolds and becomes existence.In man just the reverse is the case. First he starts existing – without any blueprint, without any design, without being programmed in any way. He simply starts existing as a nothingness, as nobody. And then, by and by, he has to create his own identity, he has to create himself. He has to work it out, hence the anxiety. One may be able to, one may not be able to – who knows? One may succeed, one may not succeed…there is no guarantee in man.A dog is bound to succeed – he will become a dog. There is no more to it. A peacock has no fear of being a failure. A tiger need not worry, need not suffer from insomnia. He is already that which he can be.Man is not that which he can be, man is just a beginning – and the end remains unknown. Man brings no program into the world, man is not born ready-made. He is born as utter freedom.So the responsibility is great – because otherwise you will go on missing your own soul. The responsibility is towards yourself. You will never feel fulfilled, you will always remain empty. If you don’t start discovering, creating, inventing, if you don’t start working for your being, you will remain just an existence without an essence.That’s what is happening to millions of people. They have no souls. They exist, obviously, but their existence has no fulfillment in it, no contentment in it, no joy. This state is the state of existential anguish, tension, misery – what Buddha calls dukkha, utter misery. Blissfulness comes when you have come out of the darkness, you have become defined, you have become illuminated, you have an inner flame and now you know who you are. By knowing this, you have found your home – otherwise you remain a stranger, always searching for the home and never at home anywhere You remain a traveler you never know rest – because rest is possible only when you have come home.So the whole life is a search for the home – a place where you can rest and relax, a space where you can be yourself, utterly fulfilled in your being. Existence has to become essence. existence has to produce essence.And when I say “man has to create himself” I mean that’s how he participates in God. Animals live; they don’t create. Trees live; they don’t create. Even if something comes out of them, it is a natural production – the fruit will come, the flowers will come. It is only man who creates. There is no necessity…. There was no possibility of predicting that Picasso would do his paintings. A mango tree will produce mangoes but nothing is certain about man. Picasso will produce paintings, or become a buddha, or a dancer…nobody knows.Man is a chaos, a creative chaos. He is very nebulous in his being. You cannot demark him, you cannot say exactly what he is. And man goes on changing every day. He is river-like. This is man’s dignity. He is the only animal who can create; he is the only animal who participates in God’s creativity.But then there is also a problem. No glory can come without a problem with it. The glory is that you can miss. You may not be able to sing your song, you may not be able to dance your dance – you may be a failure. So man is constantly surrounded by fear – fear of failure; fear of remaining nobody; fear of remaining a nothingness, an unfulfilled, yearning nothingness; fear of remaining barren; fear of remaining a desert. Who knows? You can’t be certain about it. There is no guarantee in man’s existence.The possibility of failure is ninety-nine per cent. The possibility of success is only one per cent – hence there is a trembling in man’s heart. Every step is in the unknown, with no guarantee, with no security. Every path is taking you into the unknown. You don’t know whether it will lead you to the goal or whether it will just turn into a cul-de-sac. It may reach only to a precipice from where there is no going anywhere. You may have to come back and all the effort may be a wastage. Nobody knows.One has to move into darkness not knowing where one is going. But one still has to move – because if you don’t move, then too life goes on slipping by. It is better to move than not to move, because with movement there is at least a possibility that you may arrive. With no moving, there is not even that possibility. One has to choose.And all alternatives look alike. It is as if you are standing at a crossroad – all roads look alike. It may be this, it may be that, and there is no way to decide a priori that this is going to be right. You have to search and seek. Trial and error is the only method available to man – that’s why many people decide not to choose. That keeps them in a more convenient and comfortable life. It is better to sit on the crossroads and not to choose, not to go anywhere. At least you can avoid being in error.But just by avoiding being in error, you don’t become fulfilled. You may not have committed any error but you have not arrived anywhere. So the people who are very much afraid of making mistakes are the ones who lose this opportunity, this great opportunity, to grow, to be.Man has to find himself. He has to ask. This cannot be avoided. Those who avoid, avoid at their own risk. “Who am I?” – this has to be asked and this has to be asked continuously till the answer arrives from the deepest core of one’s being. This is the only religious question.And, remember, man is not a being because he is not ready-made. He is not a being because he is a process. So man is a bridge. He has to be surpassed, he has to be outgrown – that is, to find himself he has to go beyond himself. Man is continually trying to transcend himself, to surpass himself.This is very paradoxical – the effort to surpass oneself – but man is a paradoxical being. It is a bridge you have to pass over. You cannot make your house on the bridge. Those who make their houses on the bridge will never reach to the other shore. One has to go on. There are a thousand and one anxieties in going, there are a thousand and one problems, a thousand and one hazards, but in spite of all that, one has to go on. One has to commit many mistakes before one can know what truth is.That’s why man has to be constantly departing from his past. The past is the known, the known you, and the future is the unknown you. And you have always to sacrifice the known you for the unknown you. This is what all great religions teach. This is what they call sacrifice. Sacrifice that which you have known, all that that you have become identified with. Sacrifice the past for the future, the known for the unknown, the settled for the unsettled. This is the only way to grow. If you become too much identified with the past, growth stops. If you become too much entangled with the past, you start moving in circles.Man is not a pilgrim but a pilgrimage. And obviously there are problems, great problems. Problems don’t exist for animals and trees and rocks and rivers, problems exist only for man – because everything else is defined, everything is settled already by nature itself. Nature has left man unsettled; man has been left to his own efforts, his own endeavors. But these problems have to be understood not as problems, but as challenges not enemies, but as friends – because it is only through them that one learns, one knows, one becomes.Because of this search, maps have to be devised, designs have to be devised. Because of this search, you will need guidelines. Remember, a map is just a map, it is not the country that it represents. The map of India is not India. No design is the truth. The design is just a design, but it can help tremendously. A map can help tremendously, knowing perfectly well that the map is not the country. The map does not even resemble the country – by seeing the map of India you will not be seeing anything of India. The map resembles nothing. The map is just a parallel device; it is a metaphor, a symbolic representation.But it can be of great help. Those who have gone beyond can create designs for you – that’s the function of a master. Those who have known, those who have arrived, those who have attained to their definition, those who are no longer just existential but who have become essences; those who have become souls, crystallized, centered, grounded; those who are – can give you a few guidelines, a few hints, a few maps.Sufis call them designs, and there exists a school of Sufis called “the designers” – naqshbandi. It is one of the most important Sufi schools. There are others. They are all called by names like this. Another school is called “the weavers,” another school is called “the boat makers.” Sufis have such names. Those names are very practical – they immediately indicate what the school is doing.Naqshbandis have been designing maps – what in India we call yantra. A yantra is called a design by Sufis. You may have seen Indian yantras and you may be puzzled about what they are. Looking at a yantra there are only lines, geometrical designs – but if you know how to decode it, you will be surprised. It is the map of your whole journey. It shows something, but you will have to know the language. The map is in a certain language, it is not available to the public – because the public can use it in a dangerous way. It hides great power within it. It can be given only to the initiates. All world religions have created their designs, but nothing to compare with the naqshbandis.First it has to be understood that a map is a device – arbitrary. It is neither true nor false. It is simply useful or not useful. It is a utilitarian device. It has nothing to do with truth as such.Once Buddha was asked, “Can a buddha lie? Can a man who is enlightened, lie?” Buddha said, “He has to – because he will have to devise maps. Maps are lies – lies in the sense that they are not truth. They are indications towards truth. Once you have reached, you will throw away the map. It was just useful.” So Buddha has defined truth in a very novel way. He says, “That which is useful is true.” His definition is very pragmatic, practical, very scientific. So is the attitude of the naqshbandis.An ancient parable, a famous naqshbandi parable, is that of a father who called his children out of a building which was on fire. When they ignored him, he called them to come and get the toy cars he had brought for them – whereupon they came running. He did not have any toy cars but he saved his children’s lives.Now he lied. The children, small children, must have been playing inside the house. They must have become too involved in their play to see that the house was on fire. But the father was outside and he saw the danger and he called them. He shouted. “Come out!” But they were so involved in their game that they didn’t listen. He invented a lie. He said, “Look! I have brought the toy cars that you have always wanted. So many, and so beautiful! Come on and take your toy cars!” And they all came running out. There were no toy cars, the father was lying – but he saved their lives.Now this is a design, this is a naqshbandi, this is a device. It is neither true nor false, but it is useful, tremendously useful. Will you say that when the father lied, he committed a sin? – because all religions say, “Be true. Speak the truth.”It happens many times, because you are all children and the house is on fire and you won’t listen. You are so involved in your games. Somebody is involved in money games, somebody in politics, somebody in something else. People are so much involved. To their very end they will remain clouded by their dreams and desires.And the house is constantly on fire. Because you are living in death, the house is constantly on fire. Any moment you will be gone. But you are so much into your games that the master has to devise something.It happened….A man used to come to a great saint and he would always ask, “Sir, one thing puzzles me. You are so innocent, so pure, how is this possible? Suspicion arises in my mind that maybe you simply pretend. In this world of corruption, how can one be so pure and innocent and so virgin? How can one avoid being corrupted by the world? Maybe deep down you still carry the same thing but on the surface you have maintained it, you have maintained it well.”One day the man came. He again started to say the same thing. And the master said, “Listen, there is something more important to be said to you. Just show me your hand.” He looked at his hand, became very sad, closed his eyes and started to cry. The man said, “What is the matter? Why are you crying, Sir? I have never seen you crying.”He said, “I am crying because only seven days are left. Within seven days you will be gone. Your lifeline is cut. Next Sunday you will die. That’s why I am crying. Now you can ask whatsoever you want to ask. You wanted to ask something?”The man said, “I have forgotten. You have disturbed me very much. Only seven days?”Now this master was so loved by people, so much respected, that there was no reason to suspect that he would tell a lie.The man rushed home, fell ill, didn’t move from his bed for seven days, was sinking every day, stopped eating, could not sleep. The relatives gathered. On the seventh day they were just waiting, because the master had said that as the sun sets, he would die. And there was just half an hour to go. The sun was just coming down, coming down, and relatives and friends and the wife and the children were crying and the man was just sinking into death.Then the master came and said to the man, “I have one question to ask. In these seven days have you committed anything that you used to call sin, impurity, corruption, this and that? Did any idea come into your mind, any worldly idea?”The man opened his eyes with great difficulty. He said, “What are you talking about? I am dying! How can a man have any ideas of sin or of the world when he is dying? Only death was there around me. It was coming closer. In these seven days there was not a single worldly desire in me. I was only thinking of God. I was praying, repeating God’s name.”The master laughed. He said, “You can get up. You are not going to die! That was only a design to show you why I am pure. Death surrounds me continuously. What does it matter whether it is coming in seven days or seven years or seventy years? It doesn’t matter. It is only a question of time. It is coming – that much is certain – it Is coming. When death is coming, this becomes very, very clear to your consciousness. Life goes through a great change, a radical change.”The man started laughing. He said, “You played a joke!” He was perfectly okay; within minutes he was okay. But he said, “Master, one thing, how could you lie?”The master said, “It is neither a lie, nor a truth; it is a design, a naqshbandi.”Maps have been invented to help you. They are arbitrary. Never become too obsessed with a map. Use it if you can; if you cannot, forget all about it. It has nothing valuable in it beyond its use.Man has been thrown into the world for a certain reason. That has to be understood. Christianity has given the idea to the whole world that man has been thrown into the world as a punishment. That is a very stupid idea. Not only is the idea stupid, it makes even God look stupid, arrogant and mad. He threw man into the world for such a small thing! – because Adam disobeyed him? Each child disobeys the father, has to disobey the father. In fact, by disobeying the father, he tries to define himself. That is the only way to define himself. Each child has to go against the parents some day or other. If he never goes against the parents he will never be. Then he will be just a shadow. He has to rebel; he has to say no. Remember, “no-saying” is nothing but an effort to define yourself. When you go on saying yes, you lose definition.Adam and Eve were doing what each child has to do. It is so psychological. God said, “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree, this tree of knowledge.” If you ask the Sufis they will say that this is a naqshbandi, it is a design. God is provoking them to eat the fruit of this tree. He is not prohibiting; in fact, he is provoking. In the Garden of Eden there were millions of trees. If Adam had been left to himself to find the tree of knowledge he might not have found it yet. It was only one tree in those millions of trees; nothing was special about it. It was just an ordinary apple tree. There were millions of apple trees like it but this was poisoned by knowledge.Why did God say to Adam, “Don’t eat the fruit of this tree?” Christians think that he wanted to discipline Adam, that he wanted him to be obedient. That is not true. Ask the naqshbandis, because they are the people who know how to design things. They are the designers. They know that God designed the first design. He provoked Adam, challenged Adam. He created the idea and the desire to rebel by forcing an absurd commandment – “Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge.” He created a longing in Adam and Eve.They must have dreamed about this tree from then onwards. They must have gone around the tree again and again. They must have touched the fruit, they must have smelled the fruit, they must have been waiting for the right moment. They must have keen hesitant. Each child is afraid – they must also have been afraid. Each child is. Many times they must have gone and come back, many times they must have been on the verge of committing disobedience, rebellion, and they must have become frightened – “If God comes to know, then what?” But how long can you resist this desire to say no? – because the whole thing is a design. Once Adam says no to God he becomes himself. By saying no he defines himself.That’s why there is an age when children say no to every-thing. You say anything and they will say no. They are defining themselves. They are saying, “This is my definition, this is "I am.” You keep aloof. Let me be. This is my space. I don’t want to do this.”Just last night a sannyasin came with her small boy, so small, to take sannyas. I looked at the boy, and there was Adam in the boy’s eyes. He wanted to say no. His eyes were saying no. His whole body was saying no. And I loved the boy. When I put the mala on his head he threw it away!It has to be so. The boy has some spirit, Adam’s spirit. He was saving, “How dare you? I am myself. I can’t be defined by anybody else.” It was not in so many words – he had no words – but in his gesture, his reluctant look, his face, his withdrawing of the body, his throwing away of the mala.That’s what Adam did. He had to do it to be himself. It was a design from God. This interpretation has a beauty. The naqshbandis say it was a design from God to provoke Adam – because unless he was provoked, he would never become grown-up. He had to say no to God so he could go on his way into the world. It is not a punishment, not at all. God is not arrogant.When this child threw away the mala, I loved him as I have never loved any other small child. He has some courage. So small, but such great courage! So tiny, but ready to fight with the whole world! God did not punish Adam; God loved Adam. If Adam had followed God, there would have been no world, there would have been nobody here. It is by disobeying God, by saying no, that man became man, attained to his first definition, attained to his first feeling of being himself.God is neither arrogant nor egoistic nor mad. He must have loved and blessed Adam. That’s my feeling too. When Adam was going out of the Garden of Eden there must have been a showering of God’s blessing on him. Now he is going on his way. That’s what every father would like his children to do. One day they should go on their own way; they should seek and search and be. How long can you remain protected? You have to go into insecurity, you have to go into sin, you have to go into the world. It is not expulsion, it is Adam’s rebellion. And it is not punishment, it is well-planned and designed. It is by this design that God created the world.Now Christians have not understood it at all and they have made a very foolish story out of it – that God condemned Adam.And then the second part of the story follows naturally. Then Jesus said yes to God and was accepted back again. Now Christians say that because Adam committed a sin of disobedience, the whole humanity suffered. And because Jesus accepted God again, said yes totally, the whole humanity was saved through Jesus.This too is meaningless. How can you suffer for Adam’s sin? And how can you be saved by Jesus being saved? Then where do you come in? What is your responsibility? Then you are just puppets. Adam committed a sin and you suffer. You have not been a participant in it. You don’t know anything about Adam – when he was, whether he ever was or not – and you are suffering because Adam committed a sin.This is unjust. Somebody committed a sin thousands of years ago, and you are suffering, you are being punished for it. This is very far-fetched justice! It doesn’t look right. And then, two thousand years ago Jesus said yes to God, and was saved; and you are saved in Jesus being saved. So somebody commits a sin and you become a sinner, and somebody becomes a saint and you become a saint. Where do you come in? Then what is your responsibility? Then you are nothing. The whole drama is complete between Adam and Jesus. Whether you are or you are not makes no difference. If there had been no Adam you would not be here, and if there had been no Jesus you would never have been saved. All foolish attitudes. You are neither punished because of Adam nor are you saved because of Jesus. You will be whatsoever you are going to be by your own self, by your own responsibility. You will either miss or get, but it will be your responsibility.The naqshbandis say that this was the first naqshbandi, the first design that God created. He created a situation in which Adam rebelled. And since then man has been rebelling. Man has to go into the darkness to come back home. It is not a punishment. Man is not thrown into the world to be punished; man is thrown into the world to learn, to discover, to be.Robert Frost used to pray every night. I loved his prayer. He used to say to God, “God, if you forgive me my petitions against you, I promise you that I will forgive you your great sin against me. I promise that I will forgive you your great sin against me and against humanity.”It is meaningful. If Adam is thought to have committed a sin, it is a small sin. And Adam is a child – he can be forgiven. But what about God? He provoked him. What about God? He created the whole situation. If Adam’s act is thought to be a sin, then it is a small sin, a peccadillo, a very small sin. But what about God? Was he not aware of one very small thing a thing any psychologist knows about? – that is, if you provoke, if you challenge, you create a situation. He provoked Adam – that was his great sin. If Adam’s sin is a sin, God’s sin is greater.But neither is a sin. I don’t call Adam’s sin a small sin and I don’t call God’s sin a great sin. It was simply a design to help Adam to move on his own, to stand on his own.Have you watched? When trees bloom and the fruit comes and the seeds ripen, every tree tries to send its seeds far away – with the wind, with the birds. And if the tree sometimes feels that the wind will not be able to take the seed, that the seed is heavy, then it creates devices, naqshbandis, to send the seed far away – because if the seed falls underneath the big tree it will never grow. It has to be on its own; it has to find its own space.There are trees which grow their seeds with a small bit of cotton around them. The seed is heavy but the cotton is weightless; the wind can take the cotton away. Then the seed will also go away, far away, and will fall onto some open space where it can become a great tree.That’s what God did with Adam. He tried to push him away – because you can grow only when you are on your own. One day the child has to be sent to the school, one day the child has to be sent to the hostel, one day the child has to go to the university. He goes crying and weeping. He does not want to leave the family and the familiar. He does not want to leave the past, the comfort, the protection, the security, the safety. He does not want to leave, but he has to be pushed. He has to be thrown into the world. That’s what God did. It was a device.Once you are thrown into the world you will learn on your own. Many times you will fail, that’s natural, but by failing again and again, some insight will start arising in you. And that insight will take you back.Adam came into the world…he had to come. When Adam learns, becomes, attains to his being, he becomes Christ. Christ is nothing but Adam who has become grown-up. Now he can go back home. Now God will welcome him there. He has learned. The world itself is a naqshbandi for people to be.“Consciousness is not like a thing: solid, complete, full and given” It has to be learned, it has to be grown, it has to be guarded. You have to be a gardener of consciousness. You have to provide water, space, sun rays, fertilizers. You have to protect this small sprout – very delicate it is, vulnerable it is, soft it is. It can be crushed by anything.So remember: “Consciousness is not like a thing: solid, complete, full and given. It is a process and a self-creation. It is our continual improvisation based on the rejection of what it has been up to this moment.”This has to be understood. Consciousness grows only if you go on rejecting your past. Ordinarily we cling to the past – then the consciousness does not grow. Whatsoever you have learned, forget about it. It is finished. You have learned it; you have absorbed it. Whatsoever you have been up to now, drop it so that you can be something more. Never be confined by your past. People who become confined by the past are the prisoners.That’s what naqshbandi Sufis call the prison, the prison of the past. It has to be broken every day. Each moment one has to grow out of it.“To be is to spurn from one what one has been. In so far as one does not do that, one approximates to a thing and ceases to be a person.” If you don’t have any future, if you only have a past, you are a thing, not a person. A person is one who has a future. A person is one who is always unburdened by the past, who goes on dropping the past, who goes on rejecting it. It has been lived already so what is the point of carrying it? It has been known already, it has been experienced already; there is no need to go on repeating it. When a person becomes non-repetitive, when he does not go on repeating the same experience again and again, he grows. Great growth happens.“Man has the characteristic of self-transcendence.” You have to go beyond whatsoever you think of as yourself. Always and always you have to leave whatsoever you think of as yourself; you have to drop it, you have to renounce it.This is what I call renunciation, sannyas. That’s why I give you a new name when you are initiated – just to indicate. Again it is a naqshbandi – it is just to indicate that your past is finished, that that chapter is closed. Start something new, a rebirth. Be born again. It is just a metaphor. If you understand it well, you can make great use of it. And from the moment you become a sannyasin, you have to remember it continuously. Every night when you go to bed to sleep, close your eyes and close the chapter that has passed. Be finished with it. Say to yourself that the past is no more. Consciously, deliberately, drop it, renounce it, so that the next morning you can be fresh again, clean again, young again, innocent again. Only then does consciousness grow.“Man has the characteristic of self-transcendence.” He is as something to be surpassed. In plain language, man is free – or rather, man is freedom. Freedom is the essence of man, or, in man existence precedes essence. Man first is, only afterwards is this or that. Man must create for himself his own essence, his own soul, his own being. Man is a continual birth – by himself, to himself, through himself, for himself.This is the task, the life task, that faces everybody. And for this you need maps. All religions are different kinds of maps. And remember never to mix maps. If you are using one map, use it with great alertness, awareness, dedication, commitment. Don’t mix it with other maps because different maps have been made by different people with different ideas behind them. They are not planned on the same lines. One map may be a road map, another map may be a railway line, another may be a political map showing boundaries, another may be a religious map showing something else, another may be a geographical map showing something else. All maps are different devices by different people. Don’t mix the maps, otherwise you will become confused. If you are using one map, one map is enough.That’s why I am very much against the efforts that go on in the world to synthesize all religions. They cannot be synthesized. It will be as stupid and as foolish as somebody synthesizing chemistry and psychology and physiology and physics and biology and history and geography and religion. It will be as absurd. The different religions are different maps showing different territories, different ways.Yes, there is ultimately one truth, they all arrive at the same goal – but they start from different standpoints. Their starting points are different. The ultimate arriving point is-the same but there is no need to make a synthesis of the starting points. otherwise you will be confused. So whatsoever map appeals to you – listen deeply to your heart – whatsoever map appeals to you, then be dedicated to it, be committed to it.Before we enter into the parable, three things have to be understood. There are three pillars of Sufism. This is a naqshbandi, a design, to help you. This is a kind of map. The first is islam, the second is iman and the third is ihsan.Islam means surrender – surrender of the ego, surrender of the past, surrender of the so-called self you have come to believe you are – utter surrender. That is the first basic pillar. Islam is a beautiful word. It has many other meanings too, but the basic is surrender, samarpan. The second meaning of islam is peace. When one surrenders, there is peace – because when you surrender, all conflict disappears. When you have surrendered to a master or to a school or to a certain map, you are in a great peace. Now you are not fighting. You have found somebody you can trust. You have found somebody who knows the way. You have found somebody who has the light in him. You can follow. In great trust, peace arises. How can there be conflict when trust has happened, when surrender has happened?.The third meaning is silence. Peace means that now there is no more conflict in life, no more choosing in life – this way or that. “Should I go this way or that? Should I do this or that?” Once you have chosen a master, peace arises because now he is there to tell you what to do and what not to do. And your commitment is total; your involvement is utter; you need not think about it any more. You can put aside the thinking mind. Peace comes. And silence. .Silence is another dimension of peace.Have you watched? Sometimes, whenever it has happened to you – you have surrendered in love to somebody – suddenly there is great silence inside. Not a thought stirs. Not a ripple arises. Outside there may be great noise – the traffic, the airplane, the train – but when you are in silence, suddenly even the noise of the train and the airplane and the traffic has no distraction for you. Even in them you will find silence. When you are silent, you will find silence everywhere.In love a very small surrender happens because in love you are in love with somebody who is equal to you. It cannot be a very great surrender. You know the woman you are surrendered to or the man you are surrendered to, but he is just like you.When you surrender to a master, you are surrendering to something which is far away and yet close by. A master is a ladder. The first rung is very close by and the farthest rung is very far away, high in the skies, whispering with the clouds. When you surrender, one part, one end, of the ladder is in your hands and the other end of the ladder is with God. A master is man-god. He looks like you, exactly like you, and yet he is not like you. He has arrived. He has found. The inquiry is no longer there; the search is no more there. He has no desires left. All is fulfilled.Islam is the first pillar of Sufism – surrender, peace, silence.The second pillar is iman. Iman means trust, faith – not belief. Belief is in concepts; faith is in presence. If what I say appeals to you and you trust it, that will be belief. If what I am attracts you like a magnet, if it pulls you like some unknown energy source, then it is trust. When you believe in a logical statement, it is belief; when you believe in the presence of a person, it is trust. Trust is personal; belief is conceptual. Iman means trust.Sufis say that you cannot work alone. Without a master it is almost impossible. Without a master you will be like an accidental being, haphazardly going this way and that. You can drive yourself crazy more easily than you can become enlightened alone – hence iman is needed, trust is needed.And remember one thing: never for a single moment think, as so many people think, that those who surrender or those who trust, are weak people. No, not at all. Only strong people can surrender and only strong people can trust. Weaklings are always afraid. It is not for the cowards to trust. Trust needs courage; trust means risk. Trust means that now you are opening yourself to somebody totally and you don’t know what is going to happen.He may exploit you, he may destroy you; you are becoming vulnerable. Who knows what this man is going to do to you? You are becoming unprotected; you are taking all guards away. You are opening your armor for this man, and you don’t know what is going to happen. A coward, a weakling, cannot do it. So don’t think for a single moment that those who surrender are cowards or weak. No, not at all. Just the reverse is the case: only the very strong and powerful people can surrender. Iman is for those who are courageous.The first meaning of iman is faith, trust, shraddha. The second meaning of iman is religion – not sect, but religiousness. What is religiousness? The dissatisfaction with the visible is religiousness – dissatisfaction with the visible, with the tangible; dissatisfaction with the world as it is; a discontent with things as they are. With that discontent, with that divine discontent, a great longing arises in you to search for truth, to search for the meaning of life, to search for the source of life: From where does it all come? To where does it all go? What is the foundation of this whole mystery?That is religiousness. It has nothing to do with any sect – Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian. A religious man is a religious man – he is not concerned with being Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian. You can see that quality. When you see a religious man you will not feel that he is a Mohammedan or a Hindu or a Christian, you will simply feel that he is religious. He has a flavor of religiousness around him. His eyes have a shine not of this world and his heart has a beat not of this world. He walks on the earth but his feet do not touch the ground. He is here and not here. He is drunk with something else – you cannot see what he is drunk with. His alcohol is not visible; his wine is not that which can be bought in the marketplace. He has produced a wine in his innermost core and he is drunk with it. You will see it in the way he walks, the way he sits, the way he talks, the way he relates and communicates. There is a drunkenness.If you are available to him you may start getting high just by being in contact with him – a contact-high. Just because he is so turned on, you will start feeling turned on. That is religiousness, that is iman – what Hindus call dharma and what Lao Tzu calls Tao and what the Jews call torah. That is the most fundamental law of religion – to be drunk with the unknown, with the invisible; to be drunk with something that is not of this world, not available here; to be drunk with something penetrating from the beyond. And if you have seen Sufis, you will be surprised – they are the most drunk people in the world.And the third meaning of iman is commitment, involvement – not only by thought but in deed too. It is a conversion, it is an initiation. If you feel that the meaning is missing, then just by thinking you are not going to find it. You will have to commit yourself to it in your totality; your thoughts, your feelings, your actions, all will have to be committed to it.That’s the meaning of sannyas too. It is iman. You are not only supposed to believe in what I say, you are not only to pay lip-service to what I say – you have to become that, you have to represent that, you have to bring it to aliveness in your being, you have to live it. It should not remain a philosophical thing; it should become your very life. Only then, and only then. one arrives – otherwise not.And the third thing is ihsan. Ihsan means authenticity. sincerity. Unless your effort is sincere, nothing is going to happen. You cannot deceive God. You can deceive everybody, you can deceive even yourself – but you cannot deceive God, you cannot deceive the whole. There is no way to do that. You have to be authentic. You have to be true.It happens every day. Somebody comes and wants to become a sannyasin, and I look in his eyes and I look in his heart, and I see it is not going to be authentic. He thinks, “Why not try it? I am here for two, three months – I can become a sannyasin. And then when I go back to Chicago, who bothers? I can change the dress, put the mala away in a suitcase. If something happens, good; if nothing happens, nothing is lost. Why not give it a try?”If you give it a try, nothing is going to happen. Nothing is going to happen because you are not in it. Something is possible only when you are really in it, when you are ready to sacrifice everything to it – your prestige, your name, and everything.Just the other night a sannyasin was here. She is really interested in finding out the meaning of life. She has been a sannyasin for one year but she has not used her new name at all. Now she started feeling a little guilty. She told me, “I have not used the new name at all.” It is not a question of names. If you are not totally in it, then things will not happen, and when they don’t happen you will think, “What was the point of taking sannyas? Drop it, because nothing is happening.” And it is you who are responsible. Things can happen only when you are totally in it, when it is a life-and-death thing.When the name I have given to you becomes your reality, when the way I have told you to live and be, becomes your only way, then things are going to happen, then nobody can prevent them from happening – but never before that.Now I know this sannyasin – Yama is her name. She is a beautiful woman, really in search – but half-heartedly. So she cannot go away because half of her heart is with me, and she cannot enter into me totally because half of her heart is still thinking of other things. Now she will be in difficulty; she will be in a kind of schizophrenia – split.Ihsan means don’t be split. If you don’t want to see God. forget about it. Be in The world; let the world be your only reality. One day or other you will be frustrated. Then the search for God will start. But there is no need to go right now. If you are not ripe yet, it is better to remain in the world. The world will make you ripe for God. There is no hurry. If you are really ready, then don’t ride on two horses. Then choose. That is the meaning of ihsan – authenticity, sincerity.The second meaning of ihsan is virtue – inner virtue, not imposed from the outside. When a person is authentic, a kind of virtue arises in him. You can see the authentic person. The truth is very clear in his being. Everything that he does is very clear. He has a direction, a sense of direction, because his is a sincere search. He knows what he is doing so he does only that which is going to help his ultimate goal, and he drops all that which is irrelevant. He will not waste a single moment of his time and energy on anything else.If you are really a sannyasin then whatsoever you do will be a help towards your goal, your samadhi. If you are playing music, you will play with the idea that it will be part of your meditation. If you are dancing, you will dance to create a more meditative space around you. If you are talking to somebody, you will talk only about things which are going to help; you will not be distracted by rubbish. You will simply say, “This is not for me. I am not interested in it.” You will read only those books which are going to help. You will not waste your time in reading stupid novels. You will not go to any movie and you will not listen to any radio program.Your life will become more and more directed, channelized. You have one purpose, and that purpose is continuously there – like a thread running in everything you are doing. Only then is there a possibility, only then do you become worthy enough. You deserve God’s descending into you.When it is seen that your total effort is directed towards God, that your whole life has become worship, it is ihsan. It is what Buddhists called sheela, virtue.And the third meaning of ihsan is totality, wholeness. Whatsoever you do, don’t hold back. Go into it utterly, don’t remain a spectator – because it is only by being a participant that one comes to know anything. Spectators simply go on missing.If you are dancing, dance; and in that moment let the dance become your all. Put all that you have into it. Not even a small part of you should remain a watcher. You should become involved utterly, absolutely. Those few moments, when you are absolutely in something, are the moments when you are closest to God. Those are the moments of bliss and benediction.These are the three pillars of Islam and Sufism. These three pillars have to be imbibed. And they contain all that is needed for any religious person – Sufi or not Sufi. These three pillars are very essential. This is a design, a naqshbandi. If you can have islam – surrender, peace, silence; iman – faith, religiousness, commitment; ihsan – authenticity, virtue, totality .. . you have the map.Now this small story:A Sufi of the order of the naqshbandis was asked, “Your order’s name means literally ‘the designers.’ What do you design, and what use is it?”He said, “We do a great deal of designing, and it is most useful. Here is a parable of one such form:‘Unjustly imprisoned, a tinsmith was allowed to receive a rug woven by his wife. He prostrated himself upon the rug day after day to say his prayers, and after some time he said to his jailers, "I am poor and without hope, and you are wretchedly paid. But I am a tinsmith. Bring me tin and tools and I shall make small artifacts which you can sell in the market, and we will both benefit."‘The guards agreed to this, and presently they and the tinsmith were both making a profit, from which they bought food and comforts for themselves.‘Then, one day, when the guards went to the cell, the door was open, and he was gone.‘Many years later, when this man’s innocence had been established, the man who had imprisoned him asked him how he had escaped, what magic he had used. He said, "It is a matter of design, and design within design. My wife is a weaver. She found the man who had made the locks of the cell door, and got the design from him. This she wove into the carpet at the spot where my head touched in prayer five times a day. I am a metal-worker, and this design looked to me like the inside of a lock. I designed the plan of the artifacts to obtain the materials to make the key – and I escaped."“That,” said the naqshbandi Sufi, “is one of the ways in which man may make his escape from the tyranny of his captivity.”Man is imprisoned, imprisoned in his own ego. The ego is the prison and if you want to get out of the prison, this is the map: islam, iman, ihsan. If you can manage these three things you have the whole design to get out.It is a beautiful parable, a simple parable – but significant.How can you come out of your present prison – out of where you are? You will have to ask someone who knows.The escaped prisoner said:“It is a matter of design, and design within design. My wife is a weaver. She found the man who had made the locks of the cell door…”There are always men on the earth who have found the man who has made the locks of the cell door. These are the people we call masters. These are the people who have encountered God – who made the first design, who provoked Adam into rebellion. These are the people who have come to see the whole story as it is, who have looked into the whole story of how man enters into the world, why, and how he can go back into the world. Why does Jesus get out of the world, why is he saved and not others? What is the difference? Jesus surrenders, drops his ego…that is the meaning of the Christian cross. He died as an ego, he dies as himself, and is reborn as Christ. Jesus is no more, Jesus dies; Christ is born.In fact, to use these two words together is not right. To call Jesus “Christ” is not right – because they were never together. There was a time when there was Jesus but there was no Christ. Then a time came when there was Christ but there was no Jesus. They were never together. They can’t be together. Jesus is Adam lost in the world – not knowing how he is caught there, getting more and more entangled in the ego. Christ is the consciousness that has understood, that has become alert and has started moving back towards the home – a surrendering.Adam said no. No creates ego, self. Jesus said yes. Yes drops the ego. Yes is islam, surrender, samarpan. By saying yes, the whole direction of his life changed. He started moving back towards the Garden of Eden, towards God’s garden.“It is a matter of design, and design within design. My wife is a weaver. She found the man who had made the locks of the cell door, and got the design from him. This she wove into the carpet at the spot where my head touched in prayer five times a day.”Her idea was that if her husband would be praying on the rug five times a day – how long could he go on missing? That’s why I go on speaking every day. How long can you go on missing? Your head will be touching every day, every day; one day or other you will start looking at the design – “What is the matter? What is going on?” One day you will become alert and awake.“I am a metal worker and this design looked to me like the inside of a lock. I designed the plan of the artifacts to obtain the materials to make the key – and I escaped.”“That,” said the naqshbandi Sufi, “is one of the ways in which man may make his escape from the tyranny of his captivity.”The captivity is of our own making. It is our ego – and we can drop it.So meditate over these three words: islam, iman, ihsan.Enough for today.

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

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/sufis-the-people-of-path-vol-2-14/

The first question:Osho,You say there is nowhere to go. To go somewhere is to perpetuate the illusion.And sometimes I see it….And you say religiousness is to reject the known and one should not stand on the crossroads but dare, and commit mistakes….You say it is already the case – the seeker is the sought….And you say religion is self-creation, constant rebellion….The combination and the harmony of all these things between them is singularly messy.That’s true. Have you ever witnessed a childbirth? It is messy, singularly messy.This is the birth of a new consciousness. You are witnessing something rare. It happens only once in thousands of years. Whenever something new is born, it is messy. You can ask the scientists what they say about the birth of the world. It was utterly messy, it was chaos. The cosmos has come out of a chaos.And before I can create you I have to destroy you. I have to dismantle the old completely. Naturally, when the old is dismantled and the new has not yet been created, there is a period, a transition period, where everything will be messy.But if the chaos is going to give birth to a star, it has to be welcomed. Order, system, is not always good, is not always beneficial. Disorder is not always harmful. One has to look into each case to determine it. It depends. If destruction is the goal, then destruction is violence. It is ugly. If creation is the goal, then who has ever been able to create anything without destruction? You have to be destroyed.And that’s my device – to give you contradictory statements. That is my design. It is a naqshbandi. I contradict myself so much for a certain reason: if you go on listening to me, sooner or later you will stop believing. That is the whole purpose – because you will know it is meaningless to believe this man. Tomorrow he will contradict himself. Before you are established in a belief he will contradict it. He will not leave you settled in any shelter. Once you know this, slowly, slowly, the mind’s old habit of clinging to a certain concept disappears. It can disappear only if you are continuously contradicted.If I am very consistent I will become your belief, I will become your church, I will become your religion. And I don’t want to become your church or your dogma or your religion – I want to become your salvation. your liberation, your freedom. The goal is utterly different. If you are seeking a kind of belief then you are in trouble.That is why Anand Veda – who has asked this question – is in trouble. He must be seeking some security, some idea. He wants some idea to cling to; he wants a shelter to hide himself behind. He does not want to face the messy life – life as it is. He wants to prepare, he wants to be prepared to meet life with ideas, ideologies, concepts, philosophies. He wants to go to see God with a fully ready-made mind.Otherwise God is messy. He is utterly chaos. To meet God unprepared is to disappear in him. But that is the only meeting, there is no other. If you are not ready to disappear into that chaos, you will not meet God. God is not a concept.But you want a concept, you want a clear-cut philosophy so that you can depend on it and you can fight in the name of that philosophy and you can argue in the name of that philosophy.Now it will be very difficult to argue for me. It is impossible to argue for me. You cannot. Anybody can see that my statements are contradictory – no great insight is needed to see that. Any stupid person can see that my statements are contradictory. Intelligence will be needed to see that my statements are not about truth, they are devices, designs, to destroy something in your mind. Great intelligence will be needed to see that.I will not allow you ever to settle with me; you will have to move. Every day I will create and every day I will destroy. Sooner or later the understanding will dawn on you that there is no need to cling. Because you cling, it hurts when something is taken away again. So why cling in the first place? Not clinging is freedom.These contradictory statements are not meant to be statements about truth – no, not at all. Truth cannot be said. Nobody has ever said it, nobody will ever say it. It is not possible. Truth cannot be confined to the word. And I am not saying the truth, I am simply creating a space in you – the space I call the unclinging, unattached mind, the contentless mind. Once that state is there you will know what truth is. I cannot say what truth is but I can create a device, a design, for you in which you will be able to see the truth.When you listen to me, if you listen as if you are listening to a philosopher, you will miss me. If you listen to me as if you are listening to a theologian, then you will miss me. If you listen to me as if I am a logician, then you will miss me. I use logic only to destroy logic, I use words only to destroy words, I use scriptures only to destroy scriptures. The more silently, intelligently you listen to me, the more this fact will slowly, slowly become very, very clear to you. In that clarity there is vision; in that transparency, in that silence, when not a single idea is there in your mind about truth, truth comes in.So these statements are contradictory. Contradiction and paradox is my design.And I am not saying to you, “Do this, don’t do that.” That’s how you again create trouble for yourself. You listen to me with a deep desire to do something. So when you hear me saying “Do this” – or you interpret it as if I am saying “Do this” – you catch hold of it immediately; you start preparing to do it. And the next moment I say that it is wrong. Then you are at a loss. You were just ready to jump into an action and before you have even acted, it is no longer right.I am trying to help you to drop all kinds of desires – including the desire that you have to attain to truth, that you have to attain to nirvana; including the desire that you have to be desireless.Why are you in such a hurry to do something? Why can’t you be, simply be? Being is sanity and salvation. The moment you start doing, you get confused, because whatsoever you do – and I am saying it unconditionally, whatsoever – it will create more ego in you. Doing creates the doer and ego is the whole problem. The ego has to be dropped and the ego always waits for the opportunity to do something.When I am trying to explain to you what meditation is, I am doing one thing and you are preparing for something else. I am trying to talk to you; I am simply sharing my insight into meditation, my experience of meditation. I am trying to do just one thing: to make you alert about what this state of meditation is. While I am talking about the state, you are planning inside how to attain it, what to do about it. You exist in a totally different dimension.I say meditation cannot be done – one can be in meditation but one cannot do it. It is just like love. You can be in love but what can you do about it? Either it is or it is not. Listening to me, you go on interpreting, reducing everything that I say into how to do it. I am saying to you that if you can simply listen to me, that will bring enlightenment. There is no need to do anything else. lust by hearing it, just by seeing what is transpiring here between me and you, just by being with me, you will become enlightened – not by doing anything.But that you don’t like very much because that does not give you the ego. If enlightenment happens just by being with me, then who are you? Then what are you? Then what have you done? Then how can you brag about it? It will be a gift. You will have to be thankful for it, you will have to be grateful for it. You cannot go into the world saying that you have done it. How can you say, “I have done it?” It has nothing to do with your doing or you.No, you are not much interested in that. You are interested in doing it, achieving it, attaining it, so that you can say that you have attained it. But how can you attain enlightenment? You are the barrier to it, the only barrier.Enlightenment comes when you are not. It is available right now; it is all around. Enlightenment is the stuff that existence is made of. It is showering in the sun rays, it is singing in the birds, it is dancing in the trees. It is in me, it is in you. You just have to come to a point where you are not doing anything – and suddenly you see the fact of it, the radiant presence of it. But it happens only when you are not in a moment of doing. Doing, you become concerned; doing, you go outward. Non-doing, you are suddenly inside yourself. Doing is the way to go outside yourself; non-doing is the way to be where you should be, to be where you really are. Doing takes you into the future in time; non-doing allows you to relax into eternity.Paradox is my way – so that you will never be able to cling to anything I say. And you will be grateful one day that I was not consistent, because with a consistent man you can be never in that dimension called enlightenment. With a consistent man you will become a follower, with a consistent man you will become very logical, philosophical. You will have beautiful ideas to propound to the world, you will have a good, established, systematic mind. But that has nothing to do with enlightenment. You can become enlightened only with an utterly inconsistent man.And when you are able to see what I am doing here then you will be surprised that all my statements are inconsistent and yet there is a consistency in my being. And that consistency is that I am continuously paradoxical, consistently paradoxical, consistently inconsistent. That consistency you will see one day.On the surface I will say many things and each thing will be against other things and you will not be allowed to possess any idea. I am here to take all ideas from you, not to give you more ideas. As it is, you have already more than enough.The second question:Osho,The theory that we have to push, force and kick ourselves – is this true? I hate fighting myself.Look at the question. I go on saying to you that truth is not somewhere else, it is here. You have not to struggle your way towards it. It is through the struggle that you are missing it. You are not to push the river. By pushing the river you will never reach anywhere. You will simply get tired and exhausted.By pushing the river you are only creating the possibility of your utter failure. You cannot fight with the river. The river is huge – life’s river, the river of existence, is so huge – and you are so tiny. You are just a ripple in the ocean – a ripple trying to fight with the ocean, trying to direct the ocean, trying to achieve a private goal. It is simply ridiculous. And all struggle makes you ridiculous; all struggle makes you tired, exhausted, dull, sad, miserable.But one thing is there in the struggle – that thing is that you feel you are. The ego feels very good. You are fighting, you are giving a good fight. Maybe you cannot win but nobody can say that you were a coward, nobody can say that you didn’t give a good fight. Maybe you cannot win, or who knows, maybe you can win – the mind goes on thinking in these ways. Maybe others have not won but you may be the exception. Maybe it is left for you to do what others have not done. Give it a good try. The ego will feel good – you are doing something. The bigger the fight, the bigger the ego will be. The more you push the river the more you feel you are. Against the river you feel “I am.” The feeling of “I am” always comes when you are against something. The more you fight and protest, the more you struggle, the more you will feel that you are – defined, well-defined.Take the other as an enemy and he becomes your definition; take the other as a friend and your boundaries are no longer clear-cut. When you are sitting by the side of your friend or your beloved, the boundaries are not clear. They are overlapping. You are overflowing into each other. You don’t know where you end and where your friend begins. And if the friendship is really deep, something immensely beautiful happens – egos disappear.There is an Indian myth. To understand the myth you will have to understand these three words….First the myth. It is the myth of the creation. It is far more beautiful than any other myth of creation. Hindus say that he was alone – “he” means God. He was alone but not really alone, because he was two in one. He was man and woman together. He was in a deep loving embrace. But he was also one because there was no boundary. It was not possible to say where he ended and where his beloved began. The man and the woman were almost one in a cosmic embrace, ecstatically lost into each other.Eternity passed and he started feeling alone. Naturally, when you don’t have a definition, then it doesn’t matter whether you are two, you feel as if you are alone. He started feeling alone. The aloneness became too heavy so he decided to separate. So he fell into two parts.The Sanskrit word for falling apart is pat – pat means falling apart, to fall. From pat comes the Hindi word patan – patan means fall. He fell in two. And because of the word pat, a husband in India is called pati and a wife is called patni. He fell into two parts – one part became pati, husband, the other part became patni, wife. The words pat, and patni are derived from pat – he fell in two.And since then, the myth says, they have been trying to reach each other again, because now they are feeling very much separated and divorced. Hence the desire for love, the immense desire for love, the search for the other – to find someone with whom you can be one again.When you are together with a beloved one you lose identities. You cannot feel who you are because the other is involved, intimately involved, in your being. In love, ego disappears. When you hate, when you fight, when you struggle, ego arises. When you are sitting with your enemy you are perfectly well-defined because you are not overflowing, he is not overflowing. You don’t meet anywhere. There is distance.So the whole thing is that when you struggle, it is not for truth. When you struggle, it is not for nirvana, enlightenment. When you struggle, the deep urge is to declare yourself – that you are powerful, that you are against the world, against existence. But then there is trouble also. Once you declare “I am,” there arises a great fear that if “I am” then there is every possibility that one day “I may not be.”You have to understand this. This is one of the basic, fundamental problems each intelligent person has to face. First you try to declare “I am” and you feel very good that “I am,” that “I am somebody, someone special.” So for your whole life you try to become special, extraordinary in some way or other: become a famous painter or a poet or a politician; have more money than anybody else has; make a palace to live in so everybody feels jealous; in some way prove that you are special, you are not in an ordinary rut, you are not of the crowd, you are above the crowd; or become an ascetic, renounce the world; or stand on your head and become a yogi – but do something so that the whole world comes to know that you are not ordinary, you are special. People do so many things so different from each other, but the motive is the same. If you go deeper you will find the same motive. They want to declare to the world “I am.”But then a problem arises. First you have to struggle to prove that you are, and then once you have proved it, anxiety comes in. The anxiety is that if you are, you can disappear too. Anything that is, is going towards annihilation. The tree was there yesterday, now it is gone. The flower was there in the morning; in the evening it has gone, withered away. The child was alive and now the child is dead. Everywhere you see that birth is continuously followed by death. - Existence is surrounded by non-existence. Life seems to be always provoking death – they seem to be parallel.Once you have defined yourself clearly – that “I am this” – once you have become this, suddenly a great trembling arises in your being when you see that you can disappear, that you will die. How again misery settles in.First you create the ego, then the fear comes that the ego will disappear. If you don’t create the ego there is no fear of death, it is not possible at all – because if you are not, how can you die? If you are not, then there is no death. Death is always of the ego. Once ego is not there, how can you die?Just the other night I was reading a case, a very strange case. A child was born in Philadelphia. It was a premature birth, it was a miscarriage. But it was a rare phenomenon – the child was alive although it should not have been alive according to medical science. It weighed only half a pound, but it was alive.Now the difficulty was that medical science says you cannot call a child who is born below one pound, alive – because it never happens. one pound at least to a must – even the child of one pound is not going to live, but he can be alive for a few days or a few moments. But this child did not weigh even one pound. So the doctor could not give him a certificate of birth. But the child was alive and the child lived for two days. For forty-eight hours the child lived. No birth certificate was issued.. And then the child died. Now, no death certificate could be issued because when the child was never born how can you certify that he is dead? But up to now things were simple.But then the hospital demanded money from the parents for forty-eight hours of care and medicine and this and that. So the parents said, “But when the child was never born and it never died, about whom are you talking? What are you talking about? You say you cared for forty-eight hours, but for whom did you care?”Now it was such a complicated case that the hospital authorities had to keep quiet, to keep mum. They didn’t go to the court because it would not have been possible. First the child should have been given a birth certificate, then a death certificate – then money for those forty-eight hours of care would have been possible.Death is possible only if the ego is born. If the ego is not there, there cannot be any death. Then life is eternal. Then life has a different quality to it – a quality of eternity, of immortality. The ego wants to be immortal. That is not possible. You are immortal but the ego cannot be immortal. The ego will have to die – not one but a thousand and one deaths. And the ego is very, very vulnerable, very delicate. If somebody insults it, there is a death, a small death. If your business goes bankrupt, there is a small death. If something goes wrong, a small thing, there is a death. Small things, and you die many times. The ego is always ready to die because it is a false artifact, it is a pseudo phenomenon. And to keep it alive you will have to keep pushing the river.So first conflict, struggle, violence, aggression, are needed for the ego to exist. They are the fuel, the food for it. But they create misery. And the greater misery comes when ego has been created – then fear arises, the fear of death. So the ego simply suffers. The non-ego state is the state of celebration.You ask me: The theory that we have to force, push and kick ourselves – is this true? That’s what I have been telling you – that it is the most dangerous calamity that has happened to humanity. The idea to force, kick, push, fight – that is the most dangerous idea that has poisoned humanity. But if you want to have an ego that is the only way. You will have to drink the poison. And you will be suffering and suffering and you will remain in hell, but you will have one good feeling – that “I am.”George Bernard Shaw is reported to have said…. When he was dying somebody asked him, “Where would you like to go? To heaven or hell?” He said, “That depends. If I can be first in heaven then I will go to heaven, but I have to be number one. If that is not possible – because others have reached before, Jesus and Buddha, et cetera – if they have already occupied important positions, if they are sitting by the side of God already, then I would like to go to hell. But I want to be first anywhere. Even hell is okay.”He was joking against the whole human mind. What he was saying is true. You look deep in your mind – where would you like to go? To hell, if you can be made a king there? Or to heaven, if you have to be a servant there? And you will be surprised to find that you agree with Bernard Shaw. Your mind will say, “What will you do just being a servant? Forget all about it. Hell is far better. You will be the king.” Of course you will suffer but it is worth it. Kings suffer, but it is worth it. Politicians suffer, but it is worth it. Rich people suffer, but it is worth it. Poor people may not suffer that much – they don’t suffer, they cannot afford that much suffering. That much suffering is only possible when you can afford it. Nobodies don’t suffer much; there is nothing to suffer. You cannot humiliate them, they are already standing at the back. You cannot throw them further back.Beggars don’t suffer that much. How can a beggar suffer as much as Richard Nixon? It is impossible. Where can you throw a beggar? He is already there – where can you throw him? He cannot suffer. But he is a beggar, a nobody. That is continuously like a knife in his heart – “I am nobody.” The beggar also wants to be somebody. Even if it comes through suffering, it is okay.One has to look into this dangerous mind – that it wants to have an ego even though hell is created in getting it. The mind is not ready to be happy and sane and blissful if the ego has to be lost. And you all go on doing the same thing. I watch you doing it every day. For small things you are ready to drop your blissfulness, but you cannot drop your ego. And you are ready to suffer as much as possible, as much as you can tolerate, if it helps the ego. Beware of it.I am not telling you to force your way; there is no need. Relax. Let go. Start flowing with the stream. Not even swimming is needed; simply let the stream take you. It will take you to the ocean. It is already going to the ocean, you need not push. Push is needed when you start trying to go upstream. When you start going against nature then push, conflict, struggle, is needed. When you are going according to nature there is no need to struggle – nature is already going that way. Relax with it. And then there is a great song in the heart because all misery disappears.But with misery you also disappear. You cannot have both. Yourself and bliss, that is not possible. It is not possible because nature does not function that way. You will have to drop one. Either you drop bliss and you be, or you drop your ego and let bliss be. It is your choice. And that’s why I go on saying again and again that to be miserable is your choice.You come and ask me how to drop the misery. You want to drop the misery without dropping the ego. But that is not possible. And if I say “Drop the ego” I always see in your eyes that you think I am changing the subject. You think you have come to ask how to drop the misery and I am talking about something else. I am saying “Drop the ego.” Of course it looks as if it is something else.Mulla Nasruddin was sitting with a beautiful woman on a full-moon night talking about great things. He was getting very romantic. But women are very earthly, earthbound, very practical.When Mulla was getting really too high the woman said, “Mulla, your love is okay, but will you marry me?”Mulla said, “Listen, don’t change the subject.”That I have seen many times in your eyes. You bring one problem, and I start talking about something else. It is only on the surface that it appears to be something else – to me it is the cause. You want to drop the misery but you don’t want to drop the ego. And misery cannot be dropped. Misery is a shadow of the ego. Only the ego can be dropped. Dropping the ego, the misery disappears. That seems to be too great a price to pay. You say, “I will think it over.” You are not really interested in dropping the misery. If you are really interested, then just by seeing the fact you will drop the ego immediately.Sigmund Freud has said that man is naturally miserable. I don’t believe in it, but about ninety-nine per cent of people he is right. I cannot deny that. Freud feels that there is no hope for man; man is basically miserable. His misery cannot be transformed. He cannot be made happy. Man’s demands are impossible – that’s what Freud means. Man demands the impossible. He wants to have a great ego and he wants to be happy.It is as if you want the full sun, with no clouds, but still you want the coolness of the dark night, the silence of the dark night. And you want the full sun in the sky, you want it sunny. Now you are demanding impossibilities. This is not possible. You can only pretend. That’s what people go on doing. You can pretend. You can sit on the beach on a sunny day and keep your eyes closed. This is a pretension. If you keep your eyes closed you create a darkness inside. You have both – the night and the day. But this is a pretension. It is really day; the night is just a false illusion you have created by closing your eyes. The impossible cannot be done.The sane man always looks into his life to see whether he is trying to do the impossible. The moment he sees he is trying to do something which cannot be done in the very nature of things. he drops it. That project is immediately dropped. This I call sanity.Insane people are those who go on fighting, not looking at the phenomenon at all – as if they are trying to make a square circle. You can go on trying but it will never happen – because a circle is a circle and can never be a square. And a square is a square and can never be a circle. You can go on trying but you will be a failure. The whole humanity is a failure – trying to do the impossible.And you say: “I hate fighting myself.” Now that again is a fight. Hate! First you fight, that is wrong. Then you do a second wrong thing, even deeper – then you fight against fight because you hate it. I am teaching acceptance, tathata. I am teaching you a total acceptance of life as it is – everything included. Now again you will see that there is some difficulty.For example, you see that you go on fighting. Should you accept this too? I say yes. Only by accepting it will it disappear. Through acceptance, things change. You should accept everything, even the fight. What can you do? If you are fighting and pushing the river, you will be creating another problem. If I say “Don’t fight,” then you will start fighting your fight. That will be even more subtle. It will be on a deeper level. The fight will remain. When I say “Drop fighting,” I am not saying “Start fighting against fight.” I am saying “Accept.” If you feel like pushing the river, push. Don’t create a new fight against it. Go on pushing, just seeing the whole nonsense of it. See that it is stupid, that what you are doing is stupid. The river cannot be pushed back. Go on pushing and go on watching and accept it.In that acceptance, in that awareness, one day suddenly you will find your hands have stopped. But it is not that you have stopped them – if you stop them then you have missed. Then again it has been a fight of stopping. First you were fighting with the river, then you started fighting with your fighting – and you are somehow holding your hands so that they don’t start pushing the river again. This will not be a very beautiful state. It will be tense, there will be anguish, and you will be holding yourself You will not be flowing, you will not be streaming with joy, you will be repressing. And at any moment, at any opportunity, you will again start pushing the river. How long can you repress the desire?So listen to me, listen very meditatively. If you are pushing the river I am not saying stop it, I am simply saying that by pushing the river nothing is achieved. Listen to it. Let this sink into your heart. And if you feel like pushing because of old habits – you have been pushing for many lives – -go on pushing, but go on seeing the fact that this is stupid, that you are being stupid. Don’t pull away from it, don’t try to control yourself. Let it happen – but with the vision that it is stupid, that it is meaningless, that nothing is going to come out of it. Let it happen – but with no expectation, waiting for frustration, knowing perfectly well that frustration is coming, that you are wasting your energy, that it is because of old habits. Go on, don’t pull back.And one day you will see that the hands are getting slower and slower. You are not pushing as hard as you used to. And some day, when you have a clear vision, when you are transparent, you will see the whole absurdity. Seeing, there is transformation. Once seen totally, the hands simply stop. Not that you stop them, they stop of their own accord. And when they stop of their own accord there is great grace, there is great beauty.The third question:Osho,You have convinced me. Before any question arises, before any answer can be given, I believe you, happily.The question is from Yoga Puja.It is not a question at all! I am happy, Puja. But just change one word in your mind. Don’t call it conviction, call it conversion. That is what you really mean. You have used a wrong word, that’s all.Conviction is logical, intellectual, of the mind. It does not go very deep. And behind each conviction, doubt persists. Conviction does not change anybody. It is a mind thing, how can it change your totality? And conviction is borrowed. I am being very logical about something and you become convinced, but it is because I am being very logical about something. My logic appeals to you, you cannot argue against it, hence conviction. Conviction is borrowed. We get it all from others. You become a Christian, a convinced Christian, because your parents were Christian. Or you become a convinced Hindu, a staunch Hindu, a mad Hindu, because your parents were Hindus. And so on, so forth.I have heard….A Sunday school teacher suddenly stopped reading a passage in her Bible and asked her pupils, “Why do you believe in God?”She got a variety of answers – some full of simple faith, others obviously insincere. The one that stopped her cold came from the son of one of Chicago’s best known ministers.He frowned and answered, “I guess it just runs in our family.”That’s how you get your convictions.With me let there be conversion, not conviction; I am not interested in convincing you about anything. Truth is. It needs no conviction. Either you know it or you don’t know it. It needs no belief. Beliefs don’t help in any way. What you need is not conviction, you need conversion – conversion of the heart, a hundred-and-eighty degree turn, a total change of your vision, a change of your plane. You start looking at life from another vantage point. That is not conviction, that is conversion. It is not that your idea has changed but you have changed.And that’s exactly what Puja means. She has only used a wrong word. She says: “You have convinced me. Before any question arises, before any answer can be given, I believe you.” Again she is using a wrong word – believe. But they are related. If you think it is a conviction then you will think it is because you have started believing in me. If you think it is a conversion then it will not be a belief – it will be trust. Belief is in what I say, trust is in what I am. They are diametrically opposite.But my feeling about Puja is that she has only used wrong words – otherwise she means exactly that.Good, I am happy. If you listen to me from the heart, this is going to happen to everybody. If you listen to me, not with any motive to go anywhere, to achieve anything, but just for the sheer joy of listening – as one listens to music or as one listens to the sound of a waterfall or this cuckoo – if you listen to me for no motive at all but just to be here with me, conversion is going to happen, transformation is going to happen. My flame is going to jump into you and light your unlit candle.The fourth question:Just when the ashram seems to be coming together we will be moving. Is it your intention that we should be living on a perpetual building site?Precisely!The fifth question:Osho,Is there any necessity for everybody to have a religion of one kind or other?Yes, everybody ought to have a religion of one kind or another. You owe it to yourself to know what church you are staying away from. Otherwise you will feel very miserable. You will miss.I have heard….Nurse: “What church do you belong to?”Patient: “None.”Nurse: “Well, what church do you go to when you go?”Patient: “If you must know, the church which I stay away from the most of the time when I don’t go, is the Baptist.”Or….Simpkin had been shipwrecked for twenty years on a desert island when finally he was rescued by a passing ship.“What did you do to keep busy all those years?” asked the captain of the rescue vessel.“I went into the building business,” replied Simpkin, whereupon he took the captain to a corner of the island and showed him a beautiful synagogue.“That’s incredible!” said the sailing master.“That’s nothing,” said Simpkin. This time he led him to the opposite side of the island and displayed another magnificently constructed house of worship.“I don’t understand,” said the captain. “You are the only person on the island. Why did you need two synagogues?”“This one I belong to,” explained Simpkin, “but the other one I would not set foot inside if they paid me!”These are your ways to define yourself. These are the ways of the ego to define itself. You are a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Buddhist. You are Indian, German or Italian. You are a Catholic or a Protestant. These are ways to define yourself, who you are.In fact, a religious person need not have any religion. A religious person is religionless. A religious person has a quality of religiousness, certainly, but that quality is very indefinable. It is more like a poetry around him, more like a radiance. Yes, in his actions you will see a grace, in his life you will see gratitude, in his behavior you will see compassion. But he is not Hindu or Mohammedan or Christian. These are very mediocre ways to become religious. These are not the real ways to become religious.Religion is basically an art: how to live and how to die; how to live and enjoy, and how to die and enjoy; how to live gracefully and how to die gracefully; how to make your whole life – death included – a celebration.Religion has nothing to do with the Bible, the Gita, the Koran; religion has something to do with an alchemical transformation of your being. So whenever you find a really religious person you will not find him as a Hindu, Mohammedan, Christian, Jew – you will simply find him with an unknown quality present in him, which defines him. But this definition is not of the ego; this definition is just of his life style.Yes, around Jesus you will find a quality of religiousness, so will you find it around Buddha or around Mohammed or around Nanak. You will find a quality of religiousness, but you will have to watch. You will have to have a certain vision to see it.It happened in Nanak’s life that he came to visit a town in which there were many saints – Mohammedans, Jainas, Buddhists, Hindus. The town was full of the saints. And, of course, when there are too many saints there is much conflict, controversy. And a new prophet was coming.So the old saints thought, “This is too much. We are already overcrowded here.” So they called a conference and they sent a message to Nanak – he was staying just outside the town. The message was: “It is too crowded here. We are already too many here. Already business is not good because there are only a few clients and many saints. Please go somewhere else.”And they knew that Nanak’s name had reached the town; his fame had reached the town. If he came, even those few clients that they could divide among themselves would be gone. So they did a beautiful thing. They thought about how to send the message so that Nanak did not feel offended. They were worried that he would feel offended – because it was offensive. Who were they to prevent Nanak from coming? But they were cunning people. They searched in the scriptures and they found a way.They sent a cup full of oil – not even a single drop more could be added. It was almost overflowing, on the verge. They sent the cup as a symbol that this town was so full of saints and religions that not a single drop more could be accepted. There was no more space.Nanak was sitting near a well under a tree with his disciple, and the disciple was singing a song, playing on his instrument. The people came with the cup. Nanak looked at them, understood the message, took a flower from the side of the well, a wildflower, and floated the flower on the oil in the cup. The flower was so small it simply floated. It didn’t take any space. No oil came out of the cup. And Nanak said to them, “Go back and give this cup to the people who have sent you to me.”The disciple was puzzled. He said, “I don’t understand what is transpiring between you and these people. This cup was very mysterious. What exactly did they mean?” Nanak said, “They mean that there are too many saints here and there is no space. But,’ Nanak said; “a religious man needs no space. That’s my answer. I will not be fighting with anybody. I will not be in any competition with anybody. A religious man needs no space. A religious man is not a businessman. They need not be afraid of me. I will be here just like this flower floating on top of the full cup. And I will be here just like the flower – one day I will be here, tomorrow I will be gone. They need not be worried about me.”Now this is religiousness – non-competitiveness, no conflict with anybody, no aggression. And one knows that one is here just for a few moments. It is a caravanserai – an overnight stay. By the morning we are gone, just like flowers.A religious person has nothing to do with organized religion, but he has something to do with the inner poetry, the poetry of life. He has something to do with the inner dance; he has a dancing energy. He is in deep romance with life, he is in romantic love with life. He is immensely grateful for each moment of joy that God goes on giving. And we are not even worthy. We don’t deserve it. We have not earned it. It is a gift.You ask: “Is there any necessity for everybody to have a religion of one kind or another?”The second thing: there are not two kinds of religion. Religiousness is one – although formulations may differ. It is just like you make your house in one way, another makes his in another way and the third one has chosen a third architect to design his house. But the inner thing is one – that you need a shelter, you need a roof. Somebody cooks in an Indian style, somebody in a Chinese style and somebody in some other style, but the real thing is hunger – that you need food, that you need nourishment.So these so-called religions are nothing but different styles of nourishment. You can choose. But that is not important. The important thing is to have refuge in God, surrender – what Sufis call islam; and commitment – what Sufis call iman; and a transformation of life through trust – what Sufis call ihsam.The sixth question:Osho,Four years ago I had a reading which said that my blood disease was gone due to the guru's blessings. When I told you, you said, “from the day you took sannyas your cancer was gone.” I remember feeling that your saying that might have been a design and not a real fact. I always accepted that your truths may not be facts. Did I miss because of this?The first thing: truth has no obligation to be a fact. Fact is a lower phenomenon: truth is a higher phenomenon. Sometimes the truth may be factual, sometimes not. The fact cannot be decisive about it. There are higher experiences in life which cannot be contained by facts.But I can understand. The question is from Chinmaya. The Western mind is too much addicted to facts. Anything that is factual seems to be real and anything that is not factual necessarily seems to be unreal. This is a Western obsession. Truth is sometimes factual, sometimes not – that’s why I say truth has no obligation to be factual. Because of this, the Western scientific mind cannot accept the human soul – because it is not factual. The body is factual; the soul is truth, not fact.And the way facts are known, truths are not known; the approach has to be completely different. For example, you see a rose. The beauty is truth but not fact. You cannot prove it. There is no way to prove the beauty of the rose. You can prove its color, you can prove its weight, you can prove its chemistry, but you cannot prove its aesthetics.But there is something even higher than beauty. Tennyson is reported to have said, “If I can understand a single flower, root and all, I would have understood the whole existence” – because the flower contains something which is more than the fact: its hidden reality, its intrinsic reality. But that reality cannot be approached by the gross instruments of scientific experimentation. Truth has to be approached in a different way – through meditation, through love.Chinmaya says: “Four years ago I had a reading which said that my blood disease was gone due to the guru’s blessing. When I told you, you said, ‘From the day you took sannyas your cancer was gone.’”Cancer is basically a psychological disease; it is basically a disease of the mind, not a physical one. When the mind becomes very tense, so tense that it is intolerable, it starts affecting the body tissues. That’s why cancer exists only when civilization becomes very, very sophisticated. In primitive societies you cannot find cancer. People are not so sophisticated. The higher – by “higher” I mean complicated – the more sophisticated, the more complex a society is, the more cancer will happen.So when I said to Chinmaya, “From the day you took sannyas your cancer was gone,” I was saying many things. Sannyas is dropping the mind. Sannyas is exactly that – that you surrender the mind. Sannyas means you surrender all your complexities, obsessions, neuroses. Sannyas means that now you are ready to live a simple, ordinary life. Sannyas means that you are ready to become primal, innocent, childlike.Cancer has to disappear. Cancer can exist only in a certain neurotic state of mind. If the mind relaxes, sooner or later the body will follow and will relax.It is because of this fact that scientific investigation has not yet been able to find a cure for cancer. It is almost impossible to find a cure for cancer – and the day they find a cure for cancer they will create even more dangerous diseases in the world – because the cure will mean repression. The day they can find strong enough drugs to repress cancer, then some other disease will erupt. That poison will start flowing through some other channel.That’s how it has happened down the ages. Simple diseases, were cured and difficult diseases came into being. You cure one disease, another disease comes in. And the second one is more complex than the first. The first was a natural reaction of the body, the second is an unnatural, abnormal reaction of the body. You repress the second and the third will come and the third will be even more difficult to tackle. And so on, so forth. Now cancer is at the top. If cancer is repressed then even more difficult diseases will erupt in the human body and the human mind.When I said to Chinmaya, “From the day you took sannyas your cancer was gone,” I was not talking about any fact. I was indicating a truth. And if he had trusted me, it would have been gone. But a subtle doubt must have persisted in him. He says: “I remember feeling that your saying that might have been a design and not a real fact.” A design is higher than a fact. A fact is a very ordinary thing, a design is a higher thing. But we believe in the very, very lower reality, that’s why we go on missing the higher reality. Yes, the color of the flower is a fact, and the chemistry is a fact – but the poetry, the beauty, the joy that the flower creates in you when you look at it, the awe that suddenly arises in your heart…. It is not factual, true, but is it untrue because it is not factual? No, it is a higher truth.The higher need not agree with the lower; the lower has to agree with the higher – this is the Eastern approach. The Western approach is to reduce the higher to the lower; the Eastern approach is to raise the lower to the higher. For example, if you go and watch a lotus growing, it grows out of the dirty mud. If you show the lotus to the Western thinker his approach will be, “What is it? Nothing but mud.” “Nothing but” is the approach – “Nothing but mud.” And he is factual – about that there is no doubt. It has come out of the dirty mud, stinking mud. So he says, “What is the source of it? Reduce it to the source. Go to the cause.” The cause is the dirty mud, so this lotus is nothing but dirty mud.That’s why Freud goes on saying that the experience of samadhi is nothing but sex. The experience of samadhi is a lotus blooming, but he goes to the source. And he is true, true in the sense that he is factual. He cannot be refuted on that ground. All your so-called mahatmas together cannot refute him on that ground. He is valid as far as factuality is concerned. Samadhi is the flowering of sexual energy, but in the same way as the mud becomes a lotus. Can you really call a lotus just mud, nothing else? Is it not something utterly new? It comes out of the mud, certainly, but can you reduce it back to mud?The Eastern approach is that even the mud is respectable because a rose may be hidden in it, a lotus may be hidden in it. In the Western mind the lotus becomes condemned because it comes out of mud; in the Eastern mind the mud becomes sacred because it produces a lotus. We look to the ultimate, we don’t go backwards. We go forwards. We see the ultimate possibility. The West goes on seeing the source, we see the goal. We are not worried about where it comes from, we are more worried about where it is going. The potential, the ultimately potential, that’s what truth is.In the Western mind, man becomes body; in the Eastern mind, man becomes God. In the Western mind, the world is just materialistic; there exists nothing else but matter. In the Eastern mind, there exists nothing but God, but soul. Matter is also soul – asleep. Matter is potential soul – one day it will become soul. These are different visions. And if you have to choose, choose the Eastern vision because it has reverence for life, reverence for truth. Fact is an ordinary thing. Don’t be too much entangled by the fact.You say: “I remember feeling that your saying that might have been a design….” When Chinmaya is saying “might have been a design” he means “might have been a lie.” A design is neither a truth nor a lie. A design is just a creative device. If you trust in it, it works; if you don’t trust in it, it doesn’t work. It is up to you. You can miss. If the idea arises in you that it may be just a design, what are you saying? You are saying that it may be just a lie. That very idea will be enough to become a barrier. The bridge is broken.Remember, a design is higher than fact. It is lower than truth but higher than fact. It leads you from the fact tot he truth; it is a bridge between the two. It is neither factual nor true; it is a lead.Listen to this….A Bavarian farmer wanted to sell his pig in nearby Switzerland to get a better price. To avoid paying customs he dressed the pig in his black suit with sunglasses and a hat and put it in the back of his Mercedes.At the border the custom officer looked inside the car, then gave the farmer the sign to drive on. He turned around to his friend and exploded with laughter.“What happened?” asked his friend.“There was a guy sitting inside,’ he answered, with tears of laughter, “who looked exactly like a pig!”This is a design. It worked! The whole point is that it worked. Whether it is a lie or a truth does not matter. It is not factual, that is true; it is not true, that too is there – it is just in-between.And to be with a master is to be available to his design.The last question:Osho,You sometimes use the word accident or accidental to describe an event. Are there any accidents in life in reality?In reality there are only accidents and accidents, and nothing else. The factual world is the world of cause and effect; the world of truth is the world of freedom. Freedom means that causes don’t work at all. Freedom means that now everything is accidental, now everything is possible. Nothing is impossible in the world of reality. From the moment you become enlightened everything becomes possible. Now no cause and effect have any hold on you.But I understand your question. It comes again from the same ideology – that how can anything be accidental? The world is confined to cause and effect. Everything can be reduced to cause and effect. Nothing happens as a miracle. That is the scientific approach.That’s why men like B. F. Skinner or Pavlov and other behaviorists go on saying that the idea of freedom is just stupid. There is no freedom. Man has no freedom because everything is predestined by cause and effect. If Skinner is right, then Buddha cannot be right. If Skinner is right, then the whole heritage of religion is wrong. Then everything is predestined by cause and effect. You do a certain thing just as a machine does it. You don’t have any freedom.And these men are right about ninety-nine per cent of people. If they watch ordinary people, they will find every support – that’s how they have come to these conclusions.When I am talking, there is a meeting of two different dimensions. You live in the world which is determined by cause and effect, I live in the world which is of freedom. When I look at you I will talk about cause and effect, when I look into myself I talk about freedom. In the real world, in the world of truth, all is absolute freedom. Nothing is pre-determined. And that’s the beauty of it. That’s why in India we have called it moksha. Moksha means freedom, absolute freedom.Man is neither naturally good nor bad. He is free and he becomes good or bad according to how he accepts or denies his freedom. To exist is to be obliged to be free. What is left to us is the way in which we will be free – and in the end there are just these two ways: to use our freedom against freedom or to use it for freedom.“Existence is the self’s possibility to be or not to be itself.” This is an existentialist statement. I agree with it. Man is freedom. It is not only that man is free – man is freedom. Freedom is man’s essential core, and that is man’s dignity. Animals are less free, trees are even less free, rocks even less free. That’s how we decide who is more evolved – according to freedom.A rock is not very free; a tree is a little more free. It can grow according to some inner vision. It can feel sad or happy. It can make some effort. It can struggle, compete. It cannot leave its ground; in that way it is unfree. It is rooted. Animals are a little more free. They can move; physically they can move. Birds are even a little more free. They can fly into the faraway sky. Man is even more free. He can move not only physically, he can move mentally. His mind can move.And a buddha is total freedom because not only his mind but his soul is free. Freedom goes on growing, layer upon layer. It becomes more. When freedom becomes absolute, you have arrived home.You ask me: “You sometimes use the word accident or accidental to describe an event. Are there any accidents in life in reality?”One early morning in heaven three men arrived at the same time. St. Peter was surprised, as hardly anybody came at this time. So he asked the first, “How come?”‘Well,’ he said, “I came back home from a journey and found a man’s coat hanging up and shoes hanging around, and my wife naked in bed looking very happy. So I searched for the man but could not find anybody and got so furious that I smashed the TV and threw the fridge out of the window. Then I took a gun and killed myself.”“And you?” St. Peter asked the second.“Well, I was making love to my secretary when she said suddenly, ‘Ah, my husband!’ So I jumped into the fridge to hide. But then the fellow threw the fridge out from the third floor, so I am here!”“I don’t know,” said the third. “I was just waiting for my bus in the morning when suddenly a fridge came out of the blue and brought me here!”Enough for today.

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Sufis The People of Path Vol 2, 01-15Category: SUFISM

Sufis The People of Path Vol 2 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The Sufi sage, Abdulalim of Fez, refused to teach, but from time to time would advise people about the way to proceed on the path.One day a disciple, who was both incapable of learning and regularly driven abnormal by attending “mystical ceremonies,” visited him.He asked, “How can I best profit from the teachings of the sages?”The Sufi said, “I am happy to be able to tell you that I have an infallible method which corresponds to your capacity.”“And what is that, if I am allowed to hear it?”“Simply stop up your ears and think about radishes.”“Before, during or after the lectures and exercises?”“Instead of attending any of them.”Man is a quest – not a question but a quest. A question can be solved intellectually, but a quest has to be solved existentially. It is not that we are seeking some answers to some questions, it is that we are seeking some answer to our being.It is a quest because questions are about others. A quest is about oneself. Man is seeking himself. He knows he is, but he also knows that he does not know who he is. Hence from the very birth a great inquiry starts rising in the innermost core of man. We can repress that inquiry, we can divert that inquiry, we can change that inquiry for substitute inquiries, but he cannot kill it. There is no way to kill it because it is intrinsic to human nature. It is intrinsic to consciousness to know what it is.That inquiry is man’s very nature, and unless it is resolved, man remains searching. Of course, there are nine hundred and ninety-nine ways to go wrong, and there is only one way to go right – so the search is full of hazards. It is not simple; it is very complex – and it is very rare that a man reaches. But unless you reach, you will continue in agony, in turmoil. You will remain a cry in the wilderness. You will not know what joy is. Not knowing yourself, how can you be joyous? And you will not know what benediction is. Not knowing yourself, there is no benediction.You will hear words like contentment, blissfulness, but they will remain words. They won’t have any content for you. The content has to be supplied by your experience. They will remain empty words. They will create much noise around you but they will not mean anything.Search is intrinsic to human nature. But then arises the problem that there are many ways to go wrong, How to find the right path?This small parable is of immense significance. Each word of it has to be understood.Carlyle has said, “The misfortune of man has its source in his greatness. For there is something infinite in him and he cannot succeed in burying himself completely in the finite.”There is something in man which is higher than man, bigger than man, and there is no way to bury it somewhere in the finite. You can see. You can seek money and power, but each time you succeed, you will find that you have failed. Each time you succeed, the success will bring nothing but the awareness of the failure. Money is there but you are as dissatisfied as ever, or even more so. Power is there and you are as impotent as ever. Nothing makes man more aware of powerlessness than power. Nothing makes man more aware of inner poverty than riches – because of the contrast. You can see that there are riches outside but inside you are a beggar, still desiring and asking and hankering and searching.From one side this seems to be a misfortune – the misery of man. From another side it is his greatness. Carlyle is right when he says, “The misfortune of man has its source in his greatness.” What is this greatness? This greatness is his capacity to surpass himself, to go beyond himself, to make a ladder of his life, to jump out of himself. Unless that jump has happened, you live in a wasteland; nothing will ever bloom there. You can make all the efforts possible but the desert will remain a desert; you will not come across any flowers.Those flowers start happening only when you have started reaching somewhere close to truth. That is the quest. The quest is that man longs to become God. The quest is that man wants to become truth. “an-el-haq!” Man wants to feel it – that “I am truth.” Nothing less than that will ever satisfy you.This parable…The Sufi sage, Abdulalim of Fez, refused to teach, but from time to time would advise people about the way to proceed on the path.Go slowly and meditatively.The first thing to be understood is the meaning of the word sage. Sufis make a great distinction between the word saint and the word sage. And there is a great distinction. They are not synonymous. Notwithstanding what your dictionaries say. they are not synonymous.Man can ordinarily have two kinds of character. One is the negative character: the character of the criminal, the character of the anti-social, the character of the rebellious. Another is the positive character: the character of the conventional, orthodox. respectable.The criminal will be punished, will be thrown into prison if caught. The society will try to destroy him because he is a danger to the society. He is disobedient. He is trying to assert himself and the society does not like that. The society exists by destroying individuals; the society can exist only by destroying individuals. The society has more power if there are no individuals around. If there are individuals then the power is less and less and less. If the whole society consists of individuals then there will be no power in the authorities – there will be no power in the priest or the politician. So the society tries to crush. uproot, destroy the anti-social. the immoral – the individual who wants to have his own morality, who wants to do his own thing. The society is very murderous about the negative. And naturally, on the other hand, the society respects the positive.If you follow the society, the society honors you. So the one, the negative character, becomes criminal, and the other, the positive character, becomes a respected gentleman. If the criminal goes on moving to the logical extreme, then he will become the devil. And if the gentleman goes on moving to the logical extreme, he will become the saint. The saint is one who is for the society, hence the society is for him. And the evil character is one who is not for the society, is only for himself – so the society is naturally against him. But there is one thing which is common to both: they are half. This has to be understood. This is one of the most important Sufi ideas: both are half, partial.The saint has only the positive; he is missing the negative. That’s why you will find your saints very boring; you will find your saints very flat, dull. You will find that to live with your saints for even twenty-four hours will be a great ordeal. The saint will not have any joy, he will be sad. He will never do anything wrong, he will be always good, but he will not have any song to sing. He will not have any uniqueness about him. He will be just a type, a stereotype. He will not have any unique taste of his own, he will be a conformist. He will be almost dead because the positive is bound to be dead. Unless the negative goes on playing with it, there is no joy. Life is a warp and woof between the positive and the negative. You cannot make the saint whole. Hence Sufis will not say that the saint is holy – because he is not whole, he is half.Half of him, the negative part, has been repressed, denied. All connections with the negative part have been cut. The negative is thrown into the unconscious dungeon. The saint has tried in every way not to be even aware of its existence. But it exists. There is no way to drop it. The only way to go beyond it is to absorb it, not to drop it. Let me repeat: the only way to go beyond it is to absorb it. But it needs great intelligence, it needs great understanding, wisdom, meditativeness, to transform the poison into elixir.The negative is poisonous, but the poison can become medicinal in the right hands. The saint is a little stupid. You will find saints stupid, mediocre. They were not really intelligent people, otherwise they would have transformed their negative, they would have transformed all that is dangerous into a beautiful flowering. The saint will carry the negative in the unconscious.So if you look through a window into the mind of a saint while he is asleep, you will be surprised. He’s doing things which you could not even have thought about him. In dreams the saint will become the negative. There will be a shift, a total shift, from the positive to the negative – because the negative also needs a little play, a little activity. So you will find that the dreams of the saints are very criminal. That’s why saints are very much afraid to sleep. They go on reducing their sleep because it is the only thing where they are without any control. The moment they fall asleep the control is lost. The conscious goes to sleep and the unconscious take possession, and the unconscious is the negative.And they are very much afraid because in the unconscious are repressed sexuality, murderous instincts, anger, rage, hatred – all kinds of scorpions and snakes and poisonous beings. They all start bubbling up, surfacing. Saints are very much troubled by sleep, because sleep brings one fact home, and brings it home very clearly – that the unconscious or the negative has not been destroyed, it is still there. Saints have great nightmares.The criminal, the anti-social, the rebellious, the negative personality is also half. The negative people are the ones who become great politicians, sometimes great revolutionaries, and release great negative poison on the world. An Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin or Benito Mussolini or Mao Zedong – these are the negative type people. They are just the opposite of the saint, but in one way almost the same – they are as half as the saint is. The difference is only one: what the saint has made the unconscious, they have made their conscious, and what they have made their conscious the saint has made the unconscious.Josef Stalin or Adolf Hitler are not different from Mahatma Gandhi. The only difference is that what is repressed in Mahatma Gandhi is expressed in Adolf Hitler, and what is expressed in Adolf Hitler is repressed in Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi goes on repressing the negative, Adolf Hitler goes on expressing the negative. Adolf Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi are exactly the same type of person. One is just standing on his head doing a shirshasana, a headstand – but the type is exactly the same. There is no difference. And you will be surprised to know that these great criminals have beautiful dreams, far more beautiful than the saints can ever have, because their repressed positivity comes out in their dreams. In their dreams they become great saints. They do great good things to humanity.These are the two ordinary types of people: the saint and sinner. They go together. In a world where there are no more sinners there will be no more saints. In a world where there are no more saints there will be no more sinners. They are partners in the same business. They exist together, they help each other. Without the one the other cannot even exist, cannot survive. The sinner gives definition to the saint and the saint gives definition to the sinner.The sage has a totally different kind of consciousness. It is whole it is not a choice. It is neither positive nor negative, it has absorbed both. It is total acceptance. Whatsoever has been given by God has to be transformed into one unity. Man has not to choose but to accept. And remember, by acceptance I don’t mean tolerance. When you tolerate something you have not really accepted it. You say, “What can be done? It is there, so okay, I will tolerate it. If it cannot be dropped, if it cannot be destroyed, then I will have to tolerate it.” Remember, acceptance is not just tolerance. Acceptance is joyful welcome – “Whatsoever God has given must have some meaning although I may not be able to see the meaning Of it right now. I will have to search for it.” But there is a tacit understanding that whatsoever is given must have some meaning, otherwise it would not have been given in the first place.With this understanding a sage is born. A sage is a holy man because a sage is whole. He does not deny his sexuality, he does not deny his anger, he does not deny anything at all. He accepts everything with deep understanding, gratitude, welcome. And in that very understanding, in that very welcoming attitude, things start changing. A great alchemical change happens. This miracle happens in a sage – anger becomes compassion. Anger plus understanding is equal to compassion, sex plus meditation is equal to samadhi.There is a part which is carrying all the seeds of meditation, and there is another part which is carrying all the seeds of sexuality. The sinner denies the meditative part and accepts the sexual part; the saint denies the sexual part and accepts the meditative part. But both remain lopsided. The sage accepts both, brings them together –meditativeness and sexuality – and watches a great miracle happening in himself, the greatest. As meditativeness and sexuality come close suddenly there is a change – they become one flame. And that one name has a totally new quality.It is just like when hydrogen and oxygen meet, you have water. Now this is a miracle – a miracle in the sense that oxygen does not have the qualities of water, neither does hydrogen. But when hydrogen and oxygen come close, get into a loving embrace, become one unity, suddenly a new quality arises in existence which was not in either of the components. You can drink as much oxygen as you want but your thirst will not go. And you can drink as much hydrogen as you want and your thirst will not go. But water is nothing but H20. Then water has something which is not contained in the parts. Something new has happened: the parts have disappeared into something new. A higher synthesis has been arrived at.That’s what I mean by organic transformation. Whenever two things meet, if there is a real meeting, a third thing is born. When a man and a woman meet and love, a child is born. Now the child will not have the qualities of the father and will not have the qualities of the mother. The child will have his own qualities, the child will be a unique individual. You cannot just reduce the child to the qualities of the parents. You cannot say, “This quality comes from this parent, this quality comes from that parent – and the child is just a sum total of it.” No. If the child is just a sum total of the parents then there is no soul. The child must be something more than the sum total of the parents, only then is there a soul.Water is something more than the sum total of H20.Only when two opposites meet does this organic transformation happen. Man and woman meet, then a child is born. A child cannot be born from a meeting of a man with another man, or a woman with another woman. Similars cannot createonly opposites.Now meditativeness and love are opposites. Meditativeness needs aloneness, love needs the other. Sexuality and meditation are opposites. Sexuality is a desire, a continuous desire, unfulfilled – it remains unfulfilled. And meditation is desirelessness. These are opposites. When they meet, suddenly there is a flare-up. Something happens which was not contained in either.The saint is just meditative. He is carrying one part – hydrogen or oxygen. The sinner is just sexual, he’s carrying another part. When the saint and the sinner meet in you, the sage is born. When the polarities meet in you in deep embrace, are lost into each other, lose all definitions, merge, become one, the sage is born in you. The sage is the rarest flowering in existence. The saint is a faraway echo of it, as far away as the sinner.So Sufis say that the sage is not a saint. You can find many saints, that is very easy. Saints are a social phenomenon. But to find a sage is difficult because the sage is as individual as the criminal and as cosmic as the saint. He is both together. In the sage, God and Devil meet and lose all their identities. That is the highest meeting. There is no higher meeting than that. This moment of meeting within you of the sinner and the saint, of the negative and the positive, is the moment of samadhi.The sage is no-mind. The sinner is negative mind, the saint is positive mind, the sage is no-mind. The sinner lives in constant duality. He has to fight with his saint, remember it. The sinner has continuously to fight with his saint, because the saint is there. The sinner is going to kill somebody and the saint says, “Don’t do this, this is not right.” He has to fight. His fight is as arduous as the fight of the saint. The saint has to fight the sinner. If somebody insults him and a great desire to kill him arises, he has to fight with that desire. He cannot do it, he is a saint, he is a holy man, he is a religious man – this and that. Both go on fighting. They have to because they live in the duality, and the repressed part goes on taking revenge. It waits for the right moments to assert itself.In the sage there is silence, there is no duality. The sage becomes a silent shrine. There is no longer any conflict, any antagonism. There is no longer any war going on in him. There is utter peace. That’s what Sufis call islam. There is utter peace, silence. Those warring elements have disappeared into unity. The marriage has happened.The Sufi sage; Abdulalim… So when the parable says “sage” it means an enlightened person, one who has come home. The Sufi sage, Abdulalim of Fez, refused to teach, but from time to time would advise people about the way to proceed on the path.Why he should refuse to teach?A sage always refuses to teach. The reason? – because truth cannot be taught. The sage is never a teacher. He is a master, but he is never a teacher.First, the truth cannot be taught, it can only be caught. You can catch it like an infection from the master. You can allow yourself to be close to him, and one day you can catch the truth, but it cannot be taught. It is not a kind of information that can be delivered to you, it is an existential experience. You can partake of it but it cannot be given to you. Nobody can give you truth. And I’m not saying that the master cannot give you truth because he doesn’t have it, no. Even if he has it, he cannot give it. It is not a thing and it is not information. It is not knowledge, it is a lived experience – you will have to live in the master with the master.It will happen. In a very mysterious way it happens. Strange are the ways of God. Only untruth can be delivered, truth cannot be delivered. So the sage is never a teacher. This is the difference between a teacher and a master. He is available to give to you, but the giving is very subtle, the giving is very esoteric, it is very occult, it is very hidden. It cannot be given as scientific knowledge is given to you. You cannot make any education out of it. You cannot put it into words, theories, clear-cut principles. It is so vast. The moment you put it into any principle, you can immediately see that something has disappeared from it; it is no longer alive.Principles are like photographs. A bird on the wing is one thing. If you take a photograph, the photograph shows the bird on the wing – but it is just a photograph. The bird is no longer flying, everything has stopped. It is not alive.I have heard….A beautiful woman told Pablo Picasso, “The other day I saw one of your self-portraits. It was beautiful.” The woman was a bore and Picasso was fed-up with her – and she went on and on. And she said, “It was really beautiful, you have done such a beautiful job. And I loved the painting so much that I kissed it.”Picasso suddenly became alive and he said, “What happened? Did the painting kiss you?” The lady said, “What are you talking about? How can the painting kiss me?” Picasso said, “Then it was not me.”The bird on the wing is alive. The flower on the tree is alive. My hand in a gesture is a bird on the wing, it is alive. You can have a photograph of it but something very essential will be missing from it. It will be only the outline of the hand; the soul will be missing from it.So it happens with truth. Truth is aliveness. It is eternal life. The moment you put it into words, you have photographs.So a sage cannot teach the truth, he can only show you where you can go and see the bird on the wing for yourself. He cannot teach you principles, he can only indicate the way. He cannot inform you about truth, he can only inform you about the methods that can clean your heart, that can clarify your mind, that can subdue your inner turmoil, that can help you to stop your constant inner talk so that you are in a silent state of mind and you can see truth – because truth is all around, just the silence of the mind is needed. The master cannot teach you but he can inspire you. The master cannot teach you but he can invoke you. The master cannot teach you but he can invite you. A master is a finger pointing to the moon. A master is not a teacher.And the second thing: teaching is always general, teaching is always theoretical. Teaching is like the menu: you cannot eat it and you cannot be nourished by it. Teaching is like a porno-graphic photograph. It is not the real woman or the real man. You cannot love it and you cannot be loved by it.A master, a sage, can advise you but he cannot teach you. What is the difference? Advice is always personal, it is never general. Advice is from person to person, heart to heart. Advice is always practical, never theoretical. Advice is always experimental, never philosophical. Advice is like food, and teaching is like a menu. Advice is like a real man or a real woman and teaching is just pornographic.The story says: The Sufi sage, Abdulalim of Fez, refused to teach, but from time to time would advise people about the way to proceed on the path. From time to time he would advise people – but only when he found that somebody was ready, only when he found that there was a burning desire; only when he saw that there was a quest, not only curiosity; only when he saw that there was a sincere desire to devote oneself, to sacrifice oneself, for the truth; only when he saw that here there was a gambler who could gamble, not a business man who would calculate each step.Truth is for gamblers because it is for those who can take a risk. It is not for business people.So only when he found that somebody was really in need would his advice be available. That’s why masters have always moved away from the masses. They create a thousand and one ways to stop the masses from coming to them. They exist only for the few, for those who are really in search. And they create devices so that they become invisible to the masses. For example, you can see that I am here, but I am invisible to Pune people. It is deliberately done. I am here only for those people who need advice, who are really searching on their own. Even if no advice is going to come they will go on searching. They will go on risking their life in the search. But if advice is available then many pitfalls can be avoided.This is the difference between teaching and advice. Whatsoever I say to you is not a teaching, it is only advice. It is a provocation, it is a seduction, but not a teaching. It is a persuasion but not a teaching. It is encouragement hut not a teaching. It is to give you courage, zest, gusto, so that you can go on with more fervor, with more verve, with more energy, so that you can be more certain that there is hope. All that I say to you is just to create hope in you – because the path is dark and there are a thousand and one pitfalls. And the path goes on branching in many wrong paths. A master is needed to keep you on the right track.One day a disciple, who was both incapable of learning and regularly driven abnormal by attending “mystical ceremonies,” visited him.A few things about this disciple. First, he is not a disciple. He thinks he is a disciple but he is at the most a student. There is the same difference between a teacher and a master as there is between a student and a disciple. A student is there to collect some information. A student is there to become more knowledgeable. A student is there to know more, but without risking anything. A student is one who is not ready to pay any price. He wants to remain as he is; he just wants to accumulate more knowledge. He wants to become more intellectual, he wants to become a scholar, he wants to become a pundit, a doctor, but he is not interested in transforming himself. He wants to hold truth in his hand but he is not ready to dissolve himself into truth. He wants to possess truth but he does not want to be possessed by truth.A disciple is one who wants to be possessed by truth. A disciple cannot think, “I should possess truth. How can I possess truth?” In fact, the “I” is the only barrier towards truth. How can “I” possess truth? Truth is vast, truth is infinite. How can it be possessed by such a small head? It is not possible. You cannot possess the ocean in your fist, but you can drown yourself in the ocean and disappear. That’s when a disciple is ready – when he is ready to drown himself and to disappear. Even if the price is his life, he is ready.When there is something more valuable than life, you become a disciple, otherwise not. If you can sacrifice your life for something, then you are a disciple. Otherwise you are a student – just greedy. You want to have some information so that you can use it in your life, so that you can succeed in a better way.Many people come to me even though I have created so many barriers. Sometimes, somehow, they sneak in and they ask me questions which should not be asked. They ask me, “If we meditate, what benefit will there be in worldly ways? Will it make us more healthy, more successful? Will it help us to succeed in the world?” Or somebody comes and asks, “Will it help to make my memory more strong? Will it help my mind to become more intelligent?” They are not interested in meditation as such, they are interested in something else. They think that if meditation can be exploited for that, good. They are students.A disciple is one who has understood one thing: “I don’t know who I am” – and that is the most fundamental thing to know first. Anything else is secondary. “I must know who I am, only then can life have any meaning – otherwise it can’t have any meaning. I can go on working and accumulating things, money, prestige. But how is that going to satisfy me? – because I don’t even know who I am. I must first have absolute feeling of my being, only then can I be on the right track.”Everybody wants to have bliss, but how can you have bliss if you are not even aware of who you are? One has to be absolutely aware of one’s nature, only then is bliss possible. Otherwise you will go on searching for something which may not be at all helpful to your bliss. And you may go on missing something which is just there at the comer, and was absolutely meant for your bliss. But how can you judge? You don’t know yourself; you are not aware of your nature. A disciple has only one desire: to know himself. And he is ready to do whatsoever is needed for it to be done. He is unconditionally ready to pay any price.One day a disciple, who was both incapable of learning and regularly driven abnormal by attending “mystical ceremonies,” visited him. Now he is not a disciple. He thinks he is a disciple. He may be going to many people, so he thinks he is a disciple. But he is not even capable of learning.The word disciple comes from a root which means: capacity to learn. And he is not capable of learning. What prevents people from learning? What makes people incapable?A few things…. One, the capacity to learn needs a state of not knowing. You must be innocent like a child, only then can you learn. If you already know, you cannot learn. You must know that you don’t know. You must not carry the ego of knowledge – that “I know.” The second thing is that a great receptivity is needed because you will have to absorb. Openness is needed. You cannot remain closed, you cannot remain closed with your old prejudices, ideas, concepts, ideologies. Intelligence is needed.And when I say intelligence, always remember that I never mean intellectuality. Intellectuality is a substitute for intelligence. People who pretend to be intelligent are intellectuals. A real man of intelligence is not an intellectual at all, he is existential. He knows perfectly well that intellect is uncreative, that it cannot create anything. At the most it is a good survival device, but it is uncreative. All that is created is created by something else. That is intelligence. You can call it intuitiveness – but it is something else. It has nothing to do with your intellect.In a university your intellect is trained. You are taught how to argue, how to prove, how to discuss, how to debate. You are taught logic. And through logic, intellect arises. Now logic is in itself very illogical because it does not cover all of life. It is very partial. Life is more than logic, it is paradoxical. So once you have got very fixed in your logic you will start losing track of life. You will become more and more of an intellectual and less and less intelligent. An intelligent person accepts logic, and accepts illogic too. An intelligent person always accepts the polarity, he never chooses. He does not say, “I will choose the negative, or I will choose the positive, or I will choose this and I will deny that.” Intelligence accepts all.Intelligence has no choice. That’s why Krishnamurti goes on defining intelligence as choiceless awareness. And sometimes you can find it. You can find a non-intellectual person who is absolutely uneducated, he may be a primitive man living in a village, but he is of immense intelligence. In his eyes you can see intelligence, radiance; in his acts you can see intelligence. And you can see a university professor behaving very unintelligently, but he may be a great intellectual.Intelligence means awareness. Intelligence means a kind of presence, instantaneous presence, immediate presence. It happens here every day. I can go on looking at you. Whenever I see an intellectual, I can immediately feel that he is closed in a kind of wall, a transparent wall. He listens and yet he does not listen, because he is constantly thinking about whether it is right or not, constantly thinking whether he agrees with me or not, constantly thinking, yes, no – choosing. And in that very choosing he is losing, he is missing the whole point.An intelligent person listens attentively with no idea. There is no need to decide right now. He is immediately with me. It does not mean that he agrees with me. It does not mean that he is agreeing or disagreeing, no. He is simply listening. What is the point of agreeing and disagreeing? – that can be done later on. And then there is a miracle: if you can listen totally, attentively. in that very listening you will know what is truth and what is not truth. There will be no need to think about it. The very quality of silent listening will make you aware of what truth is. Truth has its own revelation. When it is there you start feeling it is there. When it is not there, a thousand and one arguments cannot prove that it is there. Truth has its own solid presence; you just have to be available to it.So the capacity to learn means intelligence, innocence, a childlike readiness to go into the unknown, to explore, to be always in a kind of wonder, to feel the mystery of life. This is the capacity to learn which makes a disciple.And against it is the incapacity to learn :knowledgeability, intellectuality – or call it stupidity, they mean the same, intellectuality and stupidity are synonymous – closedness, a prejudiced mind, full of junk, full of the past, no space for the new.A disciple is a womb – ready to receive the truth, ready to receive the master, ready to receive his energy. And remember, with the master it is always a transfer of energy. Unseen by you, untouched by you, a constant shower of energy is happening. If you are receptive you will be utterly satisfied by it. Your thirst will disappear. But if you are only listening to the words and collecting the words, and proving, disproving, agreeing, disagreeing – then you are not here, you are not present; you are almost absent. You may be physically here, but you are not psychologically here, not spiritually here at all.One day a disciple, who was both incapable of learning and regularly driven abnormal by attending “mystical ceremonies,” visited him. Now this too has to be understood. This matter of mystical experiencesFirstly, down the ages, all over the world, mystical ceremonies have existed. A mystical ceremony is a ritual in which you start by pretending, and later on, by and by, you are hypnotized by your own pretension. Slowly, slowly, the pretension becomes a kind of auto-hypnosis.For example, if you participate in a mystical ceremony, it will be a ritual in the beginning. Rituals can be of many kinds – every religion has its own. If you participate in a mystical ceremony which is based on the idea of kundalini energy, serpent-power, you have to first read about what kundalini is. Naturally you have to become acquainted with what kundalini is so that you understand the physiology of the kundalini. You read Gopi Krishna and people like that. And you know that there are many centers and there is a passage in the spine up which the energy rises. And you know that it goes moving upwards, and where it reaches and what happens – that it finally reaches to the head and then your whole body is shaken, trembling, and there is great light and there is great joy. These things you read. Naturally a great greed arises in you to have these experiences. And suddenly you see that something is being missed by you; that others are having great experiences and you are missing. That creates a kind of jealousy, competition, greed, desire, longing.Just a few years ago the pope of the Vatican announced that there were one hundred and sixty-three kinds of sins. And immediately thousands of letters reached the Vatican, saying, “Please sir, give us the whole list” – because many felt that they were missing out. One hundred and sixty-three kinds of sins? You will also wonder what you are missing. Maybe you are doing two, three, four, five – at the most seven. But one hundred and sixty-three? People are really having a good time. Many inquiries arrived – “We would like to know what these one hundred and sixty-three sins are.”People become intrigued when they see that somebody else is having something. A great desire, a great wish arises.So first you read about kundalini. You become suffused with the knowledge of the centers, their colors, their mantras, their places in the physical body. You visualize them. Then you participate in a ceremony. In the ceremony you see people whose kundalini is rising. Somebody is getting very ecstatic, and you feel very, very deeply depressed that you have never seen such beauty, such experiences. You sit there, you visualize. People are swaying, people are enjoying, tears are flowing, their faces are aglow. Sooner or later you also get into the ritual. You also start swaying. Man is very imitative.The spiritual seeker has to be very much alert about imitativeness.First you start swaying, and you know that you are just doing it yourself. Sooner or later you get into it. Your wish becomes a kind of wish fulfillment, you autohypnotize yourself. And there are many people; it is great hypnosis all around you. And you start seeing light inside. Mind is very imaginative, it can imagine anything. And remember, I am not saying kundalini is wrong; remember, I am not saying that light is not seen; and I am not saying that there are no mystical experiences – no, not in the least. I’m not saying that. But out of a hundred people, ninety-nine go on creating them by imagination – and that is not true.The real experience has nothing to do with your imagination. The real experience has nothing to do with your knowledge about kundalini. The real experience has nothing to do with the textbooks about kundalini. And the real experience is always unique. It never happens in the same way to two persons. Those seven chakras are there, but they are not at the same place in everyone. When you see a chart of kundalini it is just a generalized chart. It is almost like…. Here there are one thousand people, and if somebody asks for a man of average height – the average height comes somewhere around five feet five inches, or five feet five and a half inches, that is the average height – you can go on searching for him but you will not find him. Somebody will be five six, somebody will be five-four, somebody will be five-seven. There will be all kinds of people. The average is just a generalized form.It happens exactly like that. There are seven chakras but they don’t exist in the same Places for all people. And there are experiences but they never happen in the same way to two persons – they happen very, very differently. So there is no need to know the physiology of the kundalini, and there is no need to know the chakras, and there is no need to know what happens finally – because if you know it you will start hypnotizing yourself, and by and by you will start getting into the ritual. And you will create a kind of dream around you. And when there are many people doing the same thing, you tend to fall into the crowd-mind. You start swaying with the crowd.Have you watched it sometimes – how you fall into the crowd and become one with it? A crowd, a crowd of Hindus, is going to burn a mosque. Or a crowd of Mohammedans is going to destroy a temple. You are a Hindu and you go into the Hindu crowd. You did not really think about burning the mosque, you had never thought about it before, you are not that kind of man; you are not that destructive, not that violent, aggressive. You are a…a nice person. You have never burned anything, anybody. And when you joined the crowd you were not really thinking about doing anything, you were just curious about where this crowd was going. You were just intrigued about what was going to happen. You were just going there as a kind of entertainment, with no idea in particular of doing anything.Then by and by you get excited by the crowd – these people rushing around you from all sides, with such great energy, shouting slogans and protesting. Their energy functions on you. Your energy starts being aroused. By and by you see that you are getting excited. There is all this excitement around you – how can you be aloof? You become excited, and when you reach the mosque or the temple, and when people start burning it, suddenly you find yourself doing things you had not planned. You are burning the mosque or destroying the temple or killing a person.People get carried away by the mass-mind.Religion is your unique experience. It has nothing to do with the mass-mind. In the mass you lose your identity, but you fall below. In religious experience you also lose your identity, but you go above.Let this sentence be remembered: religion is a pilgrimage, Sufis say, from unconscious anonymity to conscious anonymity. From unconscious anonymity…that’s what happens in a crowd. You become anonymous, unconscious. You lose your ego but you fall below the ego, you become animalistic. That’s why it is said that more crimes are committed by crowds than by single individuals.Friedrich Nietzsche has said, “Madness in individuals is a rare phenomenon but in crowds it is the general rule.” It is very rare that people become mad individually, but it is almost the rule that crowds become mad. The general excitement is just too much, the fire of it is too much, you start burning with it – and it is very unconscious. And there is no responsibility any more and there is no problem of conscience – you are not killing somebody, the crowd is killing him. You are simply participating because you were there. Nobody can catch hold of you and nobody can say to you that “You killed!” Hindus killed, Mohammedans killed, communists killed. You were not individually responsible.In a mystical ceremony the same happens. It is an exploitation of the crowd-mind. Beware of it.And about mystical experiences three things have to be remembered. There are three kinds of spiritual experiences. One is pathological, neurotic, psychotic, hysterical. It happens many times that a hysterical person can become a mahatma. He falls into hysteria, foams, becomes unconscious, utters gibberish…. Do you know from where the word gibberish comes? It comes from a mystic named Jabbar, who used to utter nonsense. From Jabbar the English word gibberish has come. He would utter much nonsense, with no meaning, but it was thought that he was a great mystic. He was simply hysterical. In India you can find such hysterical people being worshipped. They have to be treated; they are simply pathological.If you are pathological, hysterical, sometimes in a mystical ceremony it happens that you fall into hysteria, and people start thinking that you have gone into samadhi, ecstasy or something and they start worshipping you. And when you come back and you see people touching your feet, holding flowers and garlands and sweets for you…now you have found a trick. Now you can exploit your hysteria. And you will also start believing, because it is so nice to believe that you are becoming a spiritual person. Now their worship will help you to become more pathological. Rather than thinking that this is something wrong, you will think that something great is happening to you. And one can go farther and farther into the mire.Remember, in the East there are many pathological people who are thought to be mahatmas. And in the West many real mystical people are put into mad asylums because they are thought to be pathological. Both attitudes are wrong. That’s why I say this matter of spiritual experience is a delicate one. In the West there are many mystical people who are in the hospitals being treated, being given electric shocks, insulin shocks, because it is thought that they are hysterical.Just think if Ramakrishna had been born in America. He would have been put into some mad asylum because from the outside his mystical experiences looked almost like hysteria – he would fall unconscious, his body would become stiff, his mouth would start foaming, his eyes would go up. All this is what happens in hysteria; it is a fit.This matter is delicate. If Ramakrishna had been in the West he would have been treated. And they have devised such strong methods to treat people that there is every possibility that they would have made Ramakrishna normal. But that would have been a great misfortune.In the East just the reverse is happening. I have come across many people. Sometimes they would be brought to me with the idea that I would recognize their state. But I saw that they were just hysterical people; this was just hysteria and nothing else. They were neurotic; they needed some therapy. They had fallen below the normal. But to fall below the normal or to go above the normal sometimes looks alike. Only a master can be decisive about it, otherwise it is very difficult to decide what is what. But there are a few things which can be given to you as indications.If it is pathological, the person will become more and more sad, dull, listless. If it is pathological, the person will become more and more tense, anxious, worried. If it is pathological, the person will become less and less attentive, will lose presence of mind, will become uncreative. If it is pathological, the person’s body will start suffering in many ways. The person will not be of any creative value to the society if it is pathological.If it is not pathological, the person will have more life, more aliveness, more love, more compassion, more intelligence, more presence of mind. The person will have a glow. He will be drunk with the divine but his drunkenness will have a kind of awareness in it. Utterly drunk and yet utterly aware – that’s how he will be. And he will be creative. His being here on the earth will be beneficial to people.So the first thing is the pathological. The second thing is the fake. There are fakes who can perform. Seeing that it pays well you can become a performer. You can pretend that something is happening to you. If you see that people come and touch your feet and people think that you have arrived, why not pretend? It is good business. You can start pretending.Remember, mind is so cunning that it can go on being cunning in every possible way.The third is the real. But there is one more complexity: sometimes if the real is not under the right guidance he can fall and become pathological. And if the pathological is under the right guidance sometimes it happens that the pathological can become real. So there is further complexity. Sometimes it happens that the fake can become pathological. He started by pretending, but by and by he got into it. Something erupted in him, some energy source ruptured in him, and he became pathological. He started on his own, deliberately, but one day he found that it was no longer deliberate; it was beyond his control. And sometimes it can also happen that under the right guidance, the fake can become the real – because if the fake is made aware of what he is doing, and if he is really in search and has chosen just a cheap way of performance, under the guidance of a right master he may drop his pseudo-ness and start moving towards the real.And the last thing, remember, the real can sometimes become fake – because the spiritual experience is such that it happens when it happens. For example, one day it happens and suddenly you are in it, completely gone and lost, utterly blissful. Then people start gathering around you, then people start gathering to see the mystical experience. Then one day they are there and it is not happening. And now your whole prestige is at stake. You can pretend, you can become fake.So complexity becomes double or triple. Right guidance is needed, otherwise you can fall into any trap of the mind.One day a disciple, who was both incapable of learning and regularly driven abnormal by attending “mystical ceremonies,” visited him.He asked, “How can I best profit from the teachings of the sages?”Now look at the question: How can I best profit…?The idea is of profit, greed. The idea is to accumulate, the idea is to become more powerful. The idea is not to dissolve, to disappear.”How can I best profit from the teachings of the sages?” And there is a misunderstanding – because sages have no teachings. Sages have messages but no teachings. advice but no teachings. Sages open the door to the unknown, but don’t supply you with any theories, philosophies, ideologies.The Sufi said, “I am happy to be able to tell you that I have an infallible method which corresponds to your capacity.”The man must have been happy. He asked:“And what is that, if I am allowed to hear it?”“Simply stop up your ears and think about radishes.”Now you will be surprised about this method. Is the sage joking? Is he making the man look foolish, ridiculous? No. The sage cannot do that. It is impossible in a state of compassion. No, he is giving him a method, it looks absurd. “Simply stop up your ears and think about radishes.”But that is exactly what Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has given to the West. It is a Transcendental Meditation: “Close your ears and think of radishes.” Anything can become a mantra. That’s why I say there is no need to repeat “aum,” there is no need to repeat “Allah.” You can repeat “Coca-Cola.” That will do! And more so, because now Coca-Cola has disappeared from India. There will be more desire for Coca-Cola than for aum. Who bothers about Allah when Coke is missing? Or you can repeat your own name – that will do.The great poet, Tennyson, has written in his memoirs that when he was a child, sometimes his parents would not be at home and he would feel very afraid. So not knowing what to do being alone, he would simply repeat his own name – Tennyson, Tennyson, Tennyson – just to give him a feeling as if somebody was there, as if his mother was calling him – Tennyson – or his father was there. Being so afraid and not knowing what else to do he would repeat his name, and that would help him and soothe him and he would fall asleep. So he found a Transcendental Meditation. And by and by he entered into it, and that became his meditation for his whole life. So whenever he would find any anxiety, any trouble, any fear arising, he would repeat his name a few times and everything would cool down. Or whenever he would find that he could not sleep, he would repeat his name and fall asleep.Yes, it is possible – because Allah or Tennyson or any word will do. The situation is that if you repeat it, if you think only of it, all other thinking disappears. You become focused. In that focusing you become silent. But this is the lowest kind of meditation.The sage is not ridiculing the man; he is not laughing at the man. “I am happy to be able to tell you that I have an infallible method which corresponds to your capacity.” He’s saying, “This is where you are. More than that won’t do. This will be enough for you. You are very childish, juvenile. Just repeating a name or thinking of something will do.”Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation is very juvenile; it is very childish; it is for the beginners. Yes, it gives a kind of consolation, it helps to soothe you. It is just like a tranquilizer. And for people who are in search of anything, in a very, very juvenile way…. America in particular is in great search for something to hang on to, because all that is available – money, power – has become meaningless. All has become meaningless. They have everything; for the first time a society has become affluent. All is there so there is no hope in it, and everybody is asking, “What else? What now?” So people are searching. And when people search and there is no long tradition, no long continuity of search…. And America is one of the most childish societies too, because it has existed on the earth for only three hundred years. It has no past to refer to, no past in which to have a context, no silsila – what Sufis call “continuity of spirituality.” It is the first urge. America is a kind of kindergarten land as far as spirituality is concerned. So any person can go and any person can become a guru. It is so easy to become a guru in America. People are searching for anything – harmful, meaningful, meaningless – anything.There are two gurus, the greatest gurus in America: Maharishi Hashish Yogi and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. People are trying even hashish to attain to God. There is no sense of direction.This man must have been childish, juvenile. He had been to many mystical ceremonies and many mystical teachers and he had been going from one school to another and collecting a few bits of information from here, a few from there – and creating garbage inside his mind.When the sage said, “You simply stop up your ears and think about radishes,” he was not joking. He was saying exactly what corresponded to this man’s capacity. More than that would not be applicable right then. More than that would be dangerous. He had to be broken in to the world of spirituality from the point at where he was.In America any kind of thing goes – for the simple reason that people are in search but they don’t have any direction and they don’t have any reference to the past. Their parents have never searched for spirituality, their parents were in search of money. Their parents were in search of money and they succeeded. And in that very success, everything failed. Their parents had only one thing that was enough to keep them drunk, and that was power. How to have a big house? How to have a big car? How to have more money? – more power. They were drunk with power. And they had only one thing as their religion and that was work. Work is the American ethos. Work hard so that you can achieve many things in the world. And they succeeded; unfortunately, they succeeded. And now their children are at a loss. Now what? Money is there, house is there, car is there, everything is there – now it doesn’t make any sense just to rush after them when they are there. Why rush after them? They are already available. Something else is needed. Anything will do. Sex will do. Psychedelics will do. Yoga will do. Tantra will do. Anything will do. And any pretender can become a guru.Listen to this…A gray-haired lady climbed three flights of stairs, opened a carved mahogany door and walked into an exotically furnished reception room. A gong sounded, and out of a cloud of incense appeared a beautiful brunette Oriental.“Do you,” she said softly, “wish to meet with His Omnipotence, the wise, all-knowing, all-seeing guru, Maharishi Naru?”“Yeah,” said the elderly woman. “Tell Irving his mama is here from the Bronx!”It is happening. It is happening for a certain reason. People are in search and they don’t know what they are searching for. Any pretender can promise – he can promise rose gardens, can promise paradise – and the promise will do. And Americans know how to promise. They know how to advertise. They know how to persuade people to purchase anything. In that they are one of the most skilled people. So now God has become the commodity.But unless you rise in your capacity to learn, unless you rise in your capacity to seek and search, you can call your search a search for truth, but it will remain something else.This man was simply stupid, mediocre. unintelligent. He was wasting his time and others’ time. But he was collecting information from here and there, and he was enjoying the ego that feels, “I am becoming knowledgeable.” Now it was by chance that he fortunately stumbled at the door of this sage. The sage said:“Simply stop up your ears and think about radishes.””Before, during or after the lectures and exercises?”“Instead of attending any of them.”I am reminded of a woman who went to her doctor. The doctor was very much troubled by the woman. Every year she would give birth to a child. She already had one dozen and now the thirteenth was coming. And the doctor said, “Enough is enough! Now you stop!”The woman said, “Now I am also thinking that it is becoming tiring. I am exhausted. Will you suggest something for me that will prevent me from becoming pregnant?”The doctor said, “Yes. Drink a cup of hot water.”The woman said, “Before or after?”The doctor said, “Instead.”“Neither before, during, or after the lectures and exercises. Drop all those exercises. They are stupid. And drop all those lectures, they are meaningless. The first thing that you have to do is to become a little more collected, calm. To close your ears will be the best thing you can do. You have already allowed your ears to take in too much for you to carry. You are already burdened.”So “close your ears” is simply symbolic. “And don’t gather any more information. It is already too much, it is driving you mad!” Close your ears means: there is no need to know about truth. To know about truth is not to know truth, so drop this going round and round in circles, this going about and about. Close your ears. And, of course, he says, “just think of radishes.” Maybe the man has only that much capacity.I have heard a Hindu parable….A man came to a sage and asked what he should do. He was a simple man. The sage asked, “Do you love somebody?”The man said, “No, I am a poor man and, you can see, I am ugly too, so no woman ever agreed to marry. I am unmarried. I am a bachelor. Nobody loves me.”The sage says, “Then it will be a little difficult. Still, you think…. Nobody loves you? That’s okay, but do you love somebody? Anything will do – a tree, a dog – anything.”The man said, “I love my buffalo.”The sage said, “That will do. You just go home and meditate on your buffalo. See God in the form of the buffalo. Look at the buffalo and feel the divine – because wherever your love is, from exactly that point one has to proceed. Let the buffalo be the first point of your journey, the departure point. The arrival will always be God, but the departures will differ.”Somebody loves nature, then that is the beginning of his meditation. Somebody loves music, then that is the beginning of his meditation.There are people who have no musical ear. If you tell them to make music their meditation, it will be impossible, it will become a barrier. They will never arrive at God. There are people who are completely dead about nature; nature has no appeal for them. These immense colors all around – this green and red and the leaves and the foliage and the flowers, don’t make any sense to them. They have not seen them. They have no eye for it. They are blind as far as beauty is concerned. Then this cannot be their door to the divine.The advice is very practical. You have to start from where you are, there is no other way to start. Everybody has to start in his own way, and as you grow, better meditations will be given to you. Meditations have to be given according to your capacity. As you start growing, more meditations – higher, deeper – will be given to you. And the final stage is that when you have really grown Up, all meditations will be taken away from you. The final stage of meditation is the disappearance of meditation. When meditation has become perfect, you have to drop it. To cling to the meditation at that moment will be the last barrier; you have to drop it too.Meditation has to become one day so natural – like breathing – that you need not do it, it is always there. It is a kind of presence around you, within, without. Asleep, you are meditative; walking, you are meditative; talking, you are meditative; doing this and that, you are meditative. Your meditation never leaves you, it has become your shadow. Then a man has really become a meditator.Remember this paradox: when meditation has arrived, it has to be dropped. And one has to begin as one’s capacity allows.The master said, “The first thing is to stop hearing more about truth. You have already heard much.”The after-dinner speaker was boring and long-winded. One after another the guests nodded off to sleep at their places. The exasperated and embarrassed master of ceremonies frantically banged his gavel. In his wild banging he hit the snoring man next to him on the head.“Hit me again,” said the snorer, “I can still hear the son of a bitch.”The master says, “You have heard enough. You have read enough. You already know more than you need. Close your ears. And your capacity is so low that whatsoever you have heard you will go on misinterpreting. It will never be relevant, it will be always irrelevant – because your being is very low and your knowledge is very high. They don’t meet. Your being will interpret. Your knowledge will be interpreted by your being and it will always be a corruption. It will always be irrelevant and out of context. Maybe the man who was saying it had a context for it, or the book you read it in had a context for it, but in you it will simply become a fragment floating – unrelated to you, unrooted in you. It will be a burden. It will not enlighten you. It will burden you more; it will not unburden you.”A man and his wife were standing in front of the gorilla cage at the zoo. Suddenly, the gorilla reached through the bars, pulled the woman into his cage and started to rip off her clothes.She screamed, “Herman, what do I do now?”Herman shrugged his shoulders and replied, “Tell him you have a headache, dear.”One thing may be relevant in one context. It is not relevant in all contexts. But the context comes from your being. So never know more than you are. Be more, know less, and you will always be moving in the right direction. Know a little, but do it, absorb it, digest it – otherwise knowledge can become a kind of indigestion. It can create nausea. You will have to vomit it.Eat a little, but let it be digested so it becomes blood, bones and marrow.Sufis are very practical people, very down-to-earth. The sage must have looked into the man and seen that his capacity was very poor. If he had to be helped, he had to start from there. It is not insulting. The sage is not ridiculing. It is out of his compassion that he says, “You do two things. One is: stop gathering knowledge – no more. In fact, unlearn all that you have learned. Close your ears and think of something that you like. Think of something that you love. Think of something with which you can fall en rapport, whatsoever it is. That will be the first glimpse of God in your being.” And the journey starts from there.Enough for today?

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-01/

Master Lu-tsu said: That which exists through itself is called the Way, Tao. Tao has neither name nor shape. It is the one essence, the one primal spirit. Essence and life cannot be seen. They are contained in the light of heaven. The light of heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.The Great One is the term given to that which has nothing above it. The secret of the magic of life consists in using action in order to attain nonaction.The Golden Flower is the light. One uses the Golden Flower as a symbol. The phrase “The lead of the water-region has but one taste” refers to it.The work on the circulation of the light depends entirely on the backward-flowing movement, so that the thoughts are gathered together. The heavenly heart lies between sun and moon.The Book of the Yellow Castle says: “In the square inch field of the square foot house, life can be regulated.” In the middle of the square inch dwells the splendor. In the purple hall of the city of jade dwells the God of Utmost Emptiness and Life. Therefore when the light circulates, the energies of the whole body appear before its throne, as, when a holy king has established the capital and has laid down the fundamental rules of order, all the states approach with tribute; or as, when the master is quiet and calm, man-servants and maids obey his orders of their own accord, and each does his work.Therefore you only have to make the light circulate; that is the deepest and most wonderful secret. The light is easy to move, but difficult to fix. If it is made to circulate long enough, then it crystallizes itself. It is the condition of which it is said: “Silently thou fliest upward in the morning.”In carrying out this fundamental principle you need to seek for no other methods, but must only concentrate your thoughts on it. By collecting the thoughts one can fly and will be born in heaven.The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life. Although it works very accurately, it is yet so fluid that it needs extreme intelligence and clarity, and the most complete absorption and tranquility. People without this highest degree of intelligence and understanding do not find the way; people without this utmost capacity for absorption and tranquility cannot keep fast hold of it.A parable.Once there was a very rich magician who had a great many sheep. But at the same time this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where his sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered into the forest, fell into ravines, and so on, and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins, and this they did not like.At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotized his sheep and suggested to them first of all that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned, that on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant.Secondly, he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them. And in the third place, he suggested to them that if anything at all was going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it.Further, the magician suggested to his sheep that they were not sheep at all. To some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians.And after this, all his cares and worries about the sheep came to an end. They never ran away again but quietly awaited the time when the magician would require their flesh and their skins.George Gurdjieff loved this parable very much. His whole philosophy is contained in this small parable. And this parable represents man in the ordinary state of unconsciousness. It is one of the most beautiful illustrations of man as he is: man is a machine.Man is not born to be a machine, but man lives like a machine and dies like a machine. Man has the seed of a great flowering of consciousness, man has the possibility to become God. But that doesn’t happen. It does not happen because man has been hypnotized – by the society, by the state, by the organized church, by the vested interests. The society needs slaves, and man can remain a slave only if he is not allowed to grow into his uttermost flowering. The society needs your flesh and your skins and naturally nobody likes it. Hence the whole process of socialization, of civilization, is nothing but a deep hypnosis.Man is being hypnotized from the very moment he is born. He is being hypnotized: that the society exists in his favor, for his good. That is utterly wrong. He is being hypnotized: that he is immortal. He is not. He can be, but he is not. And if the hypnosis persists he will never be immortal.You live only as a mortal being because you live in the body. The body is going to die. That which is born is bound to die; birth is the beginning of the body and death the end. Do you know anything more than the body in you? Have you experienced anything higher than the body, deeper than the body? Have you seen anything in you which was even before you were born? If you have seen that, then you are immortal. If you know your face, your original face, the face that you had before you were born, then you know you will be there after death too; otherwise not.Man can be an immortal, but man lives surrounded by death because man lives identified with the body. The society does not allow you to know more than the body. The society is interested only in your body; your body can be put to use, your soul is dangerous. A man of soul is always dangerous because a man of soul is a free man, he cannot be reduced to slavery. A man who has an immortal soul in him has a deeper commitment to existence itself, to God himself. He does not care a bit about the man-made structures of society, civilization and culture; these are prison cells for him. He does not exist as a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan. He cannot be part of a crowd. He exists as an individual.The body is part of a crowd, your soul is not. Your soul is deeply individual. Its flavor is that of freedom. But your soul cannot be put to any use in the marketplace. The society needs only your body. And it is very dangerous for the society if you start striving for the soul, because then your interest changes. You turn from being an extrovert into an introvert; you start moving inwards. The society is outside, the society wants you to remain an extrovert – interested in money, power, prestige, and all that – so that your energy goes on moving outwards. If you start moving inwards, that means you have become a dropout, you are no more part of the game that is being played on the outside. You don’t belong to it. You start diving deep within your own being. And there is the source of immortality.The society prevents you from going inwards. And the best way is to give you a false idea that you are going inwards. The magician told the sheep that they are lions, suggested to them that they are immortals, hypnotized them into believing that they are not only men but they are great magicians.When you go to a church you are not going inwards, when you go to the temple you are not going inwards. But the society has hypnotized you to believe that if you want to go inwards, go to the church. But the church is as much outside as anything else. The society has hypnotized you to believe that if you want to go inwards, go to the priest. And the priest is an agent of the state and the society. The priest has always been against the mystics, because if you go to a mystic you will start moving inwards.A mystic lives in a totally different way. His energy has a different gestalt: his river moves inwards. So one who comes to a mystic, falls in tune with the mystic, will start moving inwards naturally, simply, spontaneously. That is the whole purpose of being with a master, with a mystic.This book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, is one of the most esoteric treatises in the world. It will show you the way to become more than the body. It will show you the way to go beyond death. It will show you the way to bloom – how not to remain a seed but to become a golden flower – what in India we have called the one-thousand-petaled lotus, in China they call the golden flower. It is a symbol.The flower represents perfection, totality. The flower represents the uttermost expression of the potential, the actualization of the potential. The flower represents the beauty, the grandeur, the splendor of being. And unless you have become a thousand-petaled lotus or a golden flower….Remember, you have to go far. Remember, that you have to get out of the traps that the society has put around you. Remember, that you have not yet done the work for which you have come to the Earth. Remember, you are just a seed, not yet a soul.This treatise, The Secret of the Golden Flower, is very ancient – possibly one of the most ancient treatises in the world – certainly twenty-five centuries old, but the possibility is that it is older than that. But twenty-five centuries can be traced back very easily. And this treatise is also a great synthesis of all the great religions. That is rare, unique. The Bible belongs to the Christians, the Talmud belongs to the Jews, the Vedas belong to the Hindus, the Dhammapada to the Buddhists, the Tao Te Ching to the Taoists. But this small book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, belongs to no one in particular, or it belongs to all.It is deeply based in Taoist teachings, it is a flowering of the Taoist approach to life and existence. But it is not only that – Zarathustra has played a role; Zarathustra’s teachings have been incorporated in it. Buddhist teachings have also been incorporated in it, and a certain esoteric school of Christians, the Nestorians, they have also played their part. So Christianity and Judaism also have become part of it.It is one of the most synthetical approaches. It combines all that is beautiful in all the traditions of the world. For centuries it was only transmitted orally and the book remained esoteric. It was not available to the public because it has something very secret to teach; it was available only to the disciples. The master would tell it to the disciple only when the time was ripe, because it gives you such a potential secret that if you don’t understand rightly, if you do something wrong with it, there are bound to be harmful effects from it. It has to be understood rightly, and it has to be worked at only in the presence of a master. It is a powerful method – it is as powerful as atomic energy.Now the secrets of atomic energy are kept hidden from the public. Once they start leaking out to the public there is going to be great danger. If people can manufacture atom bombs privately, there is bound to be great chaos. Great secrecy is maintained about atomic research. Exactly in the same way this book teaches you one of the most potential methods of inner explosion. For centuries the secrets were guarded – only given to the disciples in privacy, in intimacy – and the people who followed this particular esoteric school resisted all temptations to write the book. In fact, all the religions of the world have long resisted writing their spiritual teachings.There is some beauty when something is transferred orally. It is alive, one thing – the master is behind it. It is not a dead word, the word has soul, wings. The experience of the master supports it, the master is a witness to it. It is not just speculation, not only a philosophy, but something existential, experienced, lived. And the master has traveled the path – he knows the dangers of the path, he knows the pitfalls, he knows the points at which people go astray – and he will take every care so that the disciple cannot go astray.The closer you come to the truth, the more is the possibility of going astray, because when you come closer to the truth, you can become very egoistic, thinking that, “Now I know,” that “Now I am.” And if the ego exploits the situation you will fall back to your old dark valley, you will lose the peak. When you come closer to the truth, a great desire arises to share it with people. But you have not attained it in its wholeness and it is dangerous to share half-truths because half-truths are more dangerous than lies, because they are powerful. Lies are impotent. Sooner or later people will themselves find that it is a lie. But the half-truth can persist for centuries, can have effects for centuries.Nobody can reach through the half-truth. And the person who travels half the way will belong neither to this world nor to the other. He will be in a limbo, and that is a very strange situation to be in: you lose the old and you don’t gain the new; you become a chaos. The old order is gone and the new has not happened. You become a cloud, you become confusion. Rather than becoming more clear, rather than becoming more alive, rather than becoming more light-full, your life becomes a conflict between two polarities. You are pulled apart, you start falling into pieces. Half of you belongs to the earth and half of you belongs to the sky. Now you are nowhere. Now you are nobody. This can create madness. So for centuries The Secret of the Golden Flower was only conveyed orally.Secondly, with an oral tradition the book remains always alive. That’s how it became a synthesis. Basically it was born in the Taoist climate of China. But then Bodhidharma reached China – a new master, with a new message from India, Buddha’s message. And the people who were following The Secret of the Golden Flower were very open people; they were not part of any established church. They could immediately see that Bodhidharma also has it – it was so apparent, so manifest. They allowed Bodhidharma’s teachings to be part of their teaching. And the same happened with Zoroastrian masters, with Nestorian Christians: again and again something came to China, and if it was worthwhile it was incorporated.An oral teaching remains alive, growing, like a river. New streams of water come and become part of it. Once a teaching is written, then it cannot incorporate anything anymore. Then it becomes rigid, it loses fluidity; it becomes dead, it is a corpse. Now The Secret of the Golden Flower is not growing; for centuries it has not grown. Since it has been written it has not grown.Why have I chosen to speak on it? – so that it can still grow. It is such a beautiful message to the world, it should not die. I would like to revive it. And now I can talk to people who are disciples, who have come to me and who are ready to die in order to be reborn, who are ready to die for flowering. The seed has to die, only then can it grow; the seed has to disappear, only then can the tree happen.I will be speaking to you on this small but immensely valuable book so that the book can become alive again. It can become alive between me and you. It can again start flowing. And it has something of immense importance. If you understand it and if you practice it, you will be enriched.But the first thing to understand is: remember that you have been hypnotized, and you have to go through a de-hypnotizing process. Remember that you have been conditioned and you have to be unconditioned. Remember that death is coming. Don’t think that it is not going to happen today; it can happen any moment.In fact, all that happens always happens now. The seed dies now, the bud becomes the flower now, the bird starts calling now. All that ever happens happens only in the space made available by now, this moment. Nothing ever happens in the past and nothing ever happens in the future. All that happens always happens in the present – that is the only way for things to happen because the present is the only time there is.Past is just your memory and future is just your imagination. But you have been hypnotized to live in the past and you have been hypnotized to live in the future: Choose, either past or future. But no society allows you to live in the present.Christians and Hindus and Mohammedans – they condition you to live in the past. Their golden age was in the past. Communists, socialists, fascists – they condition you to live in the future, their golden age is in the future, the utopia is coming: when the revolution comes, then you will be able to really live, then there will be a golden age. Either you are taken to the past, which is false, or to the future, which is again false. No society tells you to live in the present, in the herenow.To be a sannyasin, to be a real seeker, means to live herenow – and there is no other life. But for that you will have to de-automatize yourself, you will have to become a man and not a machine. You will have to become a little more conscious. You are not conscious.Once I was sitting by the side of a dying man – he was a professor in the same university where I was a professor. He was at the pinnacle of his successful career and then came the heart attack – which always comes when you are at the pinnacle. Success is always followed by a heart attack. What else can you have after it? So he had a heart attack and he was dying. I went to see him. He was very sad – who wants to die? – and he was in great despair and anguish. I told him, “You need not worry. You are not going to die.”He said, “What are you saying? But the doctors…all the doctors say that there is no possibility of my survival. On what grounds are you saying that I am not going to die?”I said, “In the first place you cannot die because you never lived. You have not fulfilled the first requirement for dying. For these fifty-five years you have been sleepwalking, you have dreamed; you have not lived. I have watched you for years.”He was shocked, he was angry – so angry that for a moment he forgot all about death. His eyes were aflame with anger and he said, “Is this the way to treat a dying man? Can’t you be a little courteous? Why are you so hard on me? I am dying and you are talking such great philosophy – ‘You never lived.’ Is this the time to say such things?”I listened silently. I just became absolutely silent. Then the rage disappeared and he started crying, and great tears came to his eyes. He held my hand with great love and then he said, “Maybe you are right. I never lived. Maybe you are not rude, you are just being true. And I know nobody else would have said this to me.” And then great gratitude, and for a moment he became so conscious that one could have seen the light on the face – it was there, he was all aura. And he thanked me. That night he died. I remained with him to the last moment.And he said, “If you had not been here I would have missed my death too, as I have missed my life. But I am dying consciously. At least one thing I am happy about – I am not dying unconsciously.”And his death was beautiful. He died without any regret, he died in a relaxed way. He died almost with a welcoming heart. He died full of gratitude. He died prayerfully. His next life is bound to have a different quality.If death is so beautiful it brings a new life to you.But one has to live each moment, whether it is of life, of love, of anger, of death. Whatsoever it is, one has to live each moment as consciously as possible.A peasant, carried away by his imagination, found himself in a vegetable garden stealing cucumbers.“I’ll carry off this sack of cucumbers,” he thought, “and with the money I get for them I’ll buy a hen. The hen will lay eggs, she will sit on them and hatch a brood of chicks, and I’ll feed the chicks till they grow, then I’ll sell them and buy a suckling pig. I’ll feed the suckling pig till it grows into a sow, I’ll breed her, and she’ll have a litter of pigs and I’ll sell them. With the money I get for the pigs I’ll buy a house with a garden; I’ll plant cucumbers in the garden, and I won’t let anyone steal them – I’ll keep guard over them. I’ll hire a strong watchman, and from time to time I’ll go out to the garden and shout, ‘Hey, you! Take care!’”The peasant was so carried away by this thought that he shouted at the top of his voice. The watchman heard him and came running. He caught the peasant and gave him a good thrashing.But this is how man lives: in dreams, in imagination, in projections. This is how you live, and this is not the way to live this beautiful, tremendously valuable life – this is sheer wastage. You have to become more attentive to the moment, to the present. You have to gather your consciousness. Consciousness is your treasure, and all the methods that have been invented, devised down the centuries, are nothing but ways to create more consciousness in you, to create more fire in you, to make your life a passionate affair, a flame. People are living dull lives, people are living absent-mindedly, people are living inattentively. How can you live with so much inattention around you? Inattention is darkness, attention is light. And this treatise will teach you how to create more light in you, so that one day…the golden flower.Two psychiatrists met on the street. “You are feeling fine,” said one. “How am I doing?”People are asking each other. Nobody knows how they are doing, they are looking into each other’s eyes, gathering information about themselves from others. That’s why the opinion of others has become so important. If somebody says you are a fool, you become angry. Why? Or you become sad. Why? You are shattered. You were thinking you are a wise man because others had told you that you are wise. It was the opinion of others that you depended on. Now somebody else says you are a fool. He can easily shatter your wisdom, very easily. He has thrown a stone and you had made a palace with playing cards. Now all is shattered. That’s why one becomes so angry, so enraged, so violent, and one becomes so worried, anxious. You are continually looking for what others are thinking, because you know only that which others think about you, you don’t know anything about yourself. Now what kind of situation is this? If I cannot know about myself, who else can know about me? From the outside nobody can watch me, I am not available that way. From the outside only my body can be watched. From the inside I can know my consciousness.Even when you stand before a mirror you see only your body, you cannot see your consciousness in the mirror. Even you cannot see it in the mirror – your own consciousness. You have to see it directly. It is never mirrored, it is never reflected in anything; it is invisible. You have to close your eyes and be it. And that is the only way of knowing it. But people live so unconsciously. They simply live by the opinion of others. What others say becomes their soul. Others can take it away any moment. People remain beggars.Have you known anything about yourself directly? Have you ever encountered yourself directly without bringing the opinion of others into it? If you have not done it, you have not yet lived. Life starts only by encountering oneself, by seeing oneself directly, immediately. Life exists only when you are capable of seeing yourself as you are, not as others think about you. What can they think about you? What can they say about you? They can watch your behavior, they cannot watch you. If you want to watch yourself, only you can do that, nobody else. It cannot be done by servants, it cannot be delegated to somebody else. It cannot be done by the experts either. But we are so much interested in others’ opinions because we are absolutely absent, there is nobody awake inside – deeply asleep, we are snoring inside.The absent-minded professor went in for a haircut. He sat down in the barber’s chair, but didn’t remove his hat.“I’m afraid you will have to take off your hat,” said the barber.“Oh, I’m sorry!” said the professor, “I didn’t know there were ladies present.”Watch your own absent-mindedness. Watching it will create attentiveness in you. Watch what is happening within you: thoughts passing, memories arising, a cloud of anger, a dark night of sadness, or a beautiful morning of joy. Watch all that passes in you, become more and more watchful. Slowly, slowly you will become an integrated watchfulness. And the method taught by The Secret of The Golden Flower is how to become integrated in your inner light. This is the story of this book before we enter into the sutras.The book comes from an esoteric circle in China. The founder of this esoteric circle is said to have been the well-known Taoist adept, Lu Yen. Where did Lu Yen get this secret teaching? He himself attributes it to Master Kuan Yiu-hsi, for whom, according to tradition, Lao Tzu wrote down his Tao Te Ching.Lao Tzu never wrote a single word in his whole life. He declined again and again, to write anything. He conveyed to his disciples what he had come to know, but he was not ready to write because he said, “The Tao which can be said is not the true Tao.” The Tao which can be expressed is already falsified. It can be learned only in intimate contact with the master. There is no other way of communicating it. It can only be learned in a deep communion where the disciple and the master meet, where the disciple holds nothing back, where the disciple and the master overlap, where their consciousnesses merge into each other. Only in such a meeting, communion, can Tao be conveyed. So he refused again and again.He lived a long life. But when he was going to die he left China on a water buffalo. Why on a water buffalo? His whole teaching had been the teaching of the watercourse way.He said: One should be like water – flowing, fluid, fresh, always moving towards the ocean and one should be like water – soft, feminine, receptive, loving, nonviolent. One should not be like a rock. The rock appears to be very strong but is not, and water appears to be very weak but is not. Never be deceived by appearances. Finally the water wins over the rock and the rock is destroyed and becomes sand and is taken to the sea. The rock disappears finally – against the soft water.The rock is masculine; it is the male mind, the aggressive mind. Water is feminine, soft, loving, not aggressive at all. But the nonaggressive wins. The water is always ready to surrender, but through surrender it conquers – that is the way of the woman. The woman always surrenders and conquers through it. And the man wants to conquer and the ultimate result is just a surrender and nothing else. Hence, Lao Tzu chose a water buffalo when he left the country. Where was he going? He was going to the Himalayas to die into that eternal beauty.A real man knows how to live and how to die. A real man lives totally, dies totally. A real man lives in benediction and dies in benediction.He was going into absolute aloneness in the Himalayas, but he was caught on the border. And the man who caught him on the border is Master Kuan Yiu-hsi. He was a guard at the last post of the Chinese border. Lao Tzu had to pass that post; there was no other way to get out of the country. And Kuan Yiu-hsi persuaded him: “You are going to die, you are leaving the country forever, and soon you will be leaving the body. Please write just a few words. And I won’t allow you to get out of the land if you don’t write them. This price you have to pay.” And Lao Tzu had to sit in Kuan Yiu-hsi’s hut for three days, and there he wrote the Tao Te Ching.The tradition of The Secret of the Golden Flower is said to have originated with Lu Yen. Lu Yen himself attributes it to Master Kuan Yiu-hsi for whom, according to tradition, Lao Tzu wrote down his Tao Te Ching. Kuan means “the Han-ku pass”; hence he is called Master Kuan, that is “Master of the Han-ku pass.” And he must have been a great adept, otherwise it would have been impossible to persuade Lao Tzu to write – his whole life he had declined. He could not decline the invitation of this man. This man must have had something that it was impossible even for Lao Tzu to say no to.This is how the tradition of The Golden Flower is connected with Lao Tzu. But it didn’t start with Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu himself says that whatsoever he is saying has been said before, again and again, down the centuries. He is not bringing a new truth in the world but only a new expression. It is always so: truth is the same, only expressions differ.What Lao Tzu said is the same as what Krishna had said before him. What Krishna said is the same as what Buddha said later on. What Buddha has said is the same as Mohammed, as Jesus, as Zarathustra have said, although their expressions are so different that you will need great intelligence to see to the very core. The structure is different, the language is different, their ways of saying it are different; naturally, because they are different persons, different individuals, with their own uniqueness. But truth is neither new nor old and wherever truth is, it is eternal.The book The Secret of the Golden Flower is one of the eternal sources where one can again become alive, one can again find the door to the divine.The sutras:Master Lu-tsu said: That which exists through itself is called the Way, Tao.The word Tao essentially means “the Way.” Nothing can be said about the goal. The goal remains elusive, inexpressible, ineffable. But something can be said about the Way. Hence, Taoists have never used the words God, truth, nirvana; no, they simply use the word Way. Buddha says: “Buddhas can only show you the Way. If you follow the path, you will reach to the truth.”Truth will have to be your own experience. Nobody can define the truth, but the Way can be defined, the Way can be made clear. The master cannot give you the truth, but the master can give you the Way. And once the Way is there then all that is needed is to walk on it. That has to be done by the disciple. I cannot walk for you and I cannot eat for you. I cannot live for you and I cannot die for you. These things have to be done by oneself. But I can show the Way, I have walked on the Way.Tao simply means “the Way.”That which exists through itself is called the WayAnd the definition is beautiful. Lu-tsu says, “That which exists by itself, that which needs nobody else’s support, that which has always existed whether you walk on it or not….”Whether anybody walks on it or not does not matter, it always exists. In fact, the whole existence follows it unknowingly. If you can follow it knowingly your life will become a great blessing. If you follow it unknowingly, then you will go on stumbling, then you cannot enjoy it as it should be enjoyed.A man can be brought into the garden and he may be unconscious; he may be drunk or he may be in a coma or under the impact of chloroform. He can be brought into the garden, he is unconscious, the songs of the birds will be heard by his ears, but he will not know. The fragrance of the flowers will come riding on the breeze to his nostrils, but he will not know. The sun will shine on him and will shower light on him, but he will not know. The breeze will caress him, but he will not know. You can put him under the shade of a big tree and the coolness of it, but he will not know. That’s how man is.We are in Tao, because where else can we be? To live is to be on the Way. To live is to live in God, to breathe is to breathe in God. Where else can we be? But just as the fish lives in the ocean and is completely oblivious of the ocean, we are living in Tao and are completely oblivious of Tao. In fact it is so obvious, that’s why we are so oblivious. The fish knows the ocean so well…the fish is born in it, the fish has never been out of it, the fish takes it for granted, hence the fish is not aware of it. We are on the Way, we are in God, we live in Tao, through Tao, but we are not aware of it. The Tao exists, because without the Tao trees will not grow and stars will not move and the blood will not circulate and the breath will not come in. Life will disappear.Life is possible only if there is a fundamental law holding it. Life is possible only if there is something that supports it. Look at the immense order in existence. It is not a chaos, it is a cosmos. What makes it a cosmos? Why is there so much harmony? There must be a law that keeps the harmony going, flowing, keeps everything in accord. But we don’t know about it. We don’t know anything about our own being, and we are joined through our being with Tao.Tao has neither name nor shape. It is the one essence, the one primal spirit.It is the ocean of life that surrounds us, it is within and without – the pure essence. It is existence, it is the primal spirit. No name can contain it. All names are its name. And no shape is particular to it, because all shapes are Tao’s shape. Tao exists in millions of forms. In the tree it is green, in the flower it is red, in man it is man, in fish it is fish. It is the same law. You can replace the word Tao with God and it will be the same. What Christians and Mohammedans call God, Taoists call Tao, Buddhists call dhamma, Jews used to call it “Logos,” but they mean the same thing. No name can contain it, or, it can be expressed by any name.Essence and life cannot be seen. They are contained in the light of heaven. The light of heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.You can see the form, you can see the body – the body is the form, the substance that surrounds the essence – but you cannot see the essence. The essence is invisible to the eyes, unapproachable by the senses. It has to be felt immediately, not through any media.You see my body, I see your body – it is through a medium. My eyes are telling me you are here, your eyes are telling you that I am here, but who knows? – the eyes may be deceiving, they do deceive sometimes. In the night, in the dark, you see a rope as if it were a snake, and when you see it as a snake it affects you as a snake: you are afraid, you start running. Or you can see in the desert an oasis which is not there, which is only a projected phenomenon because you are so thirsty that you want it to be there, so you create it there. Eyes deceive many times, so who knows?If truth is known through a medium then it will always remain suspect, doubtful; it can’t have any certainty – absolute certainty it can’t have. And a truth which is not absolutely certain is not truth at all. The truth has to be absolutely certain, it cannot be only approximately certain. Then there is only one way: it should be known without a medium, one should know it directly, immediately, one should know it without any senses. And that’s how it is known: you cannot see life, but you can feel it. It is a subjective experience, not an object.Essence and life cannot be seen. They are contained in the light of heaven. The light of heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.You have these two eyes. These two eyes for the Taoist are very significant. Only modern science has been able to see the truth of it. These two eyes are not only the visible eyes. These two eyes represent the male and the female in you. Now modern science says that the mind of man is divided into two hemispheres, and one hemisphere is male, the other is female. The right side of your mind is feminine, and the left side is masculine. So your one eye represents the male in you and your other eye represents the female in you. And when your male and female meet inside you, that meeting is what is called heaven – that meeting, that inner communion of your male and female.Jesus says: “When your two eyes become one, there will be light.” He is talking like a Taoist alchemist: When your two eyes become one there will be light. When your two eyes become one – when your male and female disappear into each other – that is the ultimate orgasmic experience. What you feel making love to a woman or to a man is only a glimpse of it, a very fleeting glimpse. It is so momentary that by the time you become aware of it, it is already gone. You become aware of it only in the past – it is so fleeting. But it is a glimpse, a glimpse of the meeting of the man and the woman.This is an exterior meeting. It is a miracle that it happens even for a single moment. But there is a deep possibility, and that has been the work of Tantra, Tao, yoga, and all the great secret teachings of the world: to help you become aware of your feminine and your masculine inside – what Tantrikas call Shiva and Shakti and what Taoists call yin and yang. The polarity, the positive and negative in you, the day and night in you – they have to meet there.The light of heaven cannot be seen. It is contained in the two eyes.But unless they become one you will not become aware of it.It is contained in the two eyes.But you cannot see it unless they become one. Then it is released, then there is a great explosion of light. Zarathustra calls it “explosion of fire,” Lao Tzu calls it “explosion of light.” It is the same.You must have come across the statement of John the Baptist. He used to say to his disciples, “I baptize you with water. After me shall come one who will baptize you with fire.” That’s what he meant – “After me there will come one who will baptize you with fire” – the baptism of water is an outer baptism; to John the Baptist, water represents the outward flow.Remember this, that the outward and the downward are synonymous and the upward and the inward are synonymous; whatsoever goes downward also goes outward and whatsoever goes upward also goes inward, and vice versa. Water always goes downward, hence it represents an outward flow, it goes away from itself; its journey is an exterior journey. Fire goes upward, always upward, and upward is synonymous with the inward; its journey is always interior.John the Baptist is saying: I am baptizing you with water, I am giving you the outer body of religion. After me will come Christ who will give you the inner baptism, the baptism of fire.Jesus himself again and again says, “Repent. Repent ye!” and the word has fallen into a wrong interpretation with the Christians. They have made it repentance for misdeeds. It has nothing to do with misdeeds. The word repent actually means return, go in, go back. It means turning back: restore your originality. The word repent means metanoia, turning back – a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. If you go on flowing outwards you remain water. If you turn in you become fire.And when the two eyes, when these two flames, when these two hemispheres of your consciousness join together, are absolutely bridged and you become one flame, that one flame is what Plotinus calls the “flight of the alone to the alone.”The Great One is the term given to that which has nothing above it.And if you can become that one, you have become the Great One. This is the Taoist way of saying something about God without using the word God: if you become one, you have become God.The secret of the magic of life consists in using action in order to attain nonaction.These are potential words. What is the secret of making these two eyes one? How to make the male and the female one in you? How to let your woman and man dissolve into each other so that you are no more a duality, so that you are no more a divided house, against yourself, so that there is no longer any conflict and tension, so that all is one? In that oneness is bliss because all tension disappears, all conflict disappears, all anxiety disappears. How to become that one?The secret of the magic of life consists in using action in order to attain nonaction.Man represents action, woman represents nonaction. You have to use action to attain nonaction, you have to make effort to become effortless. You have to go and put in all your energies, you have to become so active that nothing is left behind – all energy becomes involved in that creativity – and then suddenly, when all energy is involved, there happens a trans-formation. Just as at a hundred degrees water evaporates, action when it becomes total evaporates and nonaction is left behind.First you have to learn how to dance, and you have to put all your energies into dancing. And one day that strange experience happens when suddenly the dancer disappears in the dance and the dance happens without any effort. Then it is inaction. First you have to learn action to go into inaction. That’s what meditation is all about.People come and ask me why I teach active meditations. Because that is the only way to find inaction: dance to the uttermost, dance in a frenzy, dance madly. And if your whole energy is involved in it, a moment comes when suddenly you see the dance is happening on its own, there is no effort in it – it is action without action.The Golden Flower is the light. One uses the Golden Flower as a symbol. The phrase “The lead of the water-region has but one taste” refers to it.The golden flower is a symbol, the symbol of when your energies are no more dual and have become one: great light is released, and the light is golden. It is as if a flower of golden light has opened in you. And it is not just a symbol. It is a symbol but it is almost literally true; it happens exactly like that. Right now you exist as a darkness, as a dark night. Then you exist as a sunrise. You cannot see the sun anywhere but the light is there. There is no source to it – it is a sourceless light. But once you have known that golden light in you, you have become an immortal. Then there is no death because the light never dies.The whole life, the whole existence consists of nothing but of light – all are forms of light. You can ask modern physics too, and modern physics is in perfect agreement with Tao, that all is light; forms go on changing, but the light continues. Light is eternal.Many scriptures of the world begin with the word light. “In the beginning God said, ‘Let there be light.’” That is the beginning. If there had ever been a beginning, it cannot be otherwise; it had to have been with light. But there has never been a beginning; this is just a parable! Light has existed always. The Koran says God is light. One of the names of God given by the Sufis is Noor. Noor means light.And the taste is the same – whether it happens in me or it happens in you, the taste is the same. The taste of buddhahood is the same. Buddha has said: “The taste of buddhahood is like the ocean. You can taste it from the north or from the south, or from this part or from that part, from the shore or from the middle, but the taste of the ocean is the same. So is the taste of buddhahood.” The moment a person attains to this eternal light, his life has a single flavor. That flavor is contained by absolute awareness: his unconscious has disappeared, there is no longer any dark part in his being.Now if a Freudian looks into such a man, he will find only consciousness, only consciousness; he will not find the unconscious. If a Freudian looks into you, only one part is conscious, against this one part there are nine parts which are unconscious – only one-tenth of your mind is conscious. A buddha is one hundred percent consciousness.The work on the circulation of the light depends entirely on the backward-flowing movement, so that the thoughts are gathered together. The heavenly heart lies between sun and moon.Again remember, the sun represents the male energy, the moon represents the feminine energy. And the heart lies between the two. The heart is neither male nor female and that is the beauty of the heart: the heart is divine, neither male nor female, and it lies exactly between the two.If you are leaning too much towards the male energy, you are too active and you don’t know how to be passive. That’s what has happened in the West: the West is sun-oriented – too much activity. People are driving themselves mad with their activity. Too much speed – everything has to be done immediately – no patience, no waiting. They have forgotten how to be passive, how to be patient, how to wait for things. They have lost all capacity to be inactive. They don’t know how to go on a holiday. Even if they go on a holiday they are more active than ever.More people have heart attacks on Sundays in the West than on any other day, because it is a holiday and people are too occupied. The whole working week they think they will rest when the holiday comes, and when the holiday comes, they have a thousand and one things to do. Not that they have to do them, that they are needed – no, not at all – but they cannot live in rest. They cannot just lie down on the lawn and be with the earth, they cannot just sit silently under a tree and do nothing. No, they will start doing a thousand and one things around the house. They will fix this and unfix that, they will open their car engines and start doing things to it. They will do something, but they will remain active.Their whole life people think that when they are retired then they will enjoy. But they cannot enjoy, they cannot rest. People die very fast once they become retired. Psychologists say they die ten years earlier because they don’t know what else to do. Death seems the only way to get rid of a life which has become meaningless, which has always been meaningless, which has been just a rush. People are rushing, not knowing where they are going. All that they know is they have to go faster and faster and faster without ever being worried: where exactly are you going? You may be running in a circle. That is exactly what is happening: people are running in a circle.The West is sun-oriented, the East is moon-oriented. The East has become too passive, too fatalistic: “Nothing has to be done. Simply wait, God will do it.” This is another kind of foolishness and stupidity. The East is poor, lazy, lousy, and people are not worried by anything. The misery all around, the poverty, the beggars, the illness – nobody is worried, everything is accepted. “What can you do? It is God’s will. We have to accept. We have just to wait. When things are too much, God will come. What else can we do?” This is the feminine mind.The Secret of the Golden Flower says you have to be exactly in the middle – neither male nor female, no leaning to any extreme – then there is balance. Then one is active and yet remains inactive deep inside, then one is inactive and yet remains active on the outside. On the outside be sun-oriented, on the inside be moon-oriented. Let sun and moon meet in you and you be just exactly in the middle. And in the middle is transcendence.The work on the circulation of the light depends entirely on the backward-flowing movement, so that the thoughts are gathered together.Man is a center and also a circumference. If you move towards the circumference, then you will have many thoughts. The circumference consists of the many, the center is one. If you move towards the center, thoughts start disappearing. At the very core all thoughts disappear – there is only awareness. That’s what this secret treatise says:…so that the thoughts are gathered together.The light has to move inwards.When you look at a tree, your eyes are throwing their light on the tree – the light is moving outward. When you close your eyes, the light starts turning inward – metanoia, repent, return. And when the light falls on your own being, there is self-knowledge, self-knowing. And that self-knowing brings you freedom – freedom from all entanglements, freedom from all attachments, freedom from death, freedom from body. It creates the soul in you.That’s what Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples: that you are not born with a soul, you have to create it by metanoia.The Book of the Yellow Castle says: “In the square inch field of the square foot house, life can be regulated.”In this small temple of your body life can be regulated.In the middle of the square inch dwells the splendor. In the purple hall of the city of jade dwells the God of Utmost Emptiness and Life.Just see the contradiction: emptiness and life. Life is male, emptiness is female. Life and emptiness – both are two aspects of the inner God. When you have not chosen either in preference to the other, when you have not chosen at all – you have been just a watcher – you become that God whose one aspect is life and whose other aspect is death, whose one aspect is perfection and whose other aspect is nothingness.Therefore when the light circulates, the energies of the whole body appear before its throne…And when the light moves inwards and circulates inside your being, because there is no outlet left – that’s what meditation is, that’s what Buddha is doing under the bodhi tree – you sit silently, you close all the doors and the light circulates within. Then for the first time you become aware of the body and all that the body contains – all its mysteries. This small body contains all the mysteries of the universe. It is a miniature cosmos.Therefore when the light circulates, the energies of the whole body appear before its throne, as, when a holy king has established the capital and has laid down the fundamental rules of order, all the states approach with tribute; or as, when the master is quiet and calm, man-servants and maids obey his orders of their own accord, and each does his work.And when this light is there moving inside you, the body becomes a servant, the senses become obedient servants, you need not try to control them. Of their own accord they follow you.This is the beauty of Tao: it never enforces anything, it does not want to cultivate any character. It says: Simply become full of light and all else will follow.Therefore you only have to make the light circulate; that is the deepest and most wonderful secret. The light is easy to move, but difficult to fix. If it is made to circulate long enough, then it crystallizes itself. It is the condition of which it is said: “Silently thou fliest upward in the morning.”A very significant thing is being said in this sutra: The light is easy to move; it is difficult to fix it, so don’t try to fix it.That’s where yoga tries to do something which cannot be done easily. Hence, the difficulty, the arduousness of yoga: yoga tries to fix the light. It also tries to fix the light between the two eyes, just exactly between the two eyebrows at the third eye center. Yoga tries to fix it. That is the difference between Tao and yoga: yoga wants to fix it – concentrate on the third eye. In a nutshell, that is the whole philosophy of yoga: if you can concentrate your whole consciousness on the third eye you will be transformed, your two eyes will become one and you will be full of light.And just beyond the third eye – the third eye is the sixth center in the yoga map of consciousness – beyond the sixth is the seventh. The seventh is called the one-thousand-petaled lotus. If the light is concentrated at the third eye, when it becomes too much, it will give a push to the seventh center, it will start rising like water in a reservoir. And the push to the seventh center will open the bud that has remained a bud for centuries, for millions of lives.Tao works from a different route. Tao says: To fix the light is very difficult. Don’t become concerned with fixing it. The easy way is to circulate it.Mind always finds circulation easy: it is mind’s nature to move; mind always finds it difficult to concentrate. So why not use mind’s capacity? Why not ride on it?Tao is a spontaneous science: Don’t cultivate, don’t force, don’t create unnecessary troubles for yourself; use the natural capacity of the mind – that it moves, that it likes movement, that it is a wanderer. Use it, let light circulate. We will come to know how to circulate it later on – find paths, and let it circulate.Through its circulation, Taoists came to discover the seven hundred points of acupuncture. Circulating it all over the body, they became aware that there are seven hundred points where light becomes very, very aflame, and they counted them exactly. Now science corroborates it: there are exactly seven hundred points. Now even machines have been invented which can just picture your seven hundred points, and where the light is missing in your points, where the energy is not moving in the right meridians. How did the Taoists come to know about it? They had no machines, no technology. Their only technique was to go in and circulate the light.We will come to know about the actual method – how to circulate it. This is just to make a background so you understand what exactly their approach is.They say if you circulate the light and go on circulating it, at a certain point it crystallizes on its own, you need not worry about fixing it. Circulating, circulating, circulating, one moment, suddenly, you find all has stopped, and the thing has happened that yoga tries to make happen. In Tao it is a happening, in yoga it is a hard, long journey of effort. Yoga is male-oriented.Tao is not female-oriented, Tao is both – a synthesis. Circulation is masculine energy and fixation is feminine energy. Reach to the nonactive, reach to the passive through action, through effort attain to effortlessness.In carrying out this fundamental principle you need to seek for no other methods, but must only concentrate your thoughts on it. By collecting the thoughts one can fly and will be born in heaven.The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life….It is the secret of all immortality. This is what the Western alchemists used to call the philosopher’s stone, what in India is called amrit, elixir, nectar. This is an alchemical treatise: it gives you the secrets for transforming your chemistry into alchemy, for transforming the baser metal into gold. Right now you are only a baser metal, but you contain the secrets. If those secrets are worked out, you are transformed into gold. The gold is immortal.The Golden Flower is the Elixir of Life. Although it works very accurately, it is yet so fluid that it needs extreme intelligence and clarity, and the most complete absorption and tranquility. People without this highest degree of intelligence and understanding do not find the way; people without this utmost capacity for absorption and tranquility cannot keep fast hold of it.Two requirements…. First, one needs intelligence and clarity. Don’t be worried about it. Don’t start thinking that if you are not intelligent, then what? Everybody is born intelligent. Intelligence is an intrinsic quality: just as everybody is born breathing, everybody is born intelligent. The idea that a few people are intelligent and a few are not is utterly wrong and has been de-humanizing many many people, is very insulting, degrading.All are born intelligent, although their intelligences may differ in their expressions. One is intelligent in music, another is intelligent in mathematics, but if you make mathematics the criterion then the musician looks unintelligent. If you put them both into one examination where mathematics is the criterion, the musician fails. Change the criterion, let music be the criterion and put them both into the examination where music will decide, then the mathematician looks stupid.Because we have chosen certain criteria, that’s why many people have been condemned as stupid – they are not. I have never come across a single person who is stupid – it does not happen – but his intelligence may be a different kind of intelligence. Poetry needs a different kind of intelligence than being in business. A poet cannot be a businessman and the businessman will find it very difficult to be a poet. One kind of intelligence is needed in being a politician, another kind of intelligence is needed in being a painter. And there are millions of possibilities.Remember, everyone is born intelligent, so that is not debarring anybody. You just have to find your intelligence – where it is. And once you have found your intelligence you will be clear. People are living with unclarity because they are living with wrong ideas about themselves. Somebody has told you – a schoolmaster, a headmaster, a university – that you are not intelligent. But their criterion is only a chosen criterion, their criterion is not applicable to all. The universities are not yet universal: they don’t allow every kind of intelligence, they don’t accept all manifestations of intelligence. Once you have accepted your intelligence and you start respecting it, you will become clear, there will be no problem.The poet feels stupid because he cannot be a good businessman. Now this creates confusion. He becomes inferior in his own eyes, disrespectful, condemning. He tries to succeed in business but he cannot. This creates great smoke around him. If he simply understands that he is a poet and he is not meant to be a businessman, and to succeed as a businessman will be a suicide to him – he has to succeed as a poet. That is his intelligence, and his intelligence has to flower in his own way. He has not to imitate anybody else. Maybe the society will not pay for it, because poetry is not needed as much as bombs are needed, love is not needed as much as hatred is needed.That’s why in the movies, on the radio, on the television, murder is allowed; it is not called obscene. But lovemaking is not allowed; it is called obscene. This society lives through hate not through love. If somebody is murdering, it is perfectly okay. If somebody puts a dagger into your heart and the blood rushes like a fountain, it is perfectly okay. But if somebody hugs you, kisses you, loves you, the society is afraid. This is strange, that love is obscene and murder is not, that lovers are condemned and soldiers rewarded, that war is right and love is wrong.If you accept your intelligence, if you accept yourself, you will become clear, absolutely clear; all clouds will disappear.And the second thing: you need absorption and tranquility. Intelligence and clarity are part of the male mind, absorption and tranquility are part of the feminine mind. Only a woman can absorb, that’s why she becomes pregnant – she has the womb.These two things are needed together. If you are not intelligent you will not be able to understand what is being said to you, you will not understand what the master is imparting to you. And if you are not feminine, you will not be able to absorb it, you will not be able to become pregnant with it. And both are needed: you have to be intelligent, utterly intelligent to see the point, and you have to be utterly absorptive to keep it in you, so that it becomes part of you.This is just a background. Slowly, slowly we will go into the techniques of how to circulate the light. Listen attentively, intelligently. Absorb it. It can be one of the greatest experiences of your life.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Lately several friends have asked me if I was skeptical towards sannyas, the ashram and you. I had to admit to the truth and said, “Yes, at times I am.” This left me with a feeling of guilt. Have I committed some unforgivable, sacrilegious crime or is it natural to be skeptical out of being sure? I do not know if you are enlightened. I can only feel your beauty and trust.Faith is afraid of doubt – afraid because it has repressed it. And whatsoever you repress you will remain afraid of, because it is always there deep inside you, waiting to take revenge, and whenever the opportunity arises it is going to explode in you with a vengeance. Faith is sitting on an earthquake and every day the doubt becomes stronger, because every day you have to repress it. Sooner or later it is more than you can repress, it is more than your faith. Then it simply throws your faith away.But trust is not afraid of doubt because trust is not against doubt. Trust uses doubt, trust knows how to use the energy contained in doubt itself. That’s the difference between faith and trust. Faith is false; it creates a pseudo kind of religion, it creates hypocrites. Trust has a sublime beauty and truth about it. It grows through doubt, it uses doubt as manure, it transforms doubt. Doubt is a friend, doubt is not the enemy.And unless your trust has moved through many doubts it will remain impotent. From where will it gather strength, from where will it gather integration? If there is no challenge it is bound to remain weak.Doubt is a challenge. If your trust can respond to the challenge, can befriend your doubt, it will grow through it. And you will not be a split person, deep down doubting and just on the surface faithful, believing; you will have a kind of unity, you will be an individual, undivided. And that individuality is what is called “soul” in the old religions.The soul is arrived at through doubt, not through believing. Belief is just a mask: you are hiding your original face. Trust is a transformation: you are becoming more illumined. And because you are using doubt as a challenge, as an opportunity, there is never any repression. Slowly, slowly doubt disappears because its energy has been taken by trust.Doubt, in fact, is nothing but trust growing; doubt is trust on the way. Always think of doubt in such a way: that doubt is trust on the way. Doubt is inquiry and trust is the fulfillment of the inquiry. Doubt is the question and trust is the answer. The answer is not against the question – there will be no possibility of any answer if there is no question. The question has created the occasion for the answer to happen.So please, never feel guilty around me. I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Guilt is absolutely wrong. But it has been used by the priests and the politicians and the puritans down the ages – for centuries. Guilt is a strategy, a strategy to exploit people: make them feel guilty. Once you have succeeded in making them feel guilty, they will be your slaves. Because of the guilt they will never be integrated enough, because of the guilt they will remain divided. Because of the guilt they will never be able to accept themselves, they will be always condemning. Because of the guilt they will be ready to believe in anything. Just to get rid of guilt they will do anything. Any nonsense, any nonsense ritual they will perform just to get rid of the guilt.Down the centuries the priest has made people guilty. All the so-called religions exist on your guilt, they don’t exist on the existence of God. They have nothing to do with God and God has nothing to do with them; they exist on your guilt. You are afraid, you know that you are wrong: you have to seek the help of somebody who is not wrong. You know that you are unworthy: you have to bow down, you have to serve those who are worthy. You know that you cannot trust yourself, because you are divided.Only an undivided person can trust himself – his feeling, his intuition. You are always shaking, trembling inside; you need somebody to lean on. And once you lean on somebody, once you become dependent on somebody, you remain childish, you never grow. Your mind age remains that of a child. You never attain to any maturity, you never become independent. And the priest does not want you to become independent. Independent and you are lost to him, dependent and you are his whole marketplace, his whole business.I am utterly against any kind of guilt. Remember it always: if you start feeling guilty about something around me, then you are doing it on your own. Then you are still carrying the voices of your parents, the priests within you; you have not yet heard me, you have not yet listened to me. I want you to be totally free of all guilt. Once you are free of guilt you are a religious person. That’s my definition of a religious person.Use doubt – doubt is beautiful – because it is only through doubt that the trust attains to maturity. How can it be otherwise? It has to be beautiful – it is only through doubt that the trust becomes centered, it is only through doubt that the trust flowers, blooms. It is the dark night of doubt that brings the golden morning closer to you. The dark night is not against the dawn, the dark night is the womb for the dawn. The dawn is getting ready in the very being of the dark night.Think of doubt and trust as complementary – just as man and woman are, just as night and day, summer and winter, life and death. Always think of those pairs, inevitably, in terms of complementariness; never think in terms of opposition. Even though on the surface they seem to be opposed, deep down they are friends, helping each other.Think of a person who has no trust: he will not have any doubt either, because he has nothing to doubt about. Just think of a person who has no trust at all – how can he doubt, what has he to doubt? Only a man of trust has something to doubt. Because you trust, hence you doubt. Your doubt proves your trust, not otherwise. Think of a man who cannot doubt – how can he trust? If he is even incapable of doubt, how can he be capable of trust? Trust is the highest form of the same energy; doubt is the lowest rung of the same ladder and trust is the highest rung of the same ladder. Use doubt, use it joyfully.There is no need to feel guilty at all. It is perfectly human and natural to feel great doubts about me sometimes and great doubts about what is going on here. It is perfectly human – there is nothing extraordinary in it. If it doesn’t happen, then something seems to be abnormal. But remember that one has to reach to trust: use doubt, but don’t forget the goal, don’t forget the highest rung of the ladder. Even if you are standing on the lowest, look at the highest – you have to reach there. In fact, doubt is pushing you towards that because nobody can feel at ease with doubt.Have you not watched it? When there is doubt there is uneasiness. Don’t change that uneasiness, don’t interpret that uneasiness as guilt. Yes, uneasiness is there, because doubt means you are uncertain of the ground you are standing on. Doubt means you are ambiguous, doubt means you are not yet a unity – how can you be at ease? You are a crowd: you are not one person, you are many persons – how can you be at ease? There must be great noise inside you, one part pulling you in this direction and another part in that direction. How can you grow if you are pulled in so many directions simultaneously? There is bound to be unease, tension, anguish, anxiety.Nobody can live with doubt and in doubt. Doubt pushes you towards trust. Doubt says, “Go and find a place where you can relax, where you can be, totally.” Doubt is your friend. It simply says, “This is not the home. Go ahead – search, seek, inquire.” It creates the urge to inquire, to explore.Once you start seeing doubt as a friend, as an occasion, not against trust but pushing you towards it, suddenly guilt disappears, there is great joy. Even when you doubt, you doubt joyously, you doubt consciously, and you use doubt to find trust. It is absolutely normal.You say, “I do not know if You are enlightened.” How can you know it? There is no way to know it unless you become enlightened. How can you know what has happened to me unless it happens to you too? It is absolutely right to feel that you cannot trust me sometimes. The miracle is that sometimes you can trust: just those few moments will be enough. Don’t be worried: trust has such infinite power. Trust is just like light and doubt is like darkness. Just a small candle of trust is enough to destroy the darkness of ages.The darkness cannot say, “I have lived in this place for so long, I cannot leave so easily. And I cannot leave only because of this small candle.” Even a small candle has more potential than the darkness of ages, of centuries, of thousands of lives. But it will have to go…once the light is there it has to go.Those few moments of trust – let them be few and far between, don’t be worried – they are enough to destroy all your doubts slowly, slowly. And by “destroying” I mean just releasing the energy contained in doubt. Just breaking the shell called doubt…and deep inside you will find the pure energy to trust. Once it is released more and more trust will be available to you.You say, “I do not know if you are enlightened.” Good that you don’t believe. If you start believing you will stop seeking. A believer never moves – he has already believed. That’s why there are millions of people worshipping in the churches, temples, mosques, gurudwaras, but their worship is out of belief. Because it is out of belief, those millions of people remain irreligious: they don’t search for God, they don’t seek God – they have already accepted. Their acceptance is lame; they have not struggled for it, they have not earned it.You have to fight, you have to struggle, you have to earn. Nothing is without a price in life; you have to pay the price. They have not paid the price – and they think that just by worshipping in a temple they will attain? They are utter fools, they are wasting their time. All their worship is just an illusion.The really religious person cannot believe; he searches. Because he cannot believe, he remains in doubt, and nobody can be at rest with doubt. One has to seek and search and to find. Doubt goes on gnawing at your being, goes on goading you: “Search, seek, find, and don’t be contented before you have found.”Good that you cannot believe. Only remember: there is no need to believe and there is no need to disbelieve. And that’s happening. And I am happy.You say, “I can only feel your beauty and trust.”That’s all that is needed. That’s enough, more than enough. That will become the boat to the other shore – if you can feel my love, if you can feel my trust in you, if you can feel my hope in you, if you can see that something beautiful has happened – although you don’t know what exactly it is. You cannot define it and you cannot explain it, but if you can even feel that something of the beyond…. That’s what beauty is. Beauty is always of the beyond.Whenever you see a roseflower and you say, “It is beautiful,” what do you mean? You are saying that you have seen something of the beyond, something invisible has become visible to you. You cannot prove it. If somebody else standing by your side denies seeing any beauty in the rose, you cannot prove it to him – there is no way. You will just have to shrug your shoulders. You will say, “Then nothing can be done about it. I see and you don’t see, and that is that.”You cannot go to the scientist to dissect the rose and find whether it contains beauty or not – it does not contain it. The beauty is not contained in the rose. The beauty is from the beyond, it simply dances on the rose: those who have eyes, they will see; those who don’t have eyes, they will not see. You can take the rose to the chemist – he will dissect it, he will find everything that is in the rose – but beauty is not in the rose. The rose was just an occasion for beauty to descend from the beyond. The rose was just a screen for beauty to play upon it. The rose was just a stage for the drama to happen. It is not the drama itself. You take the rose away, you dissect the rose, you cut it into pieces, you find all the constituents – but beauty is not a constituent of the rose, although without the rose the beauty cannot descend.It is just like the sun rises in the morning and the rays are dancing on the lotus pond. You don’t see the rays themselves, you can’t see. That’s what The Secret of the Golden Flower says: You can’t see essence, you can’t see life; all that you see are only consequences.Have you ever seen light itself? No, you have never seen it. If you think you have seen light itself, you have not thought about it, you have not pondered over it. You have seen lighted things, you have not seen light itself. You have seen the lighted pond, you have seen the lighted lotus, you have seen the lighted face of your woman or man or your child. You have seen the lighted world, but have you seen the light itself? If there is nothing for the light to play upon, you will not be able to see it.That’s why the moment the astronauts go away from the Earth, even in the daytime, the sky is dark, utterly dark, because you cannot see light itself and there is nothing there for the light to play upon. Hence the infinite sky is dark. You see light on the stars because stars become the playground for the light, but surrounding the stars it is all darkness because there is nothing to obstruct the light. And unless light is obstructed you cannot see it.You cannot see enlightenment, you can see only the consequence of it. You cannot see what has happened to me, but you can see something has happened; something like X. There is no need to call it enlightenment either, just X will do. Something mysterious has happened. And the more you feel me the more you will become aware of it, and the more you become aware of it something inside you will start responding to it. What has happened to me can trigger a process in you. It cannot be the cause of your enlightenment, remember. Your enlightenment will not be the effect of my enlightenment. There is no cause/effect relationship between the master and the disciple; there is a totally different kind of relationship.Just in this century, Carl Gustav Jung was able to penetrate into the mystery of that different kind of relationship. He calls it “synchronicity.” Cause and effect is a scientific relationship, synchronicity is a poetic relationship. By synchronicity what is meant is that if something has happened somewhere and you become available to it, you remain vulnerable to it, something can start responding in you parallel to it. But it has not been the cause of it, it cannot cause it.It is just like somebody is playing beautiful music and a great desire arises in you to dance: it is not caused by the music, it is a parallel response in you. Something that was fast asleep in you – the energy to dance – has been hit; not caused, just hit, provoked, inspired. It is synchronicity. If it is a cause then it will happen to everybody.For example, you are here, three thousand sannyasins are present. I am available to all of you, but all of you are not available to me or, even if you are available to me, you are available in different ways. The quality differs, the quantity differs. If I can be a cause of your enlightenment, then all three thousand of you will become enlightened. But I am not the cause, I can only become a catalytic agent. But for that you have to be open towards me. If I were a cause, there would be no need for you to be open to me. Fire burns whether the wood is open to it or not – it is a cause. Water evaporates at hundred-degree heat; whether it is open to the heat or not doesn’t matter.Cause and effect is a blind relationship; it is materialistic, it is between matter and matter. But synchronicity is not material; it is spiritual, it is poetic, it is a love affair. If you become open to me, something will start happening to you. And remember, I am not the cause of it. You need not thank me, you need not be grateful to me, I am not the cause of it. If anybody is the cause of it, it is you, because you opened towards me. I could not have done it alone. There is no doing on my part. All that is needed is: I am present, you also be present here and something will start happening. And nobody is doing it – neither I am doing it nor are you doing it. I am available, you become available, and these two energies fall into a love affair, they start dancing together.So don’t be worried that you cannot know about my enlightenment. This is enough – you say, “I can only feel your beauty and trust.” This will do. And once it has happened in you, you will know. To know a Buddha one has to become a Buddha, to know a Christ one has to be a Christ.The second question:Osho,In the past few weeks, just when I am feeling overwhelmed with the mystery and miracle of life and this world, I suddenly feel everything outside me descending closer and closer until it goes inside my eyes. I then find myself looking at what seems like a one-dimensional screen sitting just at my eyes. It seems as though there is nothing but me and I am so alone. But then people are on the scene interacting with me and I become confused. And what about you? You also seem just part of the painting.Even though this lasts only a few seconds, I become so terrified when this happens. Is this my mind playing with me? How could I really be so alone?One is alone. Aloneness is ultimate – but aloneness is not loneliness. You are not lonely. And that’s where the whole misunderstanding lies and that’s what makes you so terrified. To be lonely means you are missing the other. To be lonely is a negative state. To be lonely means you are feeling empty, you are searching for the other: you believe in the other, you depend on the other – and the other is not there. And because the other is not there, there is great nothingness, but that nothingness is a kind of negative nothingness. You are groping for the other, and you cannot find the other, and everything starts disappearing. And when everything starts disappearing, the real problem is: you cannot remain yourself.When everything else has disappeared, you will have to disappear too, because you depend on others, you are just a reflection of the others. You have seen your face in the eyes of others; they have been mirrors. Now there are no longer any mirrors – who are you? All has disappeared, then how can you remain in this loneliness? You also start evaporating and that creates great fear – the fear of death.The ego starts dying and the ego starts searching somewhere for somebody to cling to. And that’s why soon you start interacting with people. Out of the fear of death you start getting occupied with others again. And then great confusion is bound to be there, because your natural being was moving into a deep nothingness. But you became frightened and you pulled yourself out of it. You created a contradiction in the energy: the energy was going in and you jumped out, hence the confusion.But aloneness is ultimate. And when I say aloneness is ultimate, I mean that there is only one, there are not many. You are not separate from existence. Nobody is separate from anybody else, existence is utterly one. The very idea of separation is our misery, the very idea that “I am an island” creates hell. Nobody is an island, we belong to the continent; we are part of this oceanic existence. Past, present, future, in all directions and all dimensions, it is all one. In fact, the word alone means all-oneness – that is aloneness. All-one is alone.But for that, you will have to go a little more into this nothingness. First the nothingness is negative; the negative is its outermost core, the shell part. If you go a little deeper you will find the positive negativeness. The positive negativeness is what Buddha calls nirvana, enlightenment, shunya. When you move deeper and you have crossed the shell part – the hard negative part, the dark part – suddenly there is light, the night is over. And then you feel a totally new kind of aloneness which you have never felt before, and then you know the distinction between loneliness and aloneness. In loneliness you were searching for the other, in aloneness the other has disappeared and so has the ego disappeared. Now there is nobody inside and nobody outside, and all is one.This unity, this absolute oneness brings benediction. Then there is no fear, there cannot be, because now there can be no death – how can there be fear? The death has already happened, that which could die has died. Now you are in the world of immortality, you have found the elixir. This is the nectar we will be talking about again and again in these sutras of The Secret of the Golden Flower. This is the nectar, amrit. This is the elixir, the philosopher’s stone. Once you have tasted of it, all death has disappeared, all time has disappeared, all distinctions have disappeared. Now you will see the tree as your extension, the cloud as your extension, or you as the extension of the tree. Now the center is everywhere and nowhere. The “I” does not exist anywhere anymore. The very word has become utterly false.Once a Christian missionary asked a Zen master, “Isn’t the end-point of man’s journey the union with God?”The Zen master said, “The end-point of man’s journey is not union with God, because there has never been a separation. All that is needed is the flash of insight that makes one see it.”Tao, Zen, Tantra – their insight is far more deep than the so-called religions of the marketplace. Christianity thinks in terms of joining with God, of being one with God, but the Zen master’s insight is far more penetrating and deeper. He says: “But where has there been a separation? When? It has not happened at all, you have been dreaming that you are separate. Just come out of the dream! There is no union, you have always been one with existence. Not for a single moment has there been a separation, there is no possibility of separation.”You are coming to a very very important, significant insight. If you don’t get frightened and run out of this experience, you may attain the flash of insight that makes one see it: that all is one.But fear always comes. It is not new. Each seeker has to go through it. And it is really so much that before you have thought about it you have already run out of it. It is so frightening that it does not give you time, space, to ponder over it – what to do? It is like the house is on fire – you don’t think anymore: “Should I get out or not?” There are no more alternatives left; you simply run out of the house without thinking. There is no time to think. Later on you can think: when you are outside the house, sitting under a tree, you can think and ponder in luxury. But when the house is on fire, how can you think? Action is needed immediately, and thought is never immediate. That’s the problem.When you go into your aloneness at first it is very lonely, because you have lived with the idea of the other. It was a dream idea; the other is not there. “I” and “thou” – both are false. Martin Buber says that the ultimate quality of prayer is a dialogue between “I” and “thou.” That’s where Judaism got stuck: the ultimate prayer is not a dialogue at all, the ultimate prayer is a monologue because the other is not there.A Zen master used to call his own name in the morning; every morning. He would shout his own name and say, “How are you?” And he would answer, “I am perfectly well, sir.”You will think he is mad – but this is prayer. There is no “I,” there is no “thou”; you have to play the part of both. It is a game, it is a play. Prayer is a play – playing with your own self. There is no “other.”But Judaism got stuck there with the idea of “I” and “thou.” That’s why they were so much against Jesus, because he declared – although not in such a drastic way as a Zen master declares…. It was not possible to be more drastic than he was in his situation. But still he said, “I and my father are one.” But that was enough to infuriate people. People were mad: “What is he saying? Declaring himself God?”He is not saying anything, he is not declaring himself God. He is simply saying there is no God and no devotee, there is only one. You can call it devotee in a certain situation, you can call it God in another situation. That’s why he says, “I and my Father are one. If you look at my body I am the son, if you look at my soul I am the father. If you look at my form I am a man, son of man, if you look at my essence I am son of God.” That’s why he goes on repeating it again and again. Sometimes he says, “I am son of man,” and sometimes he says, “I am son of God.” Looks contradictory, it is not.You say, “In the past few weeks, just when I am feeling overwhelmed with the mystery and miracle of life and this world, I suddenly feel everything outside me descending closer and closer until it goes inside my eyes.”All that you see is a projection of your eyes. The world, as it is, you have not seen yet. What you have seen is just a projection, so when you start moving inwards, everything that you have projected on the world will come closer and closer and closer to the eyes and will disappear into your eyes. This world is a projection of your eyes. You don’t see that which is, you project a dream upon it.For example, there is a great diamond, the Kohinoor. Now, it is just a stone like any other stone, but we have projected so much value on it. Many people have died because of the Kohinoor; whosoever possessed it was killed. Now see the whole nonsense of it: just that stone has proved very murderous – because of the projections of people. It is one of the most precious things in the world, the costliest thing in the world, but if man disappears from the earth will it be anything more than any other pebble? It will be just lying there with other pebbles, in the same way. There will be no distinction, no difference.From where does the difference come? Our eyes project, we make it special. We go on pouring our desire, greed, onto it. It becomes very precious, and very dangerous too. If you are meditating on the Kohinoor – silently seeing it, seeing it – one moment will come when you see that something from the Kohinoor is coming closer and closer to your eyes and then it disappears into the eyes. Then you open your eyes, the Kohinoor has disappeared: there is something, but you had not known it before and the one that you had known before is no more there.A beautiful experience, tremendously significant; go into it, go deeper and deeper into it. Let the whole world disappear. Yes, I will also disappear into that, because that which I am you have not seen yet, and that which you see is your projection. Your projection will disappear, and when all your projections have disappeared, then the world comes in its nakedness, as it is.And the wonder of it! Then small things are so wonderful, then ordinary pebbles are so wonderful. Because of the Kohinoor they cannot be wonderful; you have projected all on the Kohinoor, you have not left any love for anything else. Once the projection disappears and you open your eyes, empty eyes – not projecting anything at all, just seeing whatsoever it is, with no idea what it is, with no names, no labels, no interpretations, just seeing, emptied, passive – the world comes to have a totally different meaning, significance.“I suddenly feel everything outside me descending closer and closer until it goes inside my eyes. I then find myself looking at what seems like a one-dimensional screen sitting just at my eyes.”Perfectly good and perfectly right. This is the way one moves deeper into meditation.“It seems as though there is nothing but me and I am so alone.”The only problem is that you are still there, that’s why you feel so alone. You mean lonely. The “I” remains alone, “thou” has disappeared, and without the “thou” the “I” is lonely. The “I” exists only in relationship; the “I” is not an entity but a relationship – it cannot exist without the “thou,” it needs the “thou.” How can the lover exist without the beloved? Once the beloved is not there the lover starts disappearing. You need the beloved, love is a relationship. So is the “I” a relationship. And because you are still protecting the “I” somehow, you have not yet been courageous enough to let it go too.Just as the whole world has disappeared, let this “I” also disappear. It will be frightening in the beginning; it will be a death process – it is a death process. It will look as if you are committing suicide, it will look…. Who knows where you are going, whether you will be coming back again or not? It will look as if madness is exploding in you, and great fear will arise and in that fear you will be thrown out again and again. It will happen many times. Slowly, slowly you will have to learn not to be so afraid – there is nothing to fear: you are very close to the treasure.These are the moments when a master is needed to help you, to give you courage, to hold your hand, to say to you, “All is perfectly right. Go in!”I had to pass through the same and I was also as much afraid as you are. And many times I came out just as you are coming out. And you are more fortunate than me because I had no master – nobody to give me courage, nobody to hold my hand. I was simply struggling with myself. There was nobody who could tell me what was going to happen ahead. I had to grope and go into it – and it was dangerous, it was maddening. And the people who were around me in those days had already started believing that I had gone mad. Everybody who loved me was worried. My friends were worried, my teachers, my professors in the university were worried, my parents were worried, everybody was worried. But I had to go. Many times I went out, the fear was so much. I am perfectly acquainted with the fear.But one day one has to face it and go through it, because again and again you fall upon it and you rush out and the out is not meaningful anymore. The out is all empty, and you come inside and the fear – you have to choose between the two. The outside is no more relevant. You can go on making empty gestures, but how long can you deceive yourself? You know the screen is empty and all your projections are dead and you go inside and the fear, a great storm of fear arises. But there is no other way – one has to go through it to know exactly what happens after this death. The sooner you gather courage the better.And I say again, you are more fortunate, because I am standing ahead of you in that utter emptiness, calling you forth: “Come on! Come ye all. Come again, and again!” And I go on calling you forth just as Christ called Lazarus from the grave: “Lazarus, come out!” In fact, that parable is not a historical fact. It is a parable. It is a parable of moving from the outside to the inside.The outside becomes a grave when it loses meaning. The outside becomes just a futility, a wasteland, a grave. Nothing grows in it anymore, nothing flowers in it anymore – no possibility of any song and dance – and you live only in empty motions, empty gestures.But the master is standing where you are afraid to go and he calls from there. I am not only standing outside you; you will meet me in that innermost nothingness – not as me, of course – not as a person but as a presence, not separate from you but one with you.That’s why I insist so much on sannyas. Unless you are a sannyasin it will be difficult for me to call you from the inside. I can call you from the outside, but then you remain just a student. I can teach you a few things – that will become knowledge – but I cannot call you from your inside, from your very heart. And the need is there. That is possible only if you become a disciple, if you are a sannyasin, if you are ready to go with me, if you are ready to trust me, at least in some moments. I will use those “some moments” and sooner or later they will become your very state of being.So go on. Let this “me,” this “I” also disappear. And once this “I” disappears there is no loneliness, there is aloneness. And aloneness is beautiful, aloneness is freedom, it is a very positive feeling of well-being, a positive feeling of great joy. It is a very great, festive moment. It is celebration.“It seems as though there is nothing but me and I am so alone.” Yes, if “I” remains you will remain lonely.“But then people are on the scene interacting with me and I become confused. And what about you? You also seem just part of the painting.”Allow me to become part of the painting on the outside, only then can I start working from the inside. Let me disappear from the outside so that you can see me inside. And that will be my truth. And that is the truth of Christ and that is the truth of Buddha and Krishna. That is the truth of all the masters, of all those who have become awakened.“Even though this lasts only a few seconds, I become so terrified when this happens.” It is natural, but gather courage. I am with you. Go in.“Is this my mind playing with me?”No, not at all. Mind creates the fear, not this experience. Mind is playing when it creates the fear. It is not mind when you see all your projections coming closer and closer and disappearing into your eyes, it is not mind when everything becomes a white empty screen. It is not mind, it is meditation: it is movement towards no-mind. Mind creates the fear – when it comes very close to the no-mind, it becomes so afraid of death that it creates fear – and in that fear you rush out again.Next time it happens, go in, in spite of the fear. Just be like the elephant who goes on moving although the dogs go on barking. Let the dogs of the mind bark, go on moving like an elephant. Don’t care at all about the mind – what it is saying.The third question:Osho,What happens when an enlightened man slides back into delusion?Fallen flowers don’t jump back to the branches. That is not possible. The enlightened person cannot slide back into illusion. There is no way; for many reasons there is no way.The first reason: the enlightened man is no more – who will slide back? Enlightenment is; there is nothing like an enlightened person. Enlightenment is perfectly there, but there is nobody who is enlightened. That is just a way of speaking, a linguistic fallacy. Who will slide back? The one who could have slid back has disappeared. And where can one slide back? Once you have found it is illusion, it is no more there. Once you have seen it is no more there, it is finished. Where can you go back? It is not possible.But the idea arises in our mind because in life we have never seen anything like that. We attain one thing and we fall back: we are in love and then we fall back out of it, we fall in love and we fall out of it, we are happy and then we become unhappy, we are feeling good and then we start feeling very bad. We know the duality, the duality never disappears, so we naturally think about enlightenment also as if one can slide back.Enlightenment is the realization of the non-dual. That’s why Zen masters say samsara is nirvana – the very world is nirvana, the very illusion is truth. There is no distinction left. It is not that this is truth and that is illusion. All is truth, only truth is. Where can you fall back? You have gone beyond the point of no return. Nobody has ever fallen back. And don’t be worried about these people – you should worry about yourself.First become enlightened and then try to slide back. And then you will see: it is easier to become enlightened, it is very difficult to slide back. I have tried, but I have not been successful.The last question:Osho,Please explain about bliss and misery, for whenever I encounter love or beauty, I only feel tremendous pain but not bliss, and I don't understand this.You have been told again and again, you have been taught again and again that to be joyous is wrong and to be miserable is right. You may not have been told so directly, but indirectly you have been conditioned and hypnotized for misery. You have started believing that misery is natural. You see misery all around, misery abounds, everybody is miserable. It seems to be the way things are.When you were born, you were a happy child – as every child is happy. It has not happened otherwise – never. Whenever a child is born he is happy, utterly happy, and that’s why children look very selfish: they only think of themselves, they are not worried about the world, and they are happy about small things. A butterfly in the garden, and the utter joy and their wonder – at small things, at nothings, but they are happy, they are naturally happy.But slowly, slowly we cripple their happiness, we destroy it. We cannot tolerate so much happiness. The world is very miserable and we have to prepare them for the world. So indirectly we start indoctrinating them that, “The world is misery. You cannot afford to be happy. Happiness is just a hope. How can you be happy? Don’t be so selfish! There is so much misery all around – feel for others, consider others.” Slowly, slowly the child gets the feeling that to be happy is a kind of sin. How can you be happy when the world is in such misery?People write letters to me asking: “How can you teach people meditation when the world is in such a misery? How can one be happy when people are starving?” As if by being unhappy you will help them! As if by not being meditative you will be of any kind of service to them. As if wars will disappear if you don’t meditate, and poverty will disappear if you are not happy. But misery has been put on a pedestal, misery has been worshipped.I always suspect that Christianity became the greatest religion because of the cross. It represents misery, suffering. Krishna could not become a great religion because of his flute, because of his dance. Even those who worship him feel a little guilty about him. “How can you be so happy and dancing with girlfriends? And not just one – thousands! And singing and playing on the flute! People are dying and there is death and starvation and war and violence and all kinds of things are going on all around. It is hell, and you are playing on your flute! It seems callous, it seems you are cruel.” Jesus seems to be more suitable, dying on the cross. Look at the face of Jesus. The way Christians have painted him, his face is very long, sad; he is carrying the whole burden of the Earth. He has come to take all the sins of all the people on himself. He seems to be the greatest servant – very unselfish. But my feeling is that Christians have depicted Christ wrongly.This Christ is a myth; the real Christ was more like Krishna. In fact, if you go deep down into the word Christ you will be surprised: it comes from Krishna, its root is Krishna. Jesus must have been a very joyous man; otherwise how can you think of him eating, drinking, merrily? There are so many scenes where friends have gathered and they are eating and drinking and gossiping. He is not always “gospeling,” sometimes he is gossiping too! And he seems to be the only messenger from God who drinks and eats well and enjoys the small pleasures of life.My feeling is that if Zen masters were to create a religion out of Jesus, they would make him laugh on the cross – a belly laugh. Jesus would have as big a belly as Bodhidharma and the belly would be shaking like an earthquake with great laughter! And that would have been far more, far more true.Even in Japan and China the statue of Buddha is made with a big belly. In India they don’t make that big belly – no, not at all. The Indian concept, the yogic concept, is that the belly has to be very small and the chest has to be big, because the yogic breathing is a false breathing, it is not natural. It can make a Muhammad Ali out of you but not a Buddha. It will give you the shape of a Mr. Universe, but have you seen any other kinds of people in the world who are more ugly? Mr. Universe seems to be the ugliest. I don’t think any woman can fall in love with a Mr. Universe. He looks so animalistic – all muscles and no man, just a kind of mechanism. Just see his muscles moving: just a kind of mechanism, a machine, but no soul. The Indian statue of Buddha is the yogic statue. When they made Buddha’s statue in China, they made it with a big belly.When one laughs and when one breathes naturally, the belly becomes slowly bigger, because then one breathes from the belly and not from the chest – the breath goes the whole way down. If Zen were to make a religion out of Christianity, Jesus would be on the cross, but with laughter – such laughter that it would resound down the centuries. But that may not have been a successful religion, because how would it suit the people who know only crying and weeping? He would look completely eccentric, outlandish. To be on the cross and sad looks perfectly right, because everybody is on a certain cross and sad.And you must have been taught from your very childhood that the world is a wrong place. How can you be happy in this place? We are suffering a kind of punishment. God ordered Adam and Eve to leave Paradise because they disobeyed, and humanity is under that curse. How can you be happy? To be a Christian and happy will be a contradiction in terms.So, you must have been taught that the world is a miserable place: misery is perfectly right in it, in tune with it, and everybody is miserable – it will be very hard and cruel on your part to be happy and joyous. That’s why even when there are moments to enjoy people feel guilty and they hold back.Larson took Charlotte for a drive way out in the country and parked the car in a desolate stretch. “If you try to molest me,” said Charlotte, “I’ll scream.”“What good would that do?” asked Larson. “There’s not a soul around for miles.”“I know” said Charlotte, “but I want to satisfy my conscience before I start having a good time.”People even make love with sad faces as if they are on the cross – serious, doing a duty – and even if they want to enjoy, they hide it. It doesn’t look right. They feel guilty.If people really make love with joy they will scream, they will shout, they will cry, they will weep, they will laugh. One never knows what kind of emotions will surface, so it is better to keep yourself in control; otherwise you will look so foolish. And then what will the neighbors think? And modern walls are so thin that you even have to make love in a yoga posture – shavasana, the dead-body posture – and be finished with it as soon as possible, don’t let it become orgasmic. “What are you doing? And Jesus suffered for you on the cross! And you are shouting with joy? Think of Jesus, poor Jesus and of what he will think of you! And think of God – who is a kind of peeping Tom who always looks through keyholes – what will he think?”If you think of all the gods and then the angels and the christs and the saints and they are all watching and you making love…and with such relish! You will suffer in hell! It is better to keep control, it is good to feel guilty. That’s why after making love people feel a kind of sadness, a kind of frustration, as if they have done something criminal. Again they enjoyed themselves and that is not right.Just see: whenever you are feeling miserable, something feels good. It will look like a contradiction, but it is like this: whenever you are miserable you feel blissful and whenever you are blissful you feel miserable.You say, “Please explain about bliss and misery, for whenever I encounter love or beauty I only feel tremendous pain but not bliss, and I don’t understand this.”You will not be able to understand this at all because your whole understanding has been poisoned. You will have to drop the whole mind. There is no need to understand. You have to go into it with innocence, not with understanding, because that understanding is again a kind of calculation; that understanding is again the knowledge that has been given by the society. And that knowledge is creating the whole trouble! You have to become a child again, innocent.But you want to understand. Forget all about understanding. Understanding is again calculation, cunningness.I have heard:An elderly couple went to a doctor. The man said, “We want to know if we are making love properly. Will you look at us?”“Go ahead,” said the doctor. They made love.“You are making love perfectly,” the doctor said. “That will be ten dollars.” They came back six weeks in a row and did the same thing. On the seventh visit the doctor said, “What are you coming here like this for? I told you you are making love properly.”“She can’t come to my house,” said the man, “and I can’t go to her house. A motel costs twenty dollars. You charge us ten dollars and we get eight dollars back from Medicare.”Don’t be calculating, don’t be cunning with life. Now what kind of love will this be? Business and business and business…. Knowledge is needed for business, innocence is needed for life. Knowledge is a must in the marketplace, but not needed at all when you are moving into the mysteries; you cannot know, you can only be. You drop this mind, you drop all this conditioning and start moving. When you feel joyous, feel joyous, help yourself to feel joyous: dance, sing.The old habits will pull you back; don’t listen to them. You will have to get rid of the old habits slowly, slowly. It will be a kind of struggle, because no habit leaves you easily. But these habits are against you and against God, because anything that is against joy is against God. If God can be defined by any word, that word is bliss and nothing else.Whenever you feel something beautiful and the pain arises in you, that pain is not in your being, that pain is in your mind: your being is trying to go into the beautiful, but your mind is pulling you back. Whenever you feel love arising, bliss arising, and pain also, choose the bliss. Neglect the pain, ignore it. Ignoring it, it will die. If you go on paying attention to it you will feed it. Attention is food. Never pay attention to anything that is wrong; otherwise you are helping it to be there, you are giving it more and more strength. Ignore it – there is nothing better than ignoring it. Yes, let it be there. Just say, “Okay, you be there. You are just a hangover from my past. You be there. I am going ahead, l am not going to listen to you.”Listen to blissful provocations and always go with them, and you are in the right direction – you are moving towards God. Never listen to anything that gives you guilt, pain, misery – you are moving away from God. Whenever you are miserable, you are in hell – farthest away from God – and whenever you are utterly joyous, you are in God, you are in heaven.You say, “Please explain about bliss and misery….”Misery is unnatural, bliss is your nature. Misery is taught by others, bliss is given by God. Misery is a conditioning, bliss is your inner soul, your essence. Misery is personality, just the structure around you; bliss is your freedom, it is unstructured.“Please explain about bliss and misery, for whenever I encounter love or beauty I only feel tremendous pain but not bliss, and I don’t understand this.”Don’t try to understand this at all. Just leave the pain there, accept it for a few days. And go into love – go into love madly – and go into beauty. Dance around a tree, and you will feel something of the shape of the tree has started reaching you. Dance under the stars. In the beginning you may feel that your legs are not moving and you have to move, because you have been forced to live without dance for so long, your legs have forgotten the language of dance. But soon they will learn because it is a natural language.Each child knows how to dance, each child knows how to be joyous. You will have to learn it again, but because it is natural, it comes fast. Just a few efforts and suddenly one day, you are out of the trap. Your crutches have to be thrown away. Even if sometimes you fall it is perfectly good, but you have to stand on your own feet. The crutches of the society, of the organized religion, of the priests, have to be thrown. Even if for a few days you will feel impoverished – it is natural to feel impoverished for a few days – you have to accept it. But if you go on moving towards the natural, you will find Tao in your life. Tao is a natural flowering. Follow nature.Nobody wants to be miserable and everybody is. They are not following nature. Nobody wants to be anything other than blissful and nobody is blissful. Listen to the desire: the deepest desire indicates the right path. Your longing is for bliss, for beauty, for something that will overwhelm you, for something that will take you to the other shore, for something which will be so tremendous and incredible that the past and the future will be washed away and you will be just herenow.But don’t try to understand. If you start trying to understand you will become a victim of psychoanalysis, and analysis is a process ad infinitum. You can go on analyzing and analyzing and it is never finished. There is not a single person in the world who is totally psychoanalyzed. There can never be.This is where I differ from psychoanalysis. Don’t go into analysis. Put the whole mind aside. Jump out of it! There is no need to understand. All that is needed is to live, authentically live. All that is needed is to be.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Master Lu-tsu said: Only the primal spirit and the true nature overcome time and space.The primal spirit is beyond the polar differences. Here is the place whence heaven and Earth derive their being. When students understand how to grasp the primal spirit they overcome the polar opposites of light and darkness and tarry no longer in the three worlds. But only he who has envisioned human nature’s original face is able to do this.When men are set free from the womb, the primal spirit dwells in the square inch, but the conscious spirit dwells below in the heart. This heart is dependent on the outside world. If a man does not eat for one day even, it feels extremely uncomfortable. If it hears something terrifying it throbs; if it hears something enraging it stops; if it is faced with death it becomes sad; if it sees something beautiful it is dazzled. But the heavenly heart in the head, when would it have moved in the least? Dost thou ask: “Can the heavenly heart not move?” Then I answer: How could the true thought in the square inch move!The lower heart moves like a strong, powerful commander who despises the heavenly ruler because of his weakness, and has usurped the leadership in affairs of state. But when the primal castle can be fortified and defended, then it is as if a strong and wise ruler sat upon the throne. The eyes start the light circulating like two ministers at the right and left who support the ruler with all their might. When rule in the center is thus in order, all those rebellious heroes will present themselves with lances reversed, ready to take orders.The way to the Elixir of Life knows as supreme magic seed-water, spirit-fire, and thought-earth: these three. What is seed-water? It is the true, one energy, eros. Spirit-fire is the light, logos. Thought-earth is intuition.One day, a king called his clever jester and gave him a staff in front of all the court saying, “Take this staff as a wand of office and keep it till you find a greater fool than yourself. If you find one, give this wand to him.”Some time later, the king was sick and lay dying. He wanted to see his jester, of whose truthfulness he was sure. When the jester came the king said to him, “I have called you to tell you that I am going on a long journey.”“Where are you going?” asked the jester.“To a faraway country – to another world.”“My master, have you made provision for your journey and your stay there?”“None whatever, my little fool.”“Have you any friends to welcome you there?”“No one!” replied the king.Then the jester shook his head sadly and put the staff into the king’s hand and said, “Take this staff, your majesty. This belongs to you, for you are going to another world without preparation. Surely this wand belongs to you and to nobody else.”Life is an occasion to prepare for death and the beyond. If you don’t prepare for death and for the beyond you are a fool – you are missing a great opportunity. Life is only an opportunity.This life that you know is not real life. It is only an opportunity to attain to real life. The real life is just hidden somewhere in this life, but it has to be provoked, it has to be awakened. It is fast asleep. It is not yet aware of itself. And if your real life is not aware of itself, your whole so-called life will be nothing but a long dream. And it cannot be sweet either – it will be a nightmare.To live without being rooted in the real life is to live like a tree without being rooted in the soil. That’s why there is no beauty, that’s why there is no grace. That’s why you don’t see the splendor of man that the buddhas talk about.Jesus goes on saying again and again, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” But you don’t seem to be like an emperor. Jesus says to his disciples, “Look at the lilies in the field. How beautiful they are! Even Solomon, the great king, was not so beautiful, attired in all his grandeur, as these poor lily flowers.” Why are the lilies so beautiful and man so ugly? Why is only man ugly? Have you ever seen an ugly parrot, or an ugly peacock, or an ugly lion, or an ugly deer? Ugliness seems to be something human. A peacock is a peacock and a deer is a deer, but a man is not necessarily a man.A man is man only when he is a Buddha or a Christ or a Krishna – when he has become aware of his total being – otherwise you live groping in the dark. You live in the dark caves of the unconscious. You only appear to be conscious. Your consciousness is very fragile. It is very momentary, it is a very thin surface. It is not even skin-deep – just a little scratch and you lose your consciousness.Somebody insults you: just a word or just a glance, and all your consciousness is gone and you are a rage, anger, violence, aggression. In a moment your humanity disappears – you are again wild, again an animal – and man can fall below the animals, because when he falls there is nothing to stop him. Man can rise above the angels, but it rarely happens because to rise above the angels is an uphill task, arduous; one has to work for it. It needs hard work, it needs guts, courage, to explore the unknown.Millions of people are born and die, but they never live. Their life is only apparent because they remain rooted in unconsciousness. And whatsoever you do on the surface may not be true about you at all; in fact, exactly the opposite is the case. That’s why Sigmund Freud has to go into your dreams to see your reality. Just see the irony of it: your reality has to be searched for in your dreams, not in your reality. You cannot be believed – what you say about yourself. Your dreams have to be asked, because you have become so false and you are wearing so many masks that it is almost impossible to penetrate to your original face.But it is very difficult to know your original face, even from dreams and dream analysis. Who is going to do the analysis? Freud is as unconscious as you are. One unconscious person is trying to interpret the dreams of another unconscious person. His interpretations are bound to be very limited; his interpretations will reflect more about him than about you. That’s why if you go to a Freudian analyst with the same dream, you will get a different interpretation than you will get if you go to a Jungian analyst or to an Adlerian analyst – and now there are many. And you will be puzzled: a single dream has different interpretations. They are not saying anything about you, they are saying something about themselves. The Jungian is saying, “I am a Jungian. This is my interpretation.” Your dreams cannot reveal your truth. If your conscious activities cannot reveal you, how can your sleep activities reveal you? But still, Freud is on the right track. One has to go a little deeper.One has to go beyond the dreams to a state of mind where no thought, no dream, no desire exists; when all thinking…. And dreaming is a kind of thinking, a primitive kind of thinking – thinking through pictures – but it is still thinking. When you have gone beyond thinking, and if you can still remain alert, aware, as if one is fast asleep but still alert – deep down at the very core of one’s being a lamp goes on burning, a small candle of light – then you will see your original face. And to see your original face is to be back in the Garden of Eden. Then you drop all your clothes.Your personality consists only of clothes and clothes and clothes – clothes upon clothes. Remember two words which will be very important to understand this strange but immensely valuable book, The Secret of the Golden Flower: one word is essence, the other word is personality. Personality comes from a root, persona which means a mask. In ancient days, the actors in Greek dramas used to wear masks. Persona means a mask; personality comes from persona. The actors used to wear one mask, you are wearing many, because for different situations you need different masks. When you are talking to your boss you need one kind of mask and when you are talking to your servant, of course, you need another kind of mask. How can you use the same mask?Have you ever watched? When you are talking to your boss, you are all smiles; your every breath says, “Yes, sir.” Even though you are offended, angry, you are ready to kiss his feet. And when you are talking to your servant, have you seen the arrogance on your face? You have never smiled. How can you smile talking to your servant? It is impossible. You have to dehumanize him. How can you smile and relate to him as a human being? You have to possess him as a thing: he is a slave. You have to behave in a different way than you behave with your boss. There, you are a servant; he remains arrogant, he remains bossy. When you are talking to a friend you have a different mask to use. When you are talking to a stranger, of course, a different mask is needed. You have to use many masks and you have many faces, and you go on changing them as circumstances change. Your personality consists only of false faces.And what is essence? Essence is your original face without any masks. Essence is that which you brought into the world when you were born. Essence is that which was with you in the womb. Essence is that which has been given to you by God – or whatsoever you call the totality, the whole, existence. Essence is a gift from existence to you.Personality is a gift of the society, parents, school, college, culture, civilization. Personality is not you, it is pseudo – and we continue to polish this personality, and we have completely forgotten the essence. And unless you remember the essence, you will have lived in vain, because real life consists of essence. A real life is the life of essence. You can call it soul, or God within you, or whatsoever you will. But remember the distinction: you are not your clothes – not even your psychological clothes.I must remind you of Moses. When he came face to face with God, when he saw God on the mountains as fire arising out of a green bush – and the bush was not burning, the bush was as fresh, as green as ever – he was puzzled. He could not believe his eyes. It was impossible…such fire! The bush was aflame and yet the bush was not burning. And then he heard from the bush a voice coming to him, “Moses, put off your shoes, because you are on holy ground.”This is one of the most beautiful of Jewish parables: God is the fire, your personality is just the bush; and God is a cool fire – it will not burn your personality, the personality can remain green. God gives you so much freedom that if you want to be false, it is allowed, it is okay with him. If you want to be pseudo, it is allowed. Freedom means that you can be right or you can be wrong – this is up to you. Your essence is there, the flame is there, and your personality is also there.The personality is false, and naturally one will think, “Why doesn’t the fire within you burn it?” The fire is cool, the fire cannot burn it. If you have decided to have this personality, the fire allows it: you can remain green in your personality, the personality can go on gathering more and more foliage. You can become more and more false, you can become utterly false, you can be lost in the falsehood of the personality and God is not going to interfere.Remember this: God never interferes, freedom is total. That is the dignity of man, the glory of man, and the agony too. If you were not given freedom you would not be false. No other animal is false, no animal has personality. And I am not counting pet animals: because they live with you, they are destroyed – they start having personalities. Your dogs forget their essence. The dog may be angry but goes on wagging his tail – this is personality. He knows who is the boss and he knows how to buttress the ego of the boss, he has become diplomatic. He is as much a politician as the people who live in New Delhi: he goes on wagging his tail.Have you seen the dog puzzled sometimes? A stranger comes in and the dog does not know how to behave – what face to show to the stranger. Feeling ambiguous, he barks – maybe that is the right thing to do – and still he goes on wagging his tail. He is watching for the right hints from the boss – whether the person who has entered the house is a friend or a foe. If he is a foe he will stop wagging his tail, if he is a friend he will stop barking at him. He is waiting for a hint, a signal – how the master behaves. He has become a shadow of the master. He is no longer a real dog.To live with human beings is contagious – they destroy. You even destroy animals if they live with you, you don’t allow them their natural essence. You civilize them just as you have become civilized. You don’t allow nature to have its own way, you don’t allow Tao to have its own flow.Essence is that which you bring into the world, the personality is that which the world imposes upon the essence. The world is very afraid of the essence because the essence is always rebellious. The essence is always individualistic, and the world does not need any individuals. It needs sheep, it does not need rebellious people. It does not need people like Buddha, Krishna, Lao Tzu – no, these people are dangerous. It wants people who are obedient – obedient to the status quo, obedient to the vested interests, obedient to the organized church, obedient to the state and the stupid politicians.Society requires obedience, and society requires efficiency. The more mechanical you are, the more efficient you are. When you are more alive, you cannot be so efficient. A machine is more efficient than man. The society’s effort is to reduce every man into a machine. And how to reduce a man into a machine? Make him more and more unconscious, make him more and more robot-like, let his essence completely disappear from his consciousness, let him become perfectly pseudo. Let him be a husband, let her be a wife, a servant, a boss, this and that, but never let him be his essential self. Don’t allow that, because that essential self is not obedient to anybody except to God. It has no other commitment, its sole commitment is to the source. It knows no other masters.That type of being will be very inconvenient to this so-called society, because this society is not created to fulfill the needs of human beings. It is created to exploit human beings. It is not according to you and for your growth. It has no intention to help you to grow, and it has every intention not to allow you to grow because the more you grow the more independent you become, the less you grow the more dependent you remain. And a dependent person is reliable because a dependent person is always afraid. A dependent person always needs somebody to lean on – always needs somebody to lean on. He is childish. He leans on the parents, he leans on the priests, he leans on the politicians. He cannot stand on his own feet. The society goes on covering you with many many clothes – not only physical but psychological too.The society is very much afraid of physical nakedness, because physical nakedness is the beginning of psychological nakedness. The society goes into a panic seeing a naked man because this is the beginning: if he is naked physically, he has taken the first step. Now who is going to prevent him from becoming psychologically naked?And the voice that called forth from the burning bush to Moses said, “Put off your shoes.” It is a very symbolic thing. “Put off all your clothes,” it says. “Put off your shoes.” Shoes cover your feet. Shoes cover you. “Be naked on the ground. Be without shoes.” The shoe represents personality, and nakedness represents essence. “You are on holy ground, put off your shoes.”The moment you encounter your essence – the burning bush within you – you will have to put off your shoes, you will have to put off all your clothes, you will have to put off all that is hiding your essence. That is revolution, metanoia. That is the turning point in a life: the society disappears and you become an individual – and only individuals can relate with God. But a great consciousness will be needed.Gurdjieff once, in 1933, treated Fritz Peters to a demonstration of this at the former’s New York apartment in the Henry Hudson Hotel where a meeting was to be held.Peters was a young disciple of Gurdjieff, and Gurdjieff was one of the greatest masters the world has ever known – and not a conventional master at all, because no master can be conventional. Conventionality is the quality of the priest, not of the master. The master is always revolutionary. And this is a beautiful experiment. Listen attentively:When Peters arrived he was asked to wash dishes and prepare vegetables for some very important people who were coming to dinner. Gurdjieff said he needed Peters to give him an English lesson consisting of words for all those parts and functions of the body “that were not in the dictionary.” By the time Gurdjieff had mastered the four-letter words and obscene phrases the guests started arriving, who turned out to be some fifteen well-dressed, well-mannered New Yorkers, of which a number were reporters or journalists.After staging a late and obsequious entry, Gurdjieff humbly began responding at table to the guests’ blasé questions on his work and reasons for visiting America. Then, with a wink to his English teacher, he suddenly changed tone and explained that the sad degeneration of humankind and its transformation into a substance only describable by a four-letter expletive was particularly striking in their country; hence his coming to observe this phenomenon in the raw. The cause behind this distressing state of affairs, he continued, lay in the fact that people – especially Americans – never followed the dictates of intelligence or propriety, but only that of their genital organs. Then singling out one particularly handsome woman, he complimented her on her attire and makeup. He then confided that in all honesty, between them, the real explanation behind her adornment was an irresistible sexual urge she felt for some particular person – graphically spelled out by Gurdjieff with his newly acquired vocabulary. Before the guests could react, he launched into a discourse on his own sexual prowess, followed by intimate and detailed descriptions of the sexual mores of various races and nations.By the time dinner was over and the guests well plied with good old armagnac as always, they lost their inhibitions and joined in an exchange of obscenities which soon became more than verbal. Gurdjieff retired with the lady he had insulted, and the others, by now conditioned to believe that an orgy or something was in the tenor of the evening, began entangling physically in different rooms of the apartment in various stages of undress.Just when the carousal was at a climax, Gurdjieff briskly disengaged himself and thundered forth orders for the revels to cease. He proclaimed that the lesson had been accomplished, that the guests had already amply verified through their comportment the soundness of the observations he made earlier in the evening – that thanks to him they were now partly conscious of their true condition and that he would gladly accept checks and cash in payment for this important lesson. Peters noted – without surprise, knowing Gurdjieff – that the take came to several thousand dollars.When everyone had left, Gurdjieff went into the kitchen to help Peters with the dishes, asking at the same time how he had enjoyed the evening. “I was disgusted,” came the reply. Gurdjieff laughed and scrutinized his companion with a piercing look. “Is fine feeling you have – this disgust. But now is necessary ask yourself one question: with who you disgusted?”This is the real situation. What you show on the surface is one thing. Those guests were annoyed, angered by the observation of George Gurdjieff that humanity has become very degraded, that what you do on the surface is one thing, what you mean deep inside is another. You may give explanations and you may rationalize, but your rationalizations are just rationalizations and nothing else. Deep down something else goes on working in the unconscious. You are not even aware of it.Psychologists say that when a woman is raped, in the majority of cases the woman wanted to be raped – she had the desire. She was inviting it, she was using certain gestures; the way she walked, the way she dressed, the way she talked were all gestures inviting rape – and then one day it happens. And then she looks surprised, angry, violent, goes to the police, fights in the court. If she had looked deep down in her own mind she would have been surprised: it was her own effort, her own desire which had been fulfilled.There are people who go on living in this double way, not even aware what their real motives are inside. Watch, and that watching will make you very, very alert. Just watch. What is your real motive? Don’t try to convince yourself that this is not so. Just become a mirror and see your behavior. Just become a silent watcher of your behavior – always alert as to why you are doing a certain thing, from where it is coming – and then you will see you have a dual being. One is the personality which says one thing and the other is your reality which goes on doing just the opposite. And somehow they both have to manage with each other, hence the conflict, the friction, and the wastage of energy.And it happens almost in all cases that you have one desire inside and just the opposite on the outside. And why the opposite? – because through the opposite you are repressing that desire. The person who feels inferior deep inside pretends to be very superior on the outside. Only inferior people want to be superior. Those who are really superior don’t care a bit. All people who suffer from inferiority complexes become politicians, because that is the only way to prove that they are very superior. The person who has the look on his face of holier-than-thou knows that deep inside just the opposite is the case: he is suffering from guilt, he is suffering deep down from unworthiness – he knows that he is unholy. Now the only way to hide it from the world is to have a mask of holiness.Your so-called saints are not a bit different from the sinners. The only difference is that sinners are honest and your saints are not honest. Out of one hundred saints, if you can find even one saint who is really a saint, that will be more than enough, more than one can expect; ninety-nine are just pretending. And I am not saying that they are pretending only to you. The pretension can go so deep that not only are they deceiving others, they start deceiving themselves. In fact, to deceive yourself, first you have to deceive others, only then can you believe in it. When others start believing that you are a saint, only then can you believe it.The real saint is not concerned with others at all. He knows who he is. Even if the whole world says that he is not a saint, that doesn’t matter. His understanding is inner, his encounter is directly with himself, his experience is immediate and existential. He knows his essence. And to know one’s essence is the first step to knowing God, to becoming immortal, to going beyond death.Henri Bergson spoke at the beginning of this century. He said, “The addition to the body brought by technology calls for a corresponding addition to the soul.”The modern man looks more soul-less than in any other age, and the reason is: science and technology have added much to the body. The body has become stronger, lives longer. The brain has become stronger, has become more knowledgeable. Compared to the body and the brain – and the brain is part of the body – the soul has remained very, very poor. It is almost neglected, ignored. Nobody cares about it.Who thinks about one’s own essence? Going to the church or to the temple is not going to help. You will have to go within yourself: you will have to put off your shoes, you will have to go into your naked essence. Only then will you be able to reconnect yourself with the cosmos. It is from there that you can be bridged again with reality.Now the sutras:Master Lu-tsu said:Only the primal spirit and the true nature overcome time and space.What I have been telling you about essence, Master Lu-tsu calls “the primal spirit.” The primal spirit is your essential soul, that which you have brought from God – untaught, unconditioned, as you were in your mother’s womb. How did you exist in your mother’s womb? Nothing was taught to you, you had no mind, you existed in a state of no-mind, hence the blissfulness of it.Psychologists say that because of the experience of the mother’s womb, those nine months, man has been searching for God – because of that nine months’ experience the memory haunts him. Those nine months were the most beautiful that you have known. Maybe you have forgotten consciously, but deep down in the very cells of your body, in the very fibers of your being, those days are still pulsating, those days are still carried by your existence. They may not be conscious in your mind, but they are there. Just as when in the night you fall into deep sleep, you don’t know where you go and what happens to you, but in the morning you feel the relaxation, the freshness, the joy. Life has again happened to you, all the dust that you had gathered has disappeared. You are again fresh, you are rejuvenated, your body carries the feeling. Your body is calm and quiet and remembers something. The remembrance is not in the brain – you don’t know what happened exactly, where you had gone.Only a buddha knows where he goes in his deep sleep, because even in his deep sleep he remains alert. You are not alert even when you are aware – the so-called awareness, you are not alert when you are in that so-called wakeful state. Your eyes are open, but your mind goes on weaving and spinning a thousand and one thoughts. The inner talk continues, the inner noise continues. You see and yet you don’t see and you hear and yet you don’t hear, because deep inside there is a wall of thoughts, dreams – continuously floating in the sky of your consciousness. You are not alert even when you are awake. The buddha is alert even when he is fast asleep. Only he knows where he goes.Where does he go? He goes to the essence, to the source, to the primal spirit. And even if for a few moments at night you fall into the primal source, you are rejuvenated. The man who cannot fall into deep sleep is really in hell. He goes to bed tired, exhausted, bored with life, and gets up in the morning even more tired, more bored, more exhausted. His life is hell.In deep sleep you simply slip back into the primal source of your being. That primal source is always there; you have not lost it, you have only forgotten it. And that primal source is beyond all dualities: it is neither light nor darkness, it is transcendental; it is neither life nor death as you know them, it is transcendental; it is neither man nor woman as you know them, it is transcendental. It is beyond all kinds of dualities. It is God.Only the primal spirit and the true nature overcome time and space.When you are in the primal spirit you are in your true nature. When you are in your personality you are untrue, you are just a plastic phenomenon. Watch, and you will be surprised how many things are plastic in you. You smile when there is no smile in the heart, then it is plastic. You sympathize when there is no sympathy in you – it is plastic. You show joy when there is no joy in you – it is plastic. You can even cry and weep without your heart feeling anything, then those tears are plastic. Just watch how many things are plastic in you. And remember, whatsoever is plastic is not you. God has not made you a plastic thing; God has given you eternal life. But that eternal life you can find only when you put off your shoes, put off your personality.Drop all personas, all masks. Let all masks disappear. It will be painful because you have become identified with those masks; you think they are your faces. It is going to be almost a very painful process of death. And not only once – you will have to die many times – because each time a face falls you will find a death has happened. But again new life will be released in you, fresher, deeper, more vibrant. When all the faces disappear and the essence is left alone, you have transcended all duality, even the duality of time and space.When you enter deep meditation, when you enter your essential being, there is no space and no time – you cannot say where you are. All “where’s” disappear, you cannot pinpoint the place. Either you are nowhere or you are everywhere. These are the only two possibilities. Both mean the same.A few people have chosen to say one is everywhere. Vedanta has chosen to say that in deep meditation one is everywhere: Aham Brahmasmi, “I am God.” “God” means one who is everywhere, who permeates the whole existence – you become space itself. And “I am always, I am eternal” – it means you permeate time. This is one way of expressing it, the positive way. Buddhism has chosen the other, the negative way.Buddha says: “In deep meditation you are nowhere.”All space has disappeared. And there is no time, you are in a timeless state. And when there is no time and no space, how can you exist? Man exists only at the crossing point of time and space. One line of time, another line of space cross, and at that crossing the ego arises. Take away these two lines and the point of the ego disappears. It was only a crossing of two lines. It was a fallacious idea.So Buddha says: “There is nobody.”In deep meditation, time disappears, space disappears, and you disappear – all disappears. There is only nothingness, shunya, zero. This is the negative way of saying the same thing.Either you can say, “I am God,” if you choose the positive expression – which has its own dangers, its own beauties too; or you can choose the negative expression, anatta – no-self, nothingness – nirvana. It has its own beauties and its dangers too. The very idea of nothingness puts people off – that is the danger. Who wants to be nothing?In his forty years of ministry, again and again Buddha is asked, “Why should one try to be nothing? That would be a death, ultimate death.”And Buddha says, “Yes, it is an ultimate death. But it is beautiful.”And the questioners ask, “But to whom is it beautiful? – because there is nobody.”And Buddha says, “There is only beauty, beatitude – nobody to experience it.”Naturally the human mind says, “But then what is the point? If I am not there, and it is very beautiful, so let it be beautiful. But I am not there, so whether it is beautiful or not makes no difference to me. Why should I lose myself? It is better to be in a world which is not so beautiful but where at least I am.”The goal of nothingness puts people off. That’s why Buddhism disappeared from India and it learned a lesson: in China it dropped the negative language, in Tibet it dropped the negative language. Indian Buddhism, the original Buddhism, was absolutely negative. Under the influence of Buddha thousands were transformed, but you cannot find a man like Buddha every day.The impact of Buddha was such that people were even ready to die and become nothing. That was because of Buddha; otherwise there is no enchantment, no charm in being nothing. But Buddha’s magnetism was such, his charisma was such, that thousands of people were ready to become nothing: “If Buddha says it, it must be right.” His word was so important, his eyes were a witness to it: “He has disappeared, so let us also disappear. And if he says so then we can trust.”But once Buddha disappeared from the Earth, Buddhist priests could not convince people; they had to disappear from India completely. Then they learned a lesson: outside India, Buddhism started using positive language, started using all that Buddha had denied. It survived, but it did not really survive as Buddhism. It survived as Vedanta, it survived as a positive language, and Buddha’s greatest contribution was the negative expression.The beauty of the negative expression is that it never allows your ego any satisfaction, any gratification. That is the danger of the positive language. If you say, Aham Brahmasmi – “I am God,” Ana’l haq – “I am truth,” the danger is that truth may become secondary and the “I” may become primary. Truth may become your shadow; the emphasis may start concentrating on the word “I”: “I am God.” If the emphasis remains on God and the “I” remains just a shadow to God, it is perfectly good. But that is very difficult. The “I” is very cunning, the ego’s ways are very subtle. It will use the opportunity, it will jump upon the idea. It will say, “Right, I am God and nobody else is. I am truth and everybody else is a lie.” But then the whole point is missed.But one thing is certain: time and space disappear. Either you have to declare, “I am all” – the whole space, the whole time – “I am everywhere and everywhen,” or you have to use the Buddhist expression, “I am not. Time is not. Space is not. There is only an absolute silent nothing – from eternity to eternity, a silence, not even a ripple.” But both statements indicate the same thing. Expressions are different, fingers are different, but they point to the same moon. That moon is your essence.Master Lu-tsu said: Only the primal spirit and the true nature overcome time and space.And unless you overcome time and space you will not overcome death. Death exists in time, and death exists in space. Unless you overcome time and space you will not overcome mind and body.Try to understand: body corresponds to space and mind corresponds to time. Mind is a time phenomenon and body is a space phenomenon. Body exists somewhere and mind exists somewhen. Think of mind without time and you will not be able to think of it; mind is either past, present or future, either memory or imagination, or the present facticity. Mind exists in three tenses.You are listening to me attentively, alert, mind is in the present. If you are here thinking of other things – you have read something in the Bible and it corresponds with me or does not correspond with me – you have gone into your imagination or into your memory. You cannot think of mind if time disappears; time is synonymous with mind.Man is a miniature cosmos, a miniature universe. All that exists outside on a greater scale exists on a small scale in man. If you can understand man you will have understood the whole universe: as above, so below. Man is the atomic constituent of this whole universe. If one atom is understood you have understood all matter. If one man is understood, if you can decipher your own mystery, you have deciphered all the mysteries possible – past, present, future – all.And these two things have to be remembered: body is space, mind is time. When you meditate you disappear from the body, you don’t know who you are. Man, woman, ugly, beautiful, black, white – you simply don’t know who you are. When you go in, the body is left far behind. A moment comes when you cannot even locate your body and you cannot even feel its presence. You are no more attached to the form; you have become formless. And the same happens with the mind: you don’t know where your mind is, where that mind has gone. All that noise, that traffic noise that was constantly inside becomes distant, distant, distant, and disappears. Suddenly a great silence explodes in you. In this state of no space and no time, you come to know your essence. And to know one’s essence is to have the first glimpse of Tao.The primal spirit is beyond the polar differences.All the polar differences disappear. Man-woman, summer-winter, hot-cold, love-hate, positive-negative, time-space, life-death – all polar opposites disappear.The primal spirit is beyond the polar differences.And that’s why I insist again and again that you don’t get attached to any polarity. You have been taught to become attached to some polarity. Your so-called religions have been teaching you: either be worldly, or renounce and go to the monasteries. I say remain in the world and don’t be of it; otherwise you will become attached to a polarity. If you go to the monastery you will be afraid of the marketplace. What kind of attainment is this? If there is fear there is no attainment.And I know people who have lived in the Himalayas – then they become afraid. Then they don’t want to come to the world because whatsoever they have been experiencing in the Himalayas disappears when they come to the marketplace. If it disappears in the marketplace it is no attainment. It may have been just the silence of the Himalayas that you mistook for your silence. It was borrowed. Certainly, the Himalayas are silent, and if you live in that silence, slowly slowly that silence starts permeating you. But it is not your music, it is borrowed; go away from the Himalayas and it will disappear. This is creating a fallacy. This is enjoying a reflected glory, this is not your own glory.Live in the marketplace and create a Himalaya in the heart, become silent in the noise. Remain a householder and yet be a sannyasin. That’s why I emphasize so much that I don’t want my sannyasins to renounce. Nothing has to be renounced. The way of renunciation is the way of the escapist, and the way of renunciation will make you attached to a polar phenomenon. That will not give you freedom. Freedom is in transcendence, and transcendence comes only when you live in the polar opposites simultaneously, together.So be in the world, but don’t let the world be in you. Love, and yet don’t be lost in it. Relate, and yet be alone, utterly alone. Know perfectly well that all relationship is a game: play the game and play it as beautifully as possible and as skillfully as possible. A game is after all a game and has to be played beautifully. And follow all the rules of the game, because a game cannot exist without rules. But remember always that it is just a game. Don’t become attached to it, don’t become serious in it. Always allow the sense of humor to remain alive in you: remain sincere but nonserious. And then, slowly slowly you will see that the polarities are disappearing. Who is worldly and who is otherworldly? You are both or neither.The primal spirit is beyond the polar differences. Here is the place whence heaven and Earth derive their being. When students understand how to grasp the primal spirit they overcome the polar opposites of light and darkness and tarry no longer in the three worlds.The world of heaven, the world of Earth and the world of hell – the three worlds – they all disappear for the person who knows how to transcend polarities.I told you just a few moments ago that past, present, future – these are the three worlds. Past is hell because it is dead, it is ghostly: ghosts following you. Present is the Earth: the facticity, the fact, that which is right now and here. And future is heaven: hopes, aspirations, desires, longings.These are the three worlds, and you have to move in these three worlds constantly; you are shuttled back and forth. From the past you jump to the future, from the future you jump to the past, and this goes on. And the present is so minute that you are not very aware of it: it is sandwiched between the past and the future, and they are vast. And the present is very minute, an atomic moment – so small that you don’t even see it. The moment you become aware of it, it is already past.To be present to the present one needs to be very attentive, utterly attentive. And that’s why to be present to the present becomes the door to going beyond time. You cannot go from the past, because the past is so vast – infinite; you can go on and on, you will not find the end of it. That’s why I say psychoanalysis will not help. It goes into the past and it goes on unraveling the past, digging up the past. You can go on…. Psychoanalysis continues for years: three years, seven years, then too it is not complete. One simply becomes bored with the psychoanalyst and then changes the psychoanalyst and goes to somebody else and starts from ABC again.And one thing I would like to say to you: Sooner or later psychoanalysis is bound to discover that this life is not the end of the past. You can go on moving backwards, and you can come to what Janov calls “the primal scream.” Primal scream is the ultimate of psychoanalysis: the first scream of the child when he started breathing – through it he started breathing – the first scream. But once you have reached there you will be surprised: that is not the beginning either. Then you have to move into the womb.In the East we have tried it. We have a very, very deep-going method called prati prasav – going back, going back. Mahavira used it, Buddha used it – they went through the womb. And then again you have to go through death, because before the womb you died, and then the whole life again…layer upon layer. It is through deep psychoanalysis that the East became aware of the phenomenon of many lives. Christianity, Judaism, Islam are not aware of it. They never tried so hard. They have never tried psychoanalysis.Freud is the first Jew to have tried it, and of course, Christians and Jews and all the so-called religious people were against him. The fear is that if psychoanalysis goes deeper, sooner or later the Hindu idea of rebirth will be proved right. That is the fear. If you go on digging you will find layer upon layer – where will you end? Thousands of lives you have lived as man and we have tried to penetrate all those; but then too there is no end. One day, suddenly you see that before this life you were not a man, you were an elephant or a tiger or a dog, and then you start moving into animal lives. And after millions of lives, you will suddenly one day discover that before that you were a bush or a tree, and then a rock.In India we say you have passed millions of lives. Where can it lead? The analysis of the past cannot lead anywhere. It can drive you crazy, but it leads nowhere. And so is the case with the future. Where to stop? How far is far enough? Where to make a point that “Now we will not look ahead”? In the East we have tried that too, because we have worked tremendously on the concept of time. And both are unending: memory is unending, imagination is unending. Between the two is the present moment, very tiny, so tiny that you cannot become aware of it if you are not absolutely alert – it goes so fast, it is so fleeting.But if you become aware of the present, then a door opens, the door to eternity. It is from there that mind moves into no-mind. It is from there that personality moves beyond personality into essence.You know perfectly well Jesus was crucified. There were two thieves who were crucified with him: one was on his left side, the other was on his right side. You may not have ever thought of it as a tremendously significant symbol that Jesus represents the present moment. One thief is the past, the other thief is the future, and Jesus represents the present moment – closest to God, closest to essence. One thief mocked Jesus – the past always mocks you; he condemned Jesus – the past always condemns you. The other thief asked Jesus about the future, “What will happen after death? Will I be able to see you in heaven?” One is past, the other is future, and Jesus is just sandwiched between these two thieves.And why call them thieves? Past is a thief, future is a thief, because they go on stealing your present. They are thieves. To me this is a parable. I don’t know whether any Christian will agree with me or not, but that is not my business at all; I don’t care whether anybody agrees with me or not.Jesus is present, herenow, closest to the essence, just ready to die and disappear from the body and the mind. He hesitates a little bit – everybody hesitates. When you come to the present and you will see eternity facing you – no past, no future, but eternity – a totally different dimension. Past, present, future are horizontal; eternity is vertical. Again, to me the cross is the symbol of these two lines crossing.A cross is made of two lines – one horizontal, the other vertical. This is a representation of time and eternity. Everybody hesitates when facing eternity, nowhereness, nothingness or all-ness. It is so much, one is going to disappear into it like a drop. And the ocean is so big, one will not be found again. Even a dewdrop falling into the ocean from a grass leaf hesitates.Jesus hesitated, and I love this man because he hesitated. His hesitation shows that he was human. His hesitation shows that he belonged to us – he was son of man. He cried to God, “Have you forsaken me? What are you doing to me? Have you abandoned me? Are you no more with me? I am disappearing and I don’t see your hands protecting me” – the dewdrop is falling in the ocean – “Where are you? I am falling into a deep nothingness. Death has arrived, and I had always hoped that in death you would be there waiting and you would embrace me, you would take me in your fold, you would be warm and loving. But where are you? Have you forsaken me? Have you abandoned me? I don’t see you anywhere.”In fact, there is no God to be seen. God is not a person, God is a positive name for this absolute nothingness.But Jesus has lived with the Jewish idea of God as a person, hence this turmoil in his mind, the fear in his mind. He can’t see. He was waiting to see the beloved, the Father. He used to call the Father Abba – he was waiting to find his Father. But there seems to be nobody. The world is finished and beyond is nothing but a yawning nothingness, an abyss with no bottom.It is very human – the life of Jesus is very human – and that is the beauty of it, that’s why it has impressed so many people. His very humanity is touching. But then he saw the point: he must have looked deep into the eternity, the nothingness, he must have seen the point that “God cannot have a human face, this is his face,” that “God cannot have human hands,” that “This nothingness is ready to embrace me, to take me deep into its heart.” And then he said to God, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. So, be it so, let it be so. So you are nothingness: I am ready, I trust you. I will trust even your nothingness.”Every Christian, every Mohammedan, every Hindu, every Jew – whosoever has lived with the idea of God’s personality will have to face this, will have to go through this anxiety period, this anguish. That is the beauty of the Buddhist idea and the Taoist idea that God is nothingness, another name for nothingness. One who has lived with that idea of nothingness from the very beginning will not hesitate, he will simply disappear into it.The primal spirit is beyond the polar differences. Here is the place whence heaven and Earth derive their being. When students understand how to grasp the primal spirit they overcome the polar opposites of light and darkness and tarry no longer in the three worlds. But only he who has envisioned human nature’s original face is able to do this.Unless you have been able to see your own inner nothingness you will not be able to do it. First meditate and go into your inner nothingness, then you will be able to enter into the nothingness of existence itself.When men are set free from the womb, the primal spirit dwells in the square inch…This is a Taoist map – don’t get puzzled. There are different maps of human consciousness. Different maps use different symbols. This is a Taoist map.Taoists say that after a child is born from the womb, the primal spirit starts dwelling in the third eye. Between the two eyes, between the two exists the third, exactly in the middle. What the yoga map calls agya chakra, the third-eye center, that’s what Taoists call the dwelling place of the primal spirit.…the primal spirit dwells in the square inch but the conscious spirit dwells below in the heart.“But the conscious spirit dwells…in the heart,” the ordinary physical heart.This heart is dependent on the outside world. If a man does not eat for one day even, it feels extremely uncomfortable. If it hears something terrifying it throbs; if it hears something enraging it stops; if it is faced with death it becomes sad; if it sees something beautiful it is dazzled. But the heavenly heart in the head……that is, in the third-eye center.…when would it have moved in the least? Dost thou ask: “Can the heavenly heart not move?” Then I answer: How could the true thought in the square inch move!This physical heart is constantly dependent on the outside world, it is affected by the outside world. It is part of the outside world inside you. This is not the true heart. Taoists say the true heart is in the third eye; it moves not, it is unmoving, it is always the same. The physical heart is always in chaos, and the spiritual heart in the third eye is always in order. It is order itself. That’s why Hindus have called it agya chakra – the center from which orders arise, discipline arises. If something comes from the third eye it is immediately followed; the whole body follows it, the whole being follows it. It is the center from which commandments are issued. But it is fast asleep. You live from the physical heart. You have not known your spiritual heart yet.The lower heart moves like a strong, powerful commander who despises the heavenly ruler because of his weakness…But the physical heart thinks that the spiritual heart is weak because it moves not. And because it moves not you remain unaware of it. You only become aware of things when they move. If something remains absolutely unmoving you become oblivious to it. And the lower heart thinks itself very strong and thinks the heavenly heart, the spiritual heart, as being weak, almost dead, because it moves not.…and has usurped the leadership in affairs of state.And because of this, the lower heart has become the master of you.But when the primal castle can be fortified and defended, then it is as if a strong and wise ruler sat upon the throne.But if you start becoming more and more alert and more and more conscious, you will find that you have fortified the primal castle in the third eye. Whenever you become aware you will be surprised: you start functioning from the third eye. Just become a little bit aware and you will see a little strain on the third eye. Whenever you become alert, the strain is more on the third eye. Something starts throbbing in the third eye, something starts pulsating in the third eye.Once awareness has made the third eye function, once awareness has moved in the third eye and the third eye starts functioning, becomes alive…. That’s why Hindus call it a chakra. “Chakra” means a wheel. The wheel needs energy; once the energy comes in, the wheel starts moving. By “movement” is meant that it starts functioning. Then a great revolution happens in your being: immediately the lower heart bows down to the higher heart. When the higher comes, the lower always bows down. It rules only when the higher is not present. And that is the difference between a real religion and an unreal religion.The unreal religion says to you, “Try to control yourself. Do this, don’t do that. Control your senses. Discipline your body.” The real religion says, “Just go into the third eye center and let the spiritual heart function, and all will be controlled, and all will be disciplined. Let the master arrive and everything will be settled immediately.”The eyes start the light circulating like two ministers at the right and left who support the ruler with all their might. When rule in the center is thus in order, all those rebellious heroes will present themselves with lances reversed, ready to take orders.Just let the master come in, and there is no need to make any effort to create an order in your life, there is no need to cultivate character. That’s why I say don’t be worried about character. Simply put all your energy into being more conscious. Consciousness is followed by character as you are followed by your shadow. If you try to cultivate a character, your character will be false, pseudo, and you will become a hypocrite. And this is not the way to reach to the ultimate.The way to the Elixir of Life knows as supreme magic…This is the supreme magic. Why call it magic? – because once the higher heart has started functioning, it is as if a magical miracle happens…. Your senses were never in order, your mind was always confused. You were always hesitating: to do this or to do that, to be or not to be? You were in constant tension: where to go, what to choose? Suddenly, as if somebody has done a miracle: all confusion disappears, clarity arises, life becomes transparent – you simply do that which has to be done. In fact, once the heavenly heart has started functioning, all that you do is good; you cannot do wrong – it is impossible.The way to the Elixir of Life knows as supreme magic…And three are the constituents of this supreme magic:…seed-water, spirit-fire, and thought-earth…These are Taoist symbols.…these three. What is seed-water? It is the true, one energy, eros. Spirit-fire is the light, logos. Thought-earth is intuition.You will have to understand these three. Seed-water is eros – the energy that you know now as sexual energy, the energy of passion. Right now it creates only troubles for you and nothing else. Right now it pretends to be your friend but proves to be your foe. The more you follow it, the more it takes you into miseries. That’s why it is said that love is blind.Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me, “Love is blind and marriage is an eye-opener.”Love is blind because you don’t have eyes yet, and a great energy that could have become a great blessing to you becomes only misery. Eros is your energy.And Freud is right to seek and search for everything in your eros, in your sexual energy. But he is wrong because he does not know that this ordinary state of sexual energy is not its natural state, it is a perverted state. In its natural state, sexual energy rises higher and higher, it takes you upwards not downwards. In its natural state, sexual energy becomes the golden flower within you. In the so-called ordinary, perverted state it simply takes you into new prisons, because it moves outward and downward. It dissipates you. It only brings your death closer and closer. If the same energy starts moving upwards, it brings a new life, life in abundance. It becomes “the Elixir of Life.”Just as the mud can become a lotus – the mud contains the lotus, the seed of it – so your sexual energy contains the seed of the golden flower. But the energy has to move upwards, you cannot move it upwards. There are people who try to make it move upwards; they become sexual perverts and nothing else. You cannot do it directly, but you can do it indirectly. Once your third eye, your spiritual heart, starts functioning, energy starts moving on its own accord. You have created the third eye and the energy is attracted as if towards a magnet.Right now your energy moves outwards because you have magnets outside, far greater than you have inside. You see a beautiful woman and the energy starts moving outwards; the woman functions as a magnet. When your third eye functions you have such a strong magnet that nobody can pull you outward. It is just a question of having a bigger magnet inside than the one which exists outside. Then the energy moves upwards, inwards.If you go outwards you will move into the world of duality. If you go inwards you will move into the world of non-duality; you will become non-polar.This is exactly the foundation of what I call metapsychology, or the psychology of the buddhas. This is pure religion – not the religion of the rituals, but pure religion: nothing to do with Christianity and Hinduism but something to do with your energy source.The second is spirit-fire. It is light, logos; it is conscious mind. Eros moving upwards takes you beyond conscious and unconscious mind. Logos is conscious mind. It is psychology, it is science.Thought-earth is darkness, unconsciousness, intuition. It is parapsychology, art. Thought-earth is intuition, darkness. Women live in thought-earth, in the intuitive vision. Women live as unconscious, illogical beings. Men live in spirit-fire, logos, logic, conscious mind. Artists are feminine, scientists are masculine, and the seed-water – eros, the one energy – is non-dual. It takes you beyond art and beyond science, it takes you beyond the conscious and the unconscious, it takes you beyond man and beyond woman. It takes you into the non-dual, the transcendental.But the secret of the magic is to let your heavenly heart, which exists between your two eyes, function. Later on we will go into the methodology of it – how to help it function.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-04/

The first question:Osho,The river ultimately reaches the sea. The body goes and there remains only existence, the infinite. What then is this urge and the purpose of getting there now? Isn't it pushing the river?The problem is that man is not a river, man is very much frozen. There is no flow in man’s being. Man is like ice, not like water.If man is a river, there is no need to push it, it will reach ultimately to the ocean – it has already reached. In that very flow it has become part of the ocean: to be flowing is to be oceanic. But man is not flowing, hence the urge. The ice wants to melt, hence the effort. Once the ice has melted, then there is no need to push anything, then everything happens of its own accord.Man has become a rock. And the reason why man has become a nonflowing rock is the mind. The body is perfectly flowing, so is the soul, but between the two, the link – the mind – is frozen ice. Once the mind goes deeper into meditation it starts melting. That’s what meditation is all about: an effort to melt the mind.You say, “The river ultimately reaches the sea.” That’s true, but first become a river. You say, “The body goes and there remains only existence, the infinite.” True. But between the body and the soul there is a mind clinging to you, or you clinging to it. The body goes, but you don’t become the infinite because you are not only surrounded by a body – that is your physical limitation; there is a psychological limitation inside it. Through the death of the body, mind will not die, it will take rebirth. It will move into another womb because it will carry so many desires which are to be fulfilled. It will again seek another womb, another body with which to fulfil those desires. That is the very foundation of the theory of reincarnation.Mind desires, and if desires are there, then opportunities will arise in which those desires will be fulfilled. God cooperates with you. If you have desires like a dog, you will become a dog, you will have the body of a dog. Your mind creates the blueprint, and then the body follows. The body is a projection of the mind, not vice versa. Unless mind disappears completely, you will be born again and again. Once the mind is gone, then it is perfectly true: the body disappears and you are the infinite. In fact, if the mind is not there, you are the infinite – without the disappearance of the body, without the death of the body. There is no need to wait for that.Buddha is infinite even when he is in the body because he knows he is not the body. Buddha is infinite when he leaves the body. There is no difference for him: living in the body or leaving the body is the same. You live in a house, but you don’t think that you are the house. Exactly like that, an awakened consciousness lives in the body, uses the body – just as you use a car. You sit in the car, you drive the car, you know that you are not the car – you can get out of it any moment. You need not wait for an accident to happen when the car is destroyed to feel that you are not the car. And if you don’t know it when the car is there and you are in it, how are you going to know it when the car is not there? Just through the death of the body, you will not know that you are infinite. Either you are infinite herenow, or you will never be. Infinity is your nature.The real problem is not the body. The body is not the culprit as the so-called religions have been telling you – “The body is the culprit!” The body is not the culprit at all. The body is utterly innocent and beautiful. The culprit is the mind, the mind is the devil. You will have to dissolve the mind, hence the urge, hence the purpose of all the methodologies that have been developed down the ages: Tao, Yoga, Tantra, Zen, Hassidism.Become a river and then nothing is needed. That’s what The Secret of the Golden Flower says: Achieve inaction through action, achieve effortlessness through effort. But first comes the effort, the action – it will melt you – and then the river starts flowing. In that very flow it has reached the ocean.The second question:Osho,I find it almost impossible to surrender to the male ego. Instead I become competitive, resistant or frightened. Can you say something about this?The ego is neither male nor female. The ego is simply the ego. The one who becomes resistant to the male ego is the female ego.You are aware of the male ego; you are not aware of your own ego. Who is resistant to surrender? Become more aware of your own ego and then things will be easier. Everybody is aware of the ego of the other, but nothing can be done about the ego of the other. All that can be done is only with yourself.You say, “I find it almost impossible to surrender to the male ego.” Who is this who finds it almost impossible? Find out! And then you will be surprised: ego is ego, it is neither male nor female. Don’t divide it. Egos have no sex, no gender; it is the same disease. If a woman has cancer, it is cancer; if a man has cancer, it is cancer. It is not male and female. Exactly like that is the ego: the cancer of the mind.And who is telling you to surrender to the male ego? Surrender is never to the other. When two persons fall in love, both surrender to love, nobody surrenders to the other. If there is an effort from the other that you should surrender to him, avoid him – this is not love. Love never demands surrender. Surrender happens naturally in love. There is no demand for it.If the man demands surrender from your side, he does not love you. Don’t get entangled into such an unloving affair. He hates you, otherwise why should he demand surrender? He wants to possess you, he wants to reduce you to a thing. He wants to use you, exploit you. He thinks of you only as a body, as a mechanism. He does not respect you as a person, as a presence. This is humiliating, this is not love. Avoid it.But surrender happens when there is love. And nobody demands, and nobody surrenders to the other – neither the man to the woman, nor the woman to the man. They both surrender to the god of love. They both surrender to this new opening in their being. And when both surrender to love there is beauty and there is freedom. You are not reduced to being a slave. In fact, only in love do you attain dignity, only in love do you attain to your grandeur, only in love is your splendor released. This is the indication of real love: that you become more than you were before, not less, and you are freer than you ever were.Love gives freedom. That is the very taste of love. If it is missing, if it is anti-freedom, then avoid it as one avoids the plague. Don’t get into it: it is something else masquerading as love. But when love is there you will find surrender has already happened, it is simultaneous. The moment you feel love for somebody, the surrender has happened. That is what love is: not surrender – let me repeat again – to the other, but surrender to an unknown force that has taken possession of the two of you. But that is totally different from you and totally different from the other. You both have bowed down to an unknown energy. You become two pillars separate from each other, still supporting the same roof: you support something that is beyond you, above you, transcends you, but you remain separate.Love makes you more of an individual. It does not efface your individuality. It gives you individuality, it gives you uniqueness. Love is very respectful.You say, “I find it almost impossible to surrender to the male ego. Instead I become competitive, resistant or frightened.”These are the ways of the ego. The other may have the ego, may not have the ego – I don’t know about the other, who is that other? – but one thing is certain: you have a very subtle ego. That ego becomes competitive. Ego is competitive, intrinsically competitive. The ego becomes resistant or frightened, and in the fear, in the resistance, in the struggle, in the competitiveness, love is destroyed.One thing is certain: you have to become aware of your subtle egoistic approach towards life. Drop it. At least from your side let it disappear. And then you will be surprised: maybe the other was not demanding any surrender; it was just your ego that projected it on the other. If it is so, now you can surrender to love. If it is not so and the other is still demanding…. And you will be able to know rightly only when there is no resistance in you, when there is no fear in you, no competition in you. Then you will have clarity, you will have a transparency, you will be able to see through and through, and immediately you will know whether the other is demanding a surrender to him, or the demand is coming from something which is beyond you both. If it is from beyond you both, surrender. If it is coming from the other, avoid it – that other person is mad. He needs all compassion, pity him, but don’t fall in love, because to fall in love with an ego maniac is dangerous: he will destroy you.This much you owe to yourself.The third question:Osho.You spoke of the silence one finds in the Himalayas – that it is of the Himalayas, borrowed, and will leave when one returns to the marketplace. Is this true of the silence I am finding in Your presence? Is it borrowed? Will it disappear when I leave from here?This place is a marketplace. Can you find any other place which is more like the market? I could have made the ashram somewhere in the Himalayas. I love the Himalayas! For me it is a great sacrifice not to be in the Himalayas. But for a certain purpose I have not made my ashram in the Himalayas: I want to remain part of the marketplace.And this ashram is run almost as part of the marketplace. That’s why Indians are very much annoyed – they cannot understand. They have known ashrams for centuries, but this ashram is beyond their comprehension. They cannot think that you have to pay to listen to a religious discourse. They have always listened free of charge – not only free of charge, but after the discourse the ashram distributes prasad too. Many go to listen to the discourses not because of the discourses but for the prasad. Here you have to pay. What am I doing?I want it to be absolutely a part of the marketplace because I want my sannyasins not to move into the monasteries. They have to remain in the world, their meditation should grow in the world, their meditation should not become escapist. So whatsoever peace you are finding here you will be able to retain it anywhere you go. There will be no problem, not at all. I have been managing in such a way that all that can disturb you anywhere else is present here, so you need not be afraid.Meditators have always been afraid of a few things. For example, they have been afraid of women. Can you find anywhere in India more beautiful women than here? More alive? Living here, being here, you will become completely oblivious of the fact of who is a man and who is a woman. How long can you go on persisting in making the distinction?The future belongs neither to man nor to woman. The future will be a kind of androgyny. The distinction between man and woman is going to disappear more and more.In the past the distinction was very much created, culture-oriented. A girl had to be brought up in a different way than a boy – in an utterly different way. I am not saying that there is no difference. There is a difference between man and woman but that difference is only biological. But the society creates a psychological difference: “These things are allowed for boys only, because ‘boys are boys’ and these things are not allowed for girls.” A psychological difference is created from the very beginning. The difference that you see between men and women in the world is ninety-nine percent created, nurtured; it is not natural. There is a one percent difference that is biological – that doesn’t matter. Living here you live in such a togetherness that you will become oblivious of the fact of who is a man and who is a woman.In the old days, with the old-style sannyas, people had to go away from women to the caves, to the monasteries. There are Christian monasteries where no woman has ever entered, has ever been allowed to enter. On Mount Athos there is a monastery – for twelve hundred years not a single woman has been allowed to enter. And what to say of a woman? – not even a girl of the age of six months, not even a six-month-old girl has been allowed. Just see the fear! And what kind of people must be living there if they cannot even allow a six-month-old girl? Maniacs called monks – or monkeys – but not men, must be mad. And it is in the monasteries that all kinds of monstrosities have arisen.Homosexuality was first born in the monasteries; it is a religious phenomenon. It was bound to be so. If you force men to live together in a place where no woman is ever allowed, sooner or later homosexuality will come. Masturbation is a monastic practice, it came out of monasteries. All kinds of perversions are bound to be there.There are monasteries for women too – only women are allowed, no men ever – and their whole fantasy world consists of men. They cannot get magazines like Playboy, but who needs them when you have enough time to fantasize? Their fantasy is so pornographic that magazines like Playboy are nothing. Their fantasies are more psychedelic.These people who have lived in such a monastery, if they are allowed to come back to the world, naturally, their meditation, their prayer, their religion, all will be disturbed.Monks have been very afraid of money. Naturally, if they come into the world, money has to be tackled. You cannot live in the world without money. And monks have been so afraid that they will not even touch money. See the fear, the obsession.Acharya Vinoba Bhave, the chief disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, does not touch money. But what kind of obsession is this? Touching a ten-rupee note, how can it harm you? And if it can harm you, what kind of spirituality is this? Such an impotent spirituality. Not only he cannot touch it, but if you bring money in front of him he closes his eyes – he cannot even look. His guru, Mahatma Gandhi, used to keep three monkeys – somebody had given him a present. Knowing him, the present was exactly the right present. One monkey is sitting with both his hands over his eyes, not looking: “Don’t look at many things in life because it is dangerous.” Another monkey is sitting with his hands over his ears: “Don’t listen to many things because it is dangerous.” And the third monkey is sitting with his hands over his mouth: “Don’t say many things because it is dangerous.” And the monk has to do all three things together. That’s why I say a monk is a monkey three times over.Such a person – who cannot open his eyes, cannot open his ears, cannot open his mouth – if he comes into the world, will naturally be in difficulties. He will find that all is disturbed, all is destroyed. And in India the calamity is that these monkeys have become the leaders of this country – perverted people, suffering from abnormalities, not natural, not flowing, not in Tao.My whole effort here is to create a miniature world where money is absolutely accepted; where women and men live together in joy, in celebration, without fear; where all that goes on in the world also continues, and alongside the meditation grows. It becomes stronger and stronger because all the challenges are there.You can go, anywhere you like: nobody can take your peace away. Your silence is yours! It is not because of me. You have earned it, you have gained it.And a related question:So what! What do you mean “society with its rules”? What about this place?Bullshit, Osho, bullshit. It's all bullshit!The question is from Sucheta. I have not been hard on her yet, hence the question. But from now onwards she will know: I have been really nice to her, and I am rarely nice to people.This place has more rules than any other place. Those rules are a device – to create a certain situation in you, a challenge.The question has arisen in her mind because she wants to work with children, and I have said no. I have told her to work somewhere else.If I go with your likes and dislikes, your choices, I am “Osho.” In this question she has not written “Osho”; otherwise she always writes “Beloved Osho,” “Beloved Master.” The question directly starts: “So what!”I cannot leave you to yourself, otherwise I will not be of any help. Just because Sucheta wants to work with children I cannot allow her, because I have to take care of children too – I cannot spoil their life. Sucheta, you are spoiled by your parents, by your family, by your society; I cannot send you to the children. You are not yet capable of that. Just because you choose…. Anybody can choose anything, but here things have to go according to me, not according to you. Remember it! If you cannot be patient enough, then this is not the place for you, then you can leave. Guards are at every gate to prevent people from coming in, but I have not put any guards there to prevent people from going out. You can leave immediately.If you have to be here, you have to be according to me, only then can I be of any help. I know what is needed. It is not always that which you like which is your need. Your like comes out of your mind, and your mind has to be destroyed. I cannot listen to your likes and dislikes. All these rules are made by me. The moment you become a sannyasin, you give this much authority to me: that I will decide a few things for you. And if you want to become an ashramite, then you have to give one hundred percent authority to me – that is the meaning of becoming an inmate of the ashram. She wanted to be in the ashram and I have put her outside because she is not yet capable of it. Just listen to the question and you will see. You will have to earn it; and this is not the way to earn it, remember.It is very easy to lose this opportunity that is available to you. Your ego can become a problem, can create problems for you. Either you have to listen to your ego or you have to listen to me. You will have to change your whole pattern of thinking, you will have to change your very language of life; otherwise you will misunderstand.These rules are for a certain purpose.Madhuri was living in Lao Tzu House and suddenly I sent her to live in Jesus House. She cried, but accepted it. And she has come closer to me – closer than she ever was – in that very acceptance. More love will be showering on her from my side. You can live physically very close to me, that is one thing. She could have resisted, she could have written me an angry letter, but she has not done anything. She has not even uttered a single angry word. She cried, she was sad – and that is natural – but no anger. To live with me in the same house and then to be sent to live in another house is hard, I know. But she survived the shock and something immensely valuable has happened through it. Only later on will she understand that this was a blessing. It takes time for you to understand things. But I live in a totally different reality, and I decide from there. And I know you live in a different reality – misinterpretations are bound to be there from your side – but try to understand me. Even if you cannot understand sometimes, silently, patiently do what I say.It happened….The teacher asked the student, “Do you like Kipling?”The student said, “I don’t know. I have never kipled.”Marriage counselor to wife, “Do you usually wake up grumpy in the morning?”Wife, “No, he gets up before I do.”“How did you get on with your date last night?” one hippie was asked by an elderly neighbor.“Just great,” was the reply. “I finally persuaded her to say yes.”“Oh, congratulations! When is the wedding to be?”“Wedding? What wedding?”To a hippie it is a different world. Yes does not mean marriage.“Vicar, you told me I must have Faith, Hope and Charity.”“That’s right.”“Well, when I tried, they called the police.”And the last:“Are you sure that it was a marriage license you gave me last month?”“Yes, sir. What’s the matter?”“I thought there might be some mistake, seeing that I have lived a dog’s life ever since.”Sucheta, if you want to be here, you will have to learn my language, my way of seeing things, and you have to come with me; otherwise this is not the place for you. Then don’t waste your time here. Then it is better to leave this place soon – the sooner the better – because if you don’t go with me, one day or other you will have to leave. And then you will feel very miserable because all those days that you stayed here will look like a wastage. If you want to be with me, then be with me totally, as totally as possible, then only something can happen. This happening is difficult because from your side there are so many hindrances.The fifth question:Osho,I found the comments on rape in yesterday's discourse very offensive, namely, that women who are raped “wanted it.” This has been proven to be absolutely incorrect.Then why have you not signed the question? First: I had not said that all the women who are raped were desiring it, I said “in the majority of cases.” Remember it; it makes a lot of difference. And it is only an example. There are thousands of car accidents and I say again, the majority of people who go through a car accident wanted it, were accident-prone, were hoping somehow that something would happen, were desiring it deep down, were suicidal.The mind that you know is not all; below it there is a greater unconscious mind. In that unconscious mind you harbor many things of which you are not aware. There may be a person who is suicidal but not courageous enough to commit suicide. He will seek ways and means to commit suicide in a vicarious way: a car accident – he will not be responsible at all, nobody will say that he committed suicide. Nobody will say later on that he was a coward, that he could not face life. It is easier to have a car accident than to commit suicide.And as far as rape is concerned, just look into your unconscious, look into your dreams. It is very rare to find a woman who has not dreamed of being raped. There is a certain attraction in it. What is the attraction? The attraction is that you are so irresistible that a person is ready to commit rape, you are so irresistible that a person is ready to go to jail for ten years, or if it is a Mohammedan country, is ready to die. If a rape is committed in a Mohammedan country and the person is caught, death is the penalty. And you will be surprised: more rapes are committed in Mohammedan countries than anywhere else.Maybe the person who commits the rape wants to commit suicide. And this is a beautiful way to commit suicide. Can you find a better way of committing suicide? – a brave way too. And dying for love…so poetic, so romantic.There is some violence involved in sex. Even in ordinary sex when no rape is committed, something of rape is involved. The woman always says no. Why? – because if she says yes too easily, then there is no longer that feeling, “I am needed, utterly needed.” She goes on saying no and goes on meaning yes. She goes on saying no, she is provoking the man: she wants the man to be after her, she wants the man to force her. The very effort to force her, the very effort to drag her into lovemaking makes her feel good: she is “needed.” This is a poor state of mind, but it is how people are.So first I said “in the majority of cases.” There are accidents also. You may not be thinking of rape at all, and a madman comes and rapes you. I am not excluding those cases, that’s why I didn’t say “a hundred percent.” In the majority of cases, whatsoever happens to you – rape, murder, disease – is somehow, somewhere, desired by you. But I am not saying in all cases.Now psychologists are aware that when people are prone to certain diseases…. For example, nearabout the age of forty-two people have heart attacks. Why near the age of forty-two? – because that is the time when people start succeeding or have succeeded. They have the money they always wanted and now they don’t know what to do: success is there and they are shocked by success. They have always lived in the hope that they will have this much money, this woman, this house, this car – and they have it. Now what? Suddenly the heart stops beating. Now what? All direction seems to be lost. If they don’t have a heart attack they will be very miserable. The heart attack relieves them. Now they can say to the world, “I have to rest. The doctors have suggested rest. I cannot do any hard work.”They cannot rest without an excuse; a heart attack becomes the excuse. If they simply rest, people will say, “What are you doing? At the prime of your life, on the last rung of your success, what are you doing? You can have more money. This is the time, because when you have money more money comes. When you have success, more success comes. What are you doing relaxing, retiring?” And they will not have any excuse. A heart attack is a beautiful excuse. Nobody will say they have escaped from the world. Nobody will throw the responsibility on them. What can they do? The whole responsibility goes to the heart attack. People are not conscious of all that goes on deep inside them.You say, “I found the comments on rape in yesterday’s discourse very offensive….” But why are they so offensive – and only to one person? Nobody else has written, nobody else has felt any offense. If you are a lady – and I hope that you are a lady, because if you are a gentleman then things will be more complicated, so I trust that you are a lady – why are you feeling so offended? You must be carrying the desire inside you, hence the offense; otherwise there is no offense.I am a madman, I go on saying things. Why should you be offended? I am not a scientist, I am not a psychologist, I am nobody – I just like gossiping – why should you be offended? I am not a consistent man, I go on contradicting myself. You can just wait for a few days and I will contradict myself. I will say, “Never has it happened! Whenever a woman is raped she is not responsible. It is the male ego, male violence.” Just wait! You have to be patient with me – I contradict myself!But why are you offended? I must have touched a sore spot in you, something like a wound must be there. Deep down somewhere in the unconscious you want to be raped? That’s why there is so much anger, so much offense. And you are afraid too – naturally – that’s why you have not signed the question.Always remember to sign it. And if you are very much afraid, you can write somebody else’s name – but sign it! Then you can enjoy, and the other will be beaten. No need to be worried about it.And you say, “This has been proven to be absolutely incorrect.” Do you know that nothing is ever proven absolutely? Nothing! Man has not proved anything absolutely. There is no possibility of proving anything absolutely: new discoveries, new facts, new data, and changes have to be made. Even scientific discoveries are not absolute, so how can psychological discoveries be absolute? Psychology is not yet a science, it is still fictitious. At most you can call it, if you like the word scientific, you can call it science fiction. But it has nothing to do with science yet. It is struggling to be scientific, but I don’t think that it ever will be, because man’s mind is like mercury – you cannot make a science out of it.And man’s mind is not a single phenomenon. There are as many minds as there are people. All that psychology can hope for is to think about the average mind. But you never come across “the average,” you always come across the unique. No scientific explanation is possible about the unique mind.Psychology is not yet a science, and even science cannot claim absoluteness. What Newton did is no longer right. It looked so absolute in those days – it is no longer right. Do you think what Einstein has done will remain right for long? It cannot, it is not in the very nature of things. Life is such a mystery that the more you know about it, the more you will have to create new hypotheses – to include the new facts.Have you known man and woman totally? Have you fathomed the feminine mind totally, so that you know absolutely that this is incorrect? Nothing is absolutely correct, nothing is absolutely incorrect. All are guesses – all are guesses. One may be a little more close to the truth, another may not be so close. But what I said has not to be taken as a general statement. It has to be taken as an object for meditation. You just meditate over it.I am not concerned about general truths. I am talking to disciples! You have to look into yourself. If you are a woman disciple just look into yourself. Is there not somewhere a lurking desire to be raped? And if it is there, it is better to know about it, it is better to bring it to the conscious completely, because once something becomes conscious, it disappears. It can exist only in the unconscious. In the unconscious it is dangerous. If you bring it to the conscious, it evaporates. It is like pulling a tree out of the earth: bringing its roots to the light, then the tree dies. And that’s exactly what happens: anything that goes on lurking in the unconscious, in the dark chamber of your soul – which is nine times bigger than your conscious mind – bring it into the conscious mind, bring it into sunlight, and if it comes there, it withers away.What I am saying here is meant for you to meditate on. If you felt offended, then this is very good for you to meditate over: go into it, search into yourself, and don’t conclude from the very beginning. Don’t say, “This is wrong and has been proved absolutely wrong.” First meditate, and don’t try to prove it wrong or right. Just go with an open mind into your own being and search for it. And you will be surprised that the desire is lurking there. It has a kind of charm in it.One woman went to the priest to confess. She confessed that she had been raped. And she confessed that she had come to the priest because she enjoyed it. That’s why she was feeling guilty: if she had not enjoyed it, there would be no question of coming to confess.Then she came next time and again confessed. And then she came again.And when she came for the fourth time, the priest said, “But this is too much! Are you being raped every week?”She said, “No, this is the same rape.”“But then why do you go on coming?”She said, “I enjoy telling it. It feels so good.”Just go into yourself and you will find all kinds of desires lurking in you. You will find something of the sadist: that you want to torture others. You will find something of the masochist: that you want to torture yourself. You will find all kinds of things in you because man is vast and the unconscious is not an ordered place – it is chaos, it is a madhouse. But we go on repressing all that. We are so afraid to see. That’s why you felt so offended. I must have touched the right spot in you, hence the offense. It is not a question of whether it is proved right or wrong. And I am not interested in that at all.My interest is in making you more and more meditative, more and more aware of your intrinsic, innermost desires, longings, perversions, obsessions. If they can be brought to light, they will disappear. And if the unconscious can be emptied completely, you will become a buddha.So don’t simply go on arguing with me, because that is a waste of time and energy. Go in. If you cannot find any desire like that in you, so far so good. If you find it, that too is very good – you can bring it into the light and it will disappear.The sixth question:Osho,I am getting old and losing all interest in women. What should I do?Sir, go on losing your interest! That’s perfectly good, nothing is wrong in it. And be perfectly assured that no woman is going to miss you. On the contrary, they will all be very happy.But in the West particularly, since Freud opened the Pandora’s box the idea has arisen that you have to remain sexual to the very end, because sex is synonymous with life. So even if you are seventy or eighty you have to remain interested in sex. If you lose interest in sex that means you are losing interest in life, that means you are no more needed, that means you are useless now. You can drop dead or go to parliament, but you are useless.This idea that sex and life are synonymous is utterly baseless. Sex and life are synonymous at a certain stage. In childhood they are not synonymous, in youth they are synonymous, in old age they are again not synonymous. There are phases. The child is not interested, the young man is interested – and his only interest is in sex.But in the West there is an effort going on to remain young, you should not get old. People go on befooling themselves in many ways that they are still young. New panaceas have been found again and again – new kinds of elixirs that will keep you young forever – and people are so foolish that they are always ready to accept any nonsense to remain young. Old age is thought to be a kind of disease. To be old means you are ill – in the West. That is not right.Old age has its own beauties, its own treasures, just as youth has its own beauties and treasures. And certainly the treasures that an old man comes upon are far more valuable than the treasures of youth, because the old man has lived his youth. He has known all that, he has seen that, he has gone through it. He has lived the illusion and he has known the disillusionment of it all. Now he is wiser than he ever was; he is becoming innocent again. When sex disappears you attain to a kind of innocence: you become a child again – and a mature child.In the East we have a totally different vision of life. In the East we have respected the old men, not the young, because the old are at the peak – life’s journey reaching its goal. In the West the old are just something to be discarded, the old are just to be thrown on some junkyard. You make houses for the old where you go on piling them up, or in the hospitals. Nobody wants anything to do with old people – as if they are meaningless, worthless. And they have lived their whole life, and they have learned many secrets of life – they can be great teachers, only they can be teachers.In the East this has been the traditional way, that the old person should become the teacher of the young, because he has lived, grown, understood. He can give you a better direction, with more maturity, with more clarity. Old age is the age to prepare for death. And that is the greatest preparation because you will be going on the longest journey – into the unknown. If you remain interested in sex, it will keep you diverted from death. That’s what is happening in the West.In the West people have not accepted death yet as part of life. Death is a taboo, just as sex was a taboo just a hundred years ago. Nobody talked about sex a hundred years ago. It was impossible to talk about it or to write about it. It was such a taboo that in the Victorian age ladies used to cover the legs of their chairs too – because they are legs, and legs should not be shown.Freud introduced a great revolution. The world is waiting for another Freud to destroy the greater taboo of death. He destroyed the taboo of sex, and the world is far better because of it. Freud is one of the greatest benefactors. Another Freud is needed to destroy another taboo – which is greater.Death has to be accepted. With the acceptance of death you start accepting old age. And in acceptance there is relaxation. And once you are no more interested in sex, your whole attention can be focused on death. Remember, sex and death are polar opposites; if you remain interested in sex, when will you prepare for death? Your attention will remain focused on sex and you will die without any preparation.Meditation is a preparation for death. Now prepare for death – meditate. You are no more interested in women – good. Now become interested in your own self. The woman is outside you; that is the interest in the other. Or if you are a woman, then the man is outside you, and that is her interest in the other. Now become interested in yourself: now go on the discovery of the self, now go on an inward journey.You ask, “I am getting old and losing all interest in women. What should I do?” Lose interest. Allow it to happen. Don’t try to create it unnecessarily. If it is going on its own, it is beautiful.I have heard….Max, aged seventy-six, upon returning to his apartment late one night, was startled to find a girl of about eighteen ransacking the place.“Young woman, you are a thief!” he said. “I’m going to call the police.”“Mister,” she pleaded, “if I’m arrested again, I’ll be sent away for years. Please don’t call the police.”“I’m sorry, but I have to do it.” Max replied.“Look,” she cried, “I’ll do anything. I’ll give you my body.”“Okay,” said the senior citizen, “take off your clothes and get in bed.”The girl did and Max quickly followed. He tried and tried and tried for about twenty minutes. Exhausted and in defeat, he finally gave up.“It’s no use,” sighed Max. “I just can’t make it. I’ll have to call the police.”And you ask me what to do: “What should I do?” Do you want to call the police? Enough is enough. Now let that nonsense go, let that obsession go. Now turn your energy towards death: now look into death face to face, now encounter death. And to encounter death is the greatest experience in life. And if you can encounter death, you will come to know that you are deathless. To face death is the only way to know that you are deathless, that only the body dies and you never die. And once you have known it, you are ready, ready for the journey, and when death comes you will go laughing and dancing and singing into it.And a man who can go laughing, dancing and singing into death – prayerfully, meditatively – comes to know the greatest orgasm that is in the world. Sexual orgasm is nothing, because in sexual orgasm only a small, minute part of your life energy leaves your body and you feel a great relaxation. In death your whole life energy leaves the body. No sexual orgasm can be compared with that cosmic orgasm, that total orgasm that death brings to you.Don’t miss death. Death is going to give you the greatest gift in life, the parting gift. But only a few people come to it because nobody is ready for it. Death takes you unawares. And you are so frightened, and you are so concerned with sex that you cling to life.Do you know that it almost always happens…? In the East it has been one of the secrets to know about a man. When a man dies, if he is clinging too much to life and is still interested in sex, he will die with an erection. That shows that the poor fellow died without any readiness – even in death he was full of sex fantasies. It happens almost always – unless you have become a great meditator it is going to happen to you too – that while dying you will fantasize about sex: you will be making love, at least in your imagination. This is no way to die. This is very insulting to death, and insulting to God, and very insulting to yourself.Let sex disappear – it is time. Relax into nonsexuality. Nonsexuality will make you centered. Stop chasing women and start chasing yourself; you cannot do both. And get ready: death may knock you down any moment. One never knows when it is coming: prepare, allow yourself to enjoy meditation as much as possible. Transform your sexual energy into meditative energy. It is the same energy, just the direction changes: it no longer flows downward and outward, it starts flowing inward and upward. And this same energy opens the bud of the golden flower in you. This is the whole secret.Now you have come naturally to the right point, and you are asking me, “What should I do?” You are asking for some recipes to again create the disappearing sexuality. You are asking for some props, you are asking for some help, so that you can go on playing the same foolish game – even in your old age.It is good when you are young because then you are foolish. It is very rare to become alert and aware and meditative when you are young. If you can become, you have a rare genius. But if you cannot become meditative even in old age, then you are just stupid, utterly stupid. It is good to fool around when you are young. That foolishness is part of growth, it helps you. The woman or the man outside becomes the mirror; they reflect you, they help you to see who you are. Love is very revealing. But finally one has to come to see oneself within, not in a mirror. Even the mirror has to be dropped. One has to be alone. And the purity of aloneness is infinite. And the bliss of aloneness is eternal.Now the moment has come. Just let this interest in women go and suddenly you will find another interest arising in you – it is almost simultaneous – the interest in meditation. And then you can have the last gift that life can give to you: a meditative death – a death in satori, in samadhi, in ecstasy – and you will know the total orgasmic experience. That experience is enough; then you will never be coming back into life, into the body, into this prison.In the East this has been our goal – how not to be born again – because this whole process of being born and dying again and again is a boring process. It is utterly futile. In the final analysis it is just a dream, and not even a nice dream but a nightmare.My suggestion to you is: you have lived your life, you have seen the pleasures of the body, you have looked into relationship and you have learned whatsoever was to be learned from it, now it is time to turn inwards.The last question:Osho,What is philosophy?I don’t know, and I don’t think that anybody else knows either. Philosophy is a useless passion. I am using Jean-Paul Sartre’s words. He says, “Man is a useless passion,” I say man is not a useless passion – but philosophy is.You ask me, “What is philosophy?” Nobody has ever defined it, it has remained vague. Not that definitions have not been given to it – millions of definitions have been given – but the definition is still missing. Each philosopher gives a definition and others contradict it. It is a game: enjoying the gymnastics of logic. It is logic-chopping. It is like chess – a very intellectual game, very absorbing, but there is no conclusion in it. It is nonconclusive. The game continues from generation to generation. Slowly slowly out of this game two things have arisen: one is science, the other is religion.Science is objective, religion is subjective. Science is experimental, religion is experiential. Philosophy is neither; it is just hanging in a limbo between the two. And slowly, slowly it is disappearing because that which is objective is being taken by science every day, and that which is subjective has already been taken by religion. Nothing is left for philosophy. So now modern philosophy only goes on thinking about language – language analysis.Philosophers are asking the most absurd questions because they have lost all the meaningful questions; either those questions have been covered by science or by religion. Philosophy is becoming more and more empty. They cannot find even their own questions now, so either they take questions from science and they think about them, or they take questions from religion and they think about them. Their questions are borrowed. Philosophy is a dying phenomenon. It will not be a surprise that one day you suddenly come to know that philosophy has died. It is on its deathbed. You can go to any university and you can see: philosophy on its deathbed.But why have you asked the question? That is more relevant, more important to think about.I am not teaching philosophy here. What I am saying has nothing to do with philosophy. It is absolutely experimental and experiential. My effort is to create a scientific religion – the psychology of the buddhas. So I am giving you experiments and I am giving you possibilities to experience something that you have not experienced yet. This is a lab, a workshop. We are bent upon doing something – I mean business here! Philosophy is not the concern at all.I am very anti-philosophic and I avoid philosophy because it is playing with shadows, thoughts, speculation. And you can go on playing infinitely, ad infinitum, ad nauseam; there is no end to it. One word creates another word, one theory creates another theory, and you can go on and on and on. In five thousand years much philosophy has existed in the world, and to no purpose at all.But there are people who have the philosophic attitude. And if you are one of them, please drop it; otherwise you and your energy will be lost in a desert.I will tell you about the four stages of philosophy in four stories. The first stage of philosophy, the first story….One of my favorite stories is that of a boy and girl in New England where sleighriding is popular during the cold winters. While riding one Sunday afternoon, bundled up in their blankets, the girl snuggled up to the boy and said, “Johnny, I’m cold.”Johnny looked over to her and said, “I’m cold, too, Jane. Why not tuck in the blankets?”So Jane pulled the blankets closer, but pretty soon she moved even closer to Johnny and said, “My hands are still cold.”He didn’t pay much attention to her and soon she nudged him with her elbow and said, “Johnny, did you hear me? My hands are cold…and besides, nobody loves me.”This time he looked over to her and said, “Jane, remember that God loves you, and you can always sit on your hands to keep them warm.”This is the first stage of being philosophic. The second stage, the second story:A study group of philosophers had been meeting for years to study the Talmud. One member of the group had a pernicious habit of sipping a little brandy during the meeting. One night he drank just a little more than usual and became quite tipsy. His companions decided to teach him a lesson. While he was in his drunken stupor, they carried him off to the cemetery and laid him prone among the tombstones.After a while the philosopher woke up. He looked about, frightened and aghast. Then he started to reason, “Am I alive? Or am I dead? If I’m alive, what could I be doing here in the graveyard on top of the graves? And if I’m dead, then why do I feel that I must go to the bathroom immediately?”This is the second stage of philosophy. And the third stage, the third story:Professor Steinberg had been having his lunch in the same Lower East Side restaurant for twenty years. Every day he left his office at noon, went to the restaurant and ordered a bowl of chicken soup – never a change.But one day the professor called the waiter back after receiving his soup.“Yes, professor?” inquired the waiter.“Waiter, please taste the soup.”“What do you mean, taste the soup? For twenty years you’ve been eating the same chicken soup here, every day, yes? Has it ever been any different?”The professor ignored the waiter’s comments. “Please, taste this soup,” he repeated.“Professor, what’s the matter with you? I know what the chicken soup tastes like.”“Taste the soup,” the professor demanded.“All right, all right, I’ll taste. Where’s the spoon?”“Aha!” cried the professor.This is the third stage. And the fourth stage, the fourth story:A woman went to a philosophic psychologist for treatment of her delusion that she was covered with feathers. After a few sessions the philosopher said to her, “I feel that we have come to the root of this problem through our discussions and analysis, and it is now behind us. What do you think, Mrs. Smith?”“Oh,” said Mrs. Smith, “I think we have had some wonderful sessions and I do feel that the problem has been taken care of. But,” she added, “the only thing that bothers me now is what I’m going to do with these feathers.”She raised her hand to her shoulders and began to brush, and the psychologist, the philosopher, suddenly jumped back.“Now hold on just a minute, Mrs. Smith. Don’t brush those feathers on to me.”This is the fourth stage: slowly slowly, philosophy becomes a kind of madness, it leads you into neurosis because philosophy is a mind phenomenon. Science has taken the body, religion has taken the soul, only the mind is left for philosophy. And mind is potential madness. If you go on too much into the mind, you will be moving slowly slowly towards madness. It is very rare to find a philosopher who is sane. And vice versa is also true: it is very rare to find a madman who is not a philosopher.I am not teaching philosophy here because I am teaching no-mind. And if you become a no-mind all philosophy disappears: Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, Buddhist – all philosophies disappear; Hegelian, Kantian, Russellian – all philosophies disappear. If the mind disappears, where can the philosophy exist? Where can it grow? Mind is the breeding ground of philosophy.Let the mind disappear. And the beauty is, when there is no mind and nobody to philosophize and nothing to philosophize about, one comes to know. Philosophy is the blind man’s effort. It is said: Philosophy is a blind man in a dark room on a dark night, searching for a black cat which is not there….Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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In the body is the anima. The anima is feminine, yin; it is the substance of consciousness.But, besides this, there is the animus in which the spirit shelters. The animus lives in the eyes: it sees, it dreams. But whoever is in a dark and withdrawn mood, and chained to his bodily form, is fettered by the anima. Therefore the concentration of the animus is brought about by the circulation of the light, and in this way the spirit is maintained, the anima subjugated. The method used by the ancients for escaping from the world consisted in melting out completely the slag of darkness in order to return to the purely creative. This is nothing more than a reduction of the anima and a completion of the animus. And the circulation of the light is the magical means of reducing the dark, and gaining mastery over the anima. If this method is followed, plenty of seed-water will be present of itself; the spirit-fire will be ignited, and the thought-earth will solidify and crystallize. And thus the holy fruit matures.The one nature, when it descends into the house of the Creative, divides into animus and anima. The animus is the heavenly heart. It is of the nature of light; it is the power of lightness and purity. It is that which we have received from the great emptiness, that which is identical in form with the primordial beginning. The anima partakes of the nature of the dark. It is the energy of the heavy and the turbid; it is bound to the bodily fleshly heart. The animus loves life. The anima seeks death. All sensuous desires and impulses of anger are effects of the anima. But the pupil understands how to distill the dark anima completely so that it transforms itself into pure light.Once the Empress Wu asked the Master Fa Tsang if he could possibly give her a practical and simple demonstration of the principle of cosmic interrelatedness, of the relationship of the one and many, of God and his creatures, and of the creatures one to another.Fa Tsang went to work and appointed one of the palace rooms so that eight large mirrors stood at the eight points of the compass. Then he placed two more mirrors, one on the ceiling and one on the floor. A candle was suspended from the ceiling in the center of the room.When the empress entered, Fa Tsang lit the candle. The empress cried, “How marvelous. How beautiful.”Fa Tsang pointed at the reflection of the flame in each one of the ten mirrors and said, “See, your majesty, this demonstrates the relationship of the one and the many, of God to each one of his creatures.”The Empress said, “Yes, indeed, Master. And what is the relationship of each creature to the others?”Fa Tsang answered, “Just watch, your majesty, how each mirror not only reflects the one flame in the center, each mirror also reflects the reflections of the flame in all the other mirrors, until an infinite number of flames fills them all. All these reflections are mutually identical; in a sense they are interchangeable, in another sense each one exists individually. This shows the true relationship of each being to its neighbor, to all that is. Of course, I must point out, your majesty,” Fa Tsang went on, “that this is only a rough approximate and static parable of the real state of affairs in the universe, for the universe is limitless and in it all is in perpetual multidimensional motion.” Then the master covered one of the infinite number of reflections of the flame and showed how each apparently insignificant interference affects the whole organism of our world. Kegon expresses this relationship by the formula: One in all, all in one, one in one, all in all. Then Fa Tsang, in order to conclude his command performance, held up a small crystal ball and said, “Now watch, your majesty, how all these large mirrors and all the myriad forms they reflect are mirrored in this little sphere. See, how in the ultimate reality, the infinitely small contains the infinitely large and the infinitely large the infinitely small, without obstruction. Oh, if only I could demonstrate to you the unimpeded mutual interpenetration of time and eternity, of past, present and future. But alas, this is a dynamic process that must be grasped on a different level….”Man is not an island; nothing is. All is interrelated, all is interdependent. Independence – the very word – is false; so is dependence. The reality is interdependence.Everything is so deeply connected with everything else that nothing can exist apart. If you can understand a small roseflower in its totality, root and all, you will have understood the whole cosmos, because the whole cosmos is involved in that small roseflower. In the smallest leaf of grass all is contained. But remember, as Fa Tsang said to the empress: All illustrations, all descriptions are static, and existence is a dynamic flux. It is a river. Each thing goes on moving into each other thing. It is impossible to draw lines where one thing ends and another begins; there are no demarcating lines – there cannot be. So all distinctions are only for practical purposes, they have no existential value.This is the first thing to be understood. This is very fundamental to the Taoist alchemy. Once this is understood, then the whole alchemy of Taoism becomes comprehensible. Then the lower can be transformed into the higher, because the lower contains the higher already. The baser metal can be transformed into gold because nothing is separate – the baser contains the gold already: as above, so below; as below, so above.The very idea that all is interconnected makes transformation possible. If things are not interconnected then there is no possibility of any transformation. If the world consists of the philosopher Liebnitz’s monads – windowless, separate, atomic individuals, not connecting with each other at all because they are windowless – then there is no possibility of any transformation.Transformation is conceivable only because you are me, I am you; we interpenetrate. Can you think of yourself as separate even for a single moment? You cannot even imagine yourself as separate. The flower cannot be separated from the tree; the moment it is separated it dies. The tree cannot be separated from the earth, the earth cannot be separated from the sun, the sun cannot be separated from other stars, and so on and so forth. You separate the leaf and the leaf dies. You separate the flower, the flower dies. You separate the tree from the earth, the tree dies. You separate the earth from the sun and the earth dies.Death means separation; life means no separation. Hence the ego is bound to die because that is your idea of separation. To think of oneself in terms of ego is the only cause of death – because the ego is already dead. You can go on flogging the dead horse, but for how long? It is going to die. It is already dead, that’s why it is going to die. That which is alive in you cannot die – life is eternal. But life is not yours, you cannot possess it. Life belongs to all. Life has a vastness, infinity. Death is tiny, death is individual; life is universal. So when you live you are part of the universe, and when you die you die only because you think you are separate. The more you feel part of the whole, the more life you will have.Jesus says, “Come to me and I will give you life abundant.” What is the secret of life abundant? The secret is: die as the ego, disappear as a separate entity, and the whole universe and all that it contains is yours. Stop possessing and all is yours. Possess, and you are tiny and limited, and you are going to die. The secret of becoming more alive consists of a single phenomenon of dropping the idea of separation. And whenever it happens, you feel life becoming aflame in you. Even if it happens in small measures….If you fall in love with somebody, life is aflame in you. And it is not that much has happened – just two persons are feeling one. Learn the lesson from love: just two persons feeling one, and what joy and what ecstasy! Think, if you fall in love with the whole then how much ecstasy and how much joy is going to happen. That is life abundant, life infinite.Separate yourself…. There are a few people who live so egoistically that they cannot love; they are the most miserable people in the world. My definition of hell is: to live in separation is hell. To live in non-separation is heaven, to disappear completely, utterly into the whole is moksha, nirvana – it is ultimate freedom.The second thing to be understood: that life is polar. That is also very fundamental to the Taoist approach. But the polarity is not that of opposition. The polarity means that the opposites are complementary to each other, they support each other. Life cannot exist without death, hence death is not the enemy. How can death be the enemy of life if life cannot exist without it? It has to be the friend: it prepares the ground for life, it helps life, it provokes life, it challenges life.Just think: if your body were going to live for eternity, you would not live at all, because you would have an infinity to postpone everything. “Why love today if there is tomorrow? And if tomorrow is infinite, then why bother? Why dance today? We will see tomorrow.” Just imagine: if your bodily life were going to be eternal, your postponement would become eternal.You cannot postpone because you are not certain whether there is going to be any tomorrow or not. Nobody knows whether the next breath will come in or not, hence only foolish people postpone. The wise man lives, and the wise man lives herenow. He cannot afford postponement because he knows, “Only this moment is mine, only this very moment is mine. The next moment may be, may not be. How can I postpone? How can I say ‘tomorrow’?”The foolish man postpones until tomorrow, the wise man lives now. The wise man knows no other time than now and no other space than here, and the foolish man goes into things which could have been postponed for eternity – he lives them right now. If he is angry, he lives it right now. If he is loving, he says, “We will see tomorrow.” All that is stupid he goes on living, and all that is luminous he goes on postponing. The wise man also postpones, but he only postpones stupid things.Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, “When my grandfather died I was only nine years old. He called me close to his death-bed and whispered in my ear.” He had tremendous love for this small boy. He must have seen the potential of the boy. He whispered in the ears of the boy, “I have nothing to give to you except a simple piece of advice, and I don’t know whether you will be able to understand it right now or not. But remember it! Some day you may become capable enough, mature enough to understand it. Just remember it. And it is simple advice: If you want to do anything wrong, postpone it for twenty-four hours and if you want to do something right, never postpone it even for a single moment. If you want to be angry, violent, aggressive, postpone it for twenty-four hours. If you want to be loving, sharing, do not postpone it even for a single moment. Just live it right now, immediately!”And Gurdjieff used to say to his disciples, “That simple advice transformed my whole life.”How can you be angry if you can postpone it for twenty-four hours? It is impossible. To be so calm and quiet as to postpone it for twenty-four hours is enough guarantee that you are not going to be angry. And who can be angry if he can postpone it for twenty-four hours? Twenty-four hours of contemplation and the whole absurdity will be plain to you, and the whole thing will look ridiculous. And Gurdjieff was really transformed by this simple message. Sometimes very simple messages can transform you…but you have to live them.Life exists because there is death. Death gives intensity to life, death challenges life. It provokes you to live and to live to the maximum, at the optimum, because who knows? – there may be no tomorrow. Death is always provoking you, goading you to live, and to live totally. Then death is not against life but a friend.So is the case with all the polarities: the negative and the positive, love and hate, beauty and ugliness, day and night, summer and winter, and so is the case with man and woman. Man cannot be without the woman, and the woman cannot be without the man. They are part of one dialectical process. Between these two poles there is both attraction and repulsion, because attraction and repulsion cannot be separated. Hence you feel attracted towards the woman or towards the man and repulsed at the same time. A part of you wants to be with the woman, a part of you wants to be alone. You are always hesitating.If you are with the woman or with the man, you start longing for the freedom – to be on your own, to be alone. Suddenly you become very interested in being alone and free, and you don’t know where this desire to be free is coming from. The woman or the man, the other, is provoking it. The moment you have left the other, this desire, this longing, this great longing to be alone will disappear. And then you are surprised, really surprised: when you are alone you simply feel lonely. You don’t feel that joy that you had contemplated, you don’t see any freedom; you simply see loneliness surrounding you, and your whole existence becomes cold, frozen, dark. Again the desire arises to be with the other. Now you hanker for love, for togetherness.This is the problem between man and woman: they are attracted and repulsed together, simultaneously. They want to come to be together and they want to be separate and alone, on their own. Hence the constant conflict between man and woman.Marriage is a love-hate affair, an attraction-repulsion affair. If the marriage lasts long it only can last if there are mini-divorces happening every day – only then can it last long. If the man and the woman have decided not to fight, then it is a plastic marriage. They will be together, they will manage to be together, but they will never be together in reality; they will never know those moments of unity. They are only pretending. They are being polite, but not true, not authentic.Marriage is a kind of intimate enmity. It is an intimate enmity, it is a friendly fight, it is a war. Yes, between two wars there are peaceful moments too, and they are beautiful because of the two wars.Couples go on fighting – that’s how they keep the flame of love alive. Once they fight, they go away from each other. When they are far away from each other in their psychologies, they start hankering for the other, they start missing the other. Then they start seeking and groping for the other. Then they come close, and very close…because they have tasted something of loneliness. Now they want to be very close. Once they have tasted of closeness they want to be separate again.So don’t be worried about it. It is a fundamental phenomenon. You cannot escape it. The only way to escape is to have a pretend marriage, which is not a true marriage: remain polite to each other. It is a kind of contract that, “I need you and you need me,” that, “I will scratch your back and you scratch my back” – that’s all – “because I need you and you need me. You are my security, I will be your security.” It is a legal contract, but not marriage.This is the second fundamental to be understood before you can enter into the sutras.And the third and the most important thing: the third fundamental is that no man is only man and no woman is only woman. Man is both, woman is both – both are both. Man contains a woman within him, and so is the case with a woman: the woman contains a man within her. So it is not only a question of the outside man or outside woman; it is also an inner phenomenon because the outer and the inner correspond. Just as I said, “as below, so above,” I can say, “as outer, so inner.”Your inner reality is also the same as your outer reality: they correspond, they balance. Now more complexity arises because each man has a woman within him, and he has to come to terms with her. It is not just a question of having a woman outside that you love; otherwise things would have been less complicated.Whenever two persons are in love, there are really four persons. In each bed there are four persons – you can understand the complexity. Whenever two persons make love, there are four persons making love – it is always group sex! – because the man has a woman inside him and the woman has a man inside her. And it is bound to be so because each is born out of the marriage of a man and a woman. Something of the father will be in you – fifty percent, something of the mother will be in you – fifty percent. To each person the father contributes and the mother contributes. You may be biologically a man – that simply shows that physically you have the mechanism of the man – but deep in your psyche you are neither man nor woman, you are both. That’s why I say if we have to use one word for both, man and woman….Up to now we have been using “man” – that means it contains both. This is only because man has been very dominant in the past. But in the future the pendulum may swing to the other pole and that will be far more true, because the word man does not contain “woman,” but the word woman contains “man.” It will be better to use “woman” as a general word for both. And so is the case with “he” and “she.” “She” contains “he,” but “he” does not contain “she.” It will be better to use “she” for both and “woman” for both. It will be better to use “she” for God than “he.”Both contain each other. Because of this there is a possibility of homosexuality – because of this fundamental duality inside. You may be a man on the outside, and you may become attuned to your inner woman inside. There is no problem in it. Your spirit remains free. Inside it can either become identified with the inner man or it can become identified with the inner woman. If you are physically a man and you become identified with the woman inside, homosexuality will be the consequence. It can happen in many ways, it can happen for many reasons. So homosexuality is possible because of this inner duality.And now science is even capable of changing your physical sex. That too is possible, because the Taoist finding has been found to be scientifically true, too. Now just by changing the hormones and your chemistry a little bit, the man can become a woman and the woman can become a man – even physiologically. That simply shows that you are both. Even the difference in the body is only of emphasis.And sometimes it happens of its own accord too. It has been found that a woman becomes a man or a man becomes a woman. The difference must not have been much – may have been very, very slight: fifty-one percent man, forty-nine percent woman; the balance is just a little more on the side of being a man. It can change in the course of life. New hormones, new food, new climate, new atmosphere, new emotions, illnesses, or anything can change the balance, and the man can become a woman or the woman can become a man. And now science knows that it can be done very easily.There is every possibility that in future people will change their sex more often, because if you can live both the polarities in one life, then why not? If you can enjoy both visions, then why not? You will have more freedom. You have lived as a man for thirty-five years, and enough is enough. And you would like to see how it is from the other side, because there is no other way to know how it is from the other side than to be on that side.My own observation of thousands of people has been this: that if a person is a man in this life, in the next life he is born as a woman and vice versa. And the reason is simple: he becomes tired of being a man or becomes tired of being a woman, and starts hankering deep down for the other pole. And naturally, in the next life, because of this great desire to be the other, he is born as the other.These are the three fundamentals. First: everything is interdependent. Second: life is polar and the polarities are not opposites but complementaries. And third: that each is double inside, no one is single.In India we have the concept of ardhanarishwar. That corresponds to the Taoist approach. Shiva has been sculpted, painted as both – half man, half woman. Half of his body is that of a man and half of his body is that of a woman. When for the first time those statues were discovered by the West, the West laughed – it looked so absurd. What is the point of it? Now they have understood what the point of it is. It is one of the most fundamental things of life. So are you, just like Shiva: half-half.These sutras are concerned with this inner polarity, and unless you transcend this inner polarity you will not attain to the one, you will remain two. Meditation is a way to transcend this polarity within you. Meditation takes you away from all dualisms.In ordinary life you remain dual and in the space of twenty-four hours you change many times from one pole to the other. Watch. You may be a man, but sometimes you are very feminine, very vulnerable. You may be a woman, but sometimes in the daytime you are very masculine. When the woman is masculine she becomes very, very aggressive – more aggressive than any man can ever be, because her aggressiveness is very fresh, unused, just like unused land is very fertile. And so is the case with man. If a man is tender, he is very tender – more than the woman – because that is unused soil. That part of his being has not been used; it is fresh, very alive. So this strange phenomenon is observed again and again if you become a little watchful.Woman is generally loving; man is not generally loving. Woman is only sometimes quarrelsome, but when she is, then she really is. Man is only sometimes loving, but when he is, he really is. Those are the unused parts of their being. When they are used they have a freshness.This inner polarity keeps you in a kind of anguish, conflict; without it you cannot exist. The one remains invisible – that’s why God is invisible. To become visible the one has to become two. You have to write with white chalk on a blackboard, only then can those words be seen.To exist, one needs contrast. That is why in the daytime you cannot see stars, in the nighttime you can: the darkness of the night becomes the background. The stars are there as much as in the night – they don’t go anywhere, they can’t go anywhere. They are where they are. They don’t start coming in the night, they don’t start hiding somewhere in the day – they are where they are – but in the day the contrast is missing. You cannot see them, they are invisible.God is invisible. If he wants to become visible he will have to become man and woman, he will have to become two. He will have to become matter and spirit, he will have to become body and soul, he will have to become this and that. Only the two are visible. The world consists of the two, the world is dual. And the moment you can manage to make this duality disappear in oneness, you will become invisible. That is the meaning of the Taoist saying, which seems very mysterious, that the man of Tao becomes invisible. It has great significance, but it is a metaphor. It does not mean that you cannot see Lao Tzu or you cannot see me. You are seeing me already, but still you are not seeing me. That part has become invisible. The polarity has disappeared inside, the duality is no more there. Only the dual can be seen, the non-dual becomes unseen.God has to become two, only then the game, the play, is possible. Ancient Indian scriptures say, “He felt very lonely.” “He” means God. He felt very lonely, he longed for the other, that’s why he became two. He became man and woman, cow and bull, and so on and so forth. The whole existence is sexual; by “sexual” I mean dual. The whole existence is sexual. Sooner or later science is going to discover that there are planets which are male and there are planets which are female. It has to be so. Ancient astrology says so, and I perfectly agree with it: Everything is dual. That’s why the sun is represented as being male and the moon as being female. It is not poetry, it is fact. Science may not yet have discovered it, but it has to be so. If everything is dual, then there cannot be any exceptions.Your attraction for the woman or for the man keeps you in manifestation. Now you will be able to understand why the great mystics down the ages have been teaching you how to go beyond sex – because unless you go beyond sex you will not go into God, unless you go beyond sex you will never go beyond the two; you will remain tethered to the duality of the world. The “world” means God manifest, and “God” means the world disappearing into unmanifestation again. That too is a duality: manifestation, nonmanifestation.In Christian theology things are not so deep, they are very superficial. In Christian theology you have only creation. What about de-creation? How can there be creation without de-creation? In the Eastern theology they are both together: srushti means creation, pralaya means de-creation. There is a moment when God becomes manifest, and then there is a moment when God becomes unmanifest again – all disappears into nothingness, zero follows. Just like you, as I told you in the beginning: you are with your beloved, you become tired, you want to meditate, you want to go to the Himalayas; God also becomes tired of the world – naturally so – then he wants to go into retirement, then he disappears into oneness. Dissolution follows, all disappears. But again, how long can you sit in a Himalayan cave? Even God becomes tired of it. He starts seeking and searching and creating the other again.And it happens exactly so in each individual soul: you live life, then you become tired, then you want to go beyond life; you have lived your body and you are tired, now you want to go beyond the body. And then you can understand my insistence, why I say don’t be afraid of the world and don’t escape from the world, because the world is the very place where renunciation happens; it is a polarity. That’s why I don’t say escape from the woman or the man. If you escape you may remain interested.Don’t escape. Live it through and through. Indulge in the world, and the very indulgence will become renunciation. Out of that very indulgence you will start feeling that now it is time to disappear into absolute aloneness. And if you are really tired, only then can you go into that absolute aloneness.People are bound to misunderstand me. In India I am one of the most misunderstood men. They think I am teaching people indulgence – I am teaching renunciation. They think I am teaching a worldly kind of sannyas. They don’t understand. I am teaching real sannyas, because real sannyas arises only out of worldly experience. Real sannyas is not possible in a cave in the Himalayas. It will be unreal, imposed, and deep down you will remain worldly and you will continue to hanker and dream of the world.Live in the world. Really live in it so you get tired, wearied, finished with it – so much so that one day suddenly it loses all meaning for you, and the renunciation has happened. To me, the real renunciation happens in the marketplace, and only in the marketplace.Now the sutras.In the body is the anima. The anima is feminine, yin; it is the substance of consciousness.In each being there is anima. “Anima” means the feminine principle, the passive principle, the inactive principle, the woman, …yin; it is the substance of consciousness. It is not consciousness itself but the substance – without it consciousness cannot exist. It is the very matter. It is the house in which consciousness lives – without it consciousness cannot live. The woman…and remember by “woman” I don’t mean just woman, I mean the woman principle. And that you have to remember continuously, otherwise you will start feeling that these Taoist people seem to be against woman. They are not. They are not saying anything against or for; they are simply describing. And they are not saying anything for man or for woman; they are talking about the principles of womanhood and manhood.In the body is the anima. The anima is feminine…it is the substance of consciousness.That’s why, because of the feminine principle, women remain too much attached to their bodies. Man is not so attached to his body, really he is careless about the body. If there is no woman around, the man becomes dirty, dusty, the room becomes unclean as if he is not aware of all this. You can see whenever you enter a room whether the man lives alone or if there is a woman in the house. It is so simple. You can see whether the man is a bachelor or not just by seeing his room. The books have collected dust for months. He is not careful about the body, the material part of himself. But the woman is very careful, immensely careful, hence she stands so long before the mirrorOne day Mulla Nasruddin was catching flies. He caught a few and he told his wife, “I have found two female flies and two male flies.”The woman said, “This is surprising. How did you discover the sex of the flies?”He said, “Two were sitting on the mirror and two were reading the newspaper!”It is very simple. The woman is immensely tethered to the body, to the substance, to the house. If man had been left alone, at the most there would have been tents but not houses. It is woman who has created the whole of civilization, because without houses there would be no civilization, remember. Without houses there would be no cities, and civilization grows in cities. The very word civilization comes from citizens – the people who live in the cities. Woman has created the whole civilization. Man would have remained a vagabond, a wanderer, a traveler, a hunter: he would have rushed from one place to another. You can see it in many ways. There are many manifestations of it.The West is more male-oriented, hence you see so many Western tourists moving around the world. You don’t see so many Eastern tourists. The East is very feminine.The woman remains attached to property: the house, the car, the land, her ornaments, her clothes. This is because of the principle inside: she is the substance of consciousness. And remember, without a woman the spirit cannot soar high. Great poetry is born through man, but the cause is always the woman.You don’t come across great women poets. I have looked into the poetry that women write. They try hard, but nothing much happens. Madhuri writes great poetry, but it is not really poetry. Woman cannot write poetry. She can inspire poetry – that is true. No great poetry arrives in the world without a woman somewhere in the background. She inspires. Her presence, her love, her caring creates it. She need not write it, the man will write it. But she is the inspiration, the cause – a very subtle cause. No women are great painters; not that they don’t paint. Particularly in the modern age, they do everything that man has always been doing…there is great competition. They think they have to do all the things that man has been doing. They think it is because of these things that man has become important. The logic is fallacious. They will only become imitation men; they will lose their own soul and they will always remain secondhand. In the world of men, to compete with men, they will remain secondary. They will never be primary. That is not the way to compete.If you become like a man, you will never be as competent as a man – how can you be? His male principle is behind him. You will become ugly, you will become rough, you will lose all softness. That’s why the “Lib Movement” has been one of the most disastrous things that has happened to women. And the reason is not that their ideology is wrong, its implementation is wrong.Woman is equal to man, but she is not the same as man…and she should not be. She should follow her own nature, she should listen to her own soul. She has a different vibe, she has a different function to fulfill in the world, a different destiny. If she follows man and imitates, she is lost. And the more she is lost, the more she will become uprooted from her being. The more she becomes false, plastic, synthetic, the more desperate she will be. That’s why the “Lib” women are very angry, constantly in a rage. The rage is that they are feeling frustrated. They are not as they want to be, they cannot be – it is against nature. There is no need either.In the body is the anima. The anima is feminine, the yin principle; it is the substance of consciousness.Meditate over the words “substance of consciousness,” the very foundation of consciousness. It is not consciousness itself but the house where consciousness lives.But besides this, there is the animus in which the spirit shelters.Animus is the male principle, yang.The animus lives in the eyes: it sees, it dreams.The feminine principle lives in the body, it is very material. That’s why women are always materialistic. Their considerations are very practical, they are very pragmatic.Mulla Nasruddin was saying to me one day that he never quarrels with his wife.I asked him, “How do you manage it? It is almost impossible, or next to impossible.”He said, “We have managed it perfectly well for many years. On the first night we decided a single principle and we have followed it. And the principle is: she decides about the small things and I decide about the big things.”I asked, “What do you mean by small things and big things?”He said, “For example, what car to purchase, what house to live in, what school the children have to be sent to, what food has to be eaten, what clothes have to be purchased – all these small things she decides.”And I said, “What do you decide?”He said, “Whether God exists or not, whether there is a hell and heaven or not. All the great problems – that is for me. And the principle has worked out perfectly well. She never interferes in the great things, I never interfere in the small things. I am master of my own world, she is master of her own world. We never overlap.”The feminine principle is rooted in matter, rooted in the body. But man dreams.Man is a dreamer. The male principle is the principle of dreaming. No woman can understand why people are so interested in going to the moon. It looks so foolish. For what? What are you going to get there – some shopping? Better to go to M.G. Road than to go to the moon. What will you be doing there? For what? And risking your life? No woman can understand why man wants to climb Everest. What are you going to get there? It looks so ridiculous. And all women deep inside know that all men are childish: “Let them play, let them go and do their things.” She knows perfectly well that they are interested in foolish things. The football match, cricket – all nonsense, it makes no sense. You throw the ball on that side and they throw the ball to your side, and this goes on and on…. What is the point of it?The woman is practical, down-to-earth. She is earthly. The male principle is like the sky and the female principle is like the earth. Man dreams, plans, desires, longs for unknown things. Man is an adventurer, ready to risk his life for any dream that takes possession of him.The woman lives in the ears and the man lives in the eyes, hence the desire in women to gossip. Such immense joy in gossiping…. Just look at two women gossiping – they look as if they are in such ecstasy.I have heard….Once there was a competition in China – a competition to decide who was the greatest liar in the country – and many people came and told many lies. But the man who won the prize was the man who said, “I saw two women in a park sitting silently on one bench for half an hour.”He won the first prize. It is impossible!Because of the woman, the fall, the original sin happened. The snake must have tried on Adam first. But Adam is not the ears, he is the eyes; he must have seen the tricky snake, and he must have said, “Keep to yourself. Don’t bother me. I have my own dreams.” But the snake persuaded Eve. He must have gossiped with her. This was gossip that “What are you doing? Here is the tree of knowledge and God has deceived you. If you eat the fruit of this tree you will become as immortal as God. If you eat the fruit of this tree you will know all that God knows. You will be omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent.”The woman naturally became curious – such a practical thing. The snake persuaded her. The snake is the first salesman. Salesmen don’t go to men; they only knock on the door when the man has gone to the office. The woman has to be persuaded. Only the woman has ears.The ears are the passive part of your being, the receptive part. Something can enter through the ears. The eyes are the aggressive part. You cannot be aggressive with the ears, remember. But with the eyes you can be aggressive. You can look in such a way at a person as if your eyes were daggers. You can offend people with your eyes or you can love people with your eyes. You can reach people with your eyes or you can become unreachable. Somebody can look into your eyes so vacantly that he becomes unreachable. Somebody can look into you so absently that he is unreachable. Or somebody can look with such desire, such passion, such longing, such caring, that his eyes almost start caressing your body. The eyes are the aggressive parts; they can project, they can reach.In India, the person who stares at women offensively is called luchcha. And you will be surprised: the word luchcha comes from lochan. Lochan means eyes. He is raping with his eyes; his eyes can almost become his genital organs. Eyes are dangerous.Ears are very innocent. They only take in. They are feminine.The animus lives in the eyes: it sees, it dreams. But who-ever is in a dark and withdrawn mood, and chained to his bodily form, is fettered by the anima.But whenever you are in a withdrawn mood, in a mood of passivity, then you are chained to the body and you are chained by the anima. It does not matter whether you are man or woman. If a woman is using her eyes and is trying to see rather than trying to listen, she becomes animus. If a man is trying to listen, he becomes anima. A disciple becomes anima – has to become – because a disciple needs to become all ears and nothing else.The master is all eyes, and the disciple is all ears. The master has to see and has to see the deepest in you, he has to penetrate your very core. And the disciple has to listen, to be attentive, to be available – to be allowing the master to reach the very innermost core of his being.The disciple becomes feminine. That’s why women are the best disciples in the world. Man finds a little difficulty in becoming a disciple. Even if he becomes, he becomes a disciple reluctantly. He resists, he fights, he doubts, he creates many, many ways to somehow escape. If he cannot, then helplessly he relaxes – but helplessly. The woman jumps joyously. The greatest disciples have been women, and the proportion has always remained the same. If there are five disciples one will be a man, four will be women; that has been the proportion. It was so with Mahavira, it was so with Buddha, it is so with me. It has always been so.Man thinks women are starry-eyed, hypnotically available, suggestible. These are a man’s condemnations. He thinks that he himself cannot be hypnotized. Women are very, very ready to be hypnotized, he thinks. In a way he is right and in a way he is wrong too. If the woman comes to the snake she will be converted by the snake. If the woman comes to a buddha she will be converted by a buddha. Yes, she is suggestible, it all depends to whom she comes. If a man listens to the snake, he will not be converted; he will be saved from the snake. But if he comes to listen to Buddha, he will not be converted there either. Now he has missed his salvation.Therefore the concentration of the animus is brought about by the circulation of the light, and in this way the spirit is maintained, the anima subjugated.The light has to circulate in the eyes. The eyes are the most lighted part of your being. Taoists say your eyes are parallel to the sun. If you don’t have eyes you cannot see light, and only the similar can see the similar. Your eyes are condensed light, that’s why you can see light through the eyes. Your ears are condensed sound, that’s why you can hear through the ears.The anima in everybody, whether man or woman, has to be subjugated. Why? – because it is the form, it is the body, it is matter. The spirit has to be the master, the spirit has to rise above the body. The spirit has to make the body follow it, not vice versa. So whether one is a man or a woman doesn’t matter; the anima inside has to be made a follower of the animus because only the animus can search and seek. And if the woman is coming behind, the animus can go perfectly, deep into reality.If the poet knows that the woman is behind him, supporting him, his poetry can soar very high. If the man knows that the woman is always with him, he has great strength, he can go on any adventure; the moment he feels that the woman is not with him, his energy is cut off. Now he has only dreams, but they are impotent – they have no more energy, they cannot be realized.The realizing factor is the woman, the dreaming factor is the man. In the search for God or truth, the man has to lead and the woman has to follow. Inside you the animus has to become the master and the anima has to become the disciple – and remember again, irrespective of whether you are man or woman.The method used by the ancients for escaping from the world consisted in melting out completely the slag of darkness in order to return to the purely creative.Woman is stagnant, man is dynamic. That’s why you see women looking so restful and men looking so restless. Even when you were a child, just a small child, a baby, the difference was there. The boy baby is very restless, is trying to grab this, to grab that, trying to reach somewhere; he is a nuisance. And the girl baby is never a nuisance; she sits silently hugging her doll. She is also a doll, a tremendous restfulness. The principle of rest is woman and the principle of restlessness is man, hence the roundness and the beauty of woman and the constant feverish state of man.But to grow you will need the restless principle in you, because growth means change. The woman is basically orthodox, the man is basically unconventional. The woman always supports the status quo and the man is always ready to go for any stupid revolution. Anything changing and he is for it. Whether it is changing for good or bad, that is not such an important thing: change is good. The woman is always for the old, the established – whether it is good or bad is not the question: because it has always been so, so it has to be so.Growth needs the principle of stasis in you to melt. The woman in you is frozen; it has to be melted so you can become a river. But the river also needs the support of the banks – which are static, remember. If the river has no banks it will never reach the ocean. And if the river is frozen it will never reach the ocean. So the river has to melt, become water, and still has to take the support of the banks, which are static. The perfect man is one who has used his dynamism as the river and who has used his stasis as the banks. This is the perfect balance. Then you have used your animus to grow and you have used your anima to make your growth an established fact, not just a momentary phenomenon.This is nothing more than a reduction of the anima and a completion of the animus.But ordinarily, men, women – everybody has become static. Even men are so orthodox. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Jainas – even men are so orthodox. They have fallen victim to their anima, their animus has been subjugated. It has to be released.That’s my whole effort here: to release your animus from the grip of the anima. Once the animus is released from the grip of your anima, then we can use the anima too, but not before. Hence my insistence on dynamic methods of meditation. Only once in a while do I suggest that people go to Zazen, Vipassana – only when I see that their animus is flowing, now they can use their anima. Vipassana, Zazen are anima methods, feminine methods. Sufi dancing, Dynamic Meditation, Nataraj, they are animus methods.First you have to become a river, only then can your banks be used as supports.And the circulation of the light is the magical means of reducing the dark, and gaining mastery over the anima. If this method is followed, plenty of seed-water will be present of itself; the spirit-fire will be ignited, and the thought-earth will solidify and crystallize. And thus the holy fruit matures.The holy fruit is neither male nor female. The holy fruit matures only in wholeness, when your anima and animus are supporting each other like the two wings of a bird. Then eros is released, logos is released, intuition is released. Then you start flying into the sky and yet you remain rooted in the earth.A tree, to go high in the sky, will need deep roots in the earth. The earth is anima, the sky is animus. And the higher the tree goes into the sky, the deeper it has to go into the earth – in the same proportion.The one nature, when it descends into the house of the creative, divides into animus and anima.God is one, but when he becomes creative, he divides himself into two: animus and anima. Without it there is no possibility of manifestation, without it there will be no dialectic. God divides himself into thesis and antithesis, because only through thesis and antithesis the challenge, the conflict, the struggle. And through the struggle, the friction, energy is created. It is just like when you strike two stones and fire comes up. It is just like when you clap two hands and sound is created.Zen masters say, “Find the sound of one hand clapping.” What do they mean? They mean go beyond the two so you can find the One. But that One is the unmanifest God, that One is the very source from which we have come. And we can reach the source only when our two-ness has disappeared. Now this two-ness has to be used in such a way that the thesis and antithesis become synthesis. That is the whole art of life and that’s what I am teaching you.My sannyasin has to be a synthesis of man and woman, of day and night, of world and renunciation, of matter and spirit, of earth and sky.The animus is in the heavenly heart, in the third eye. It is of the nature of light; it is the power of lightness and purity. It is that which we have received from the great emptiness, the great sky, that which is identical in form with the primordial beginning. The anima partakes of the nature of the dark.Hence the mystery of the woman. No man has ever been able to unravel the mystery. Only if one has gone beyond both, only if one has become a buddha can one know the mystery of both man and woman. Otherwise no man has ever been able to plumb the depths of a woman; the woman remains mysterious, dark, a dark night – you cannot see clearly, you can grope at the most. You can never be logically clear about the woman. She never follows logic. Her path is very zig-zag: she jumps to conclusions directly without ever going through the process. The man goes step by step, through the process; he is methodical.The woman is a poet in the sense that she is intuitive. She may not create poetry – she is a poet without creating any poetry. Her life is her poetry, and it is as dark as poetry – mysterious, vague, ambiguous. Nothing is clear, nothing can ever be clear: the woman cannot be demystified, she remains always a question mark.Man is clear, like light. Hence man looks shallow, woman looks deep. Hence man seems to be completely on the surface: you can know about him. If you know about him you can predict him, but you can never predict a woman. She remains unpredictable, hence the darkness. These are metaphors.It is the energy of the heavy and the turbid…And the woman, the principle of the feminine, keeps you tethered to the earth; it is gravitation.…it is bound to the bodily fleshly heart. The animus loves life. The anima seeks death.The woman is more like death. Don’t feel offended, this is just a description. If the words anima and animus, man and woman create some trouble in you, you can replace them with X and Y. But that is what The Secret of the Golden Flower is doing. These are just metaphors. To make them anthropomorphic helps them to be understood more clearly.Man is interested in life, woman is interested in security. Man is interested in love, woman is interested in safety. Man is interested in adventure, woman is interested in comfort, convenience. Woman is death. By “death” there is no condemnation meant or supposed, just that the quality of death is security. You are secure only when you are dead, you are secure only when you are not: then nothing can happen to you anymore.But man wants to seek and search, to risk. That’s why the husband goes on looking for other women and the woman goes on watching the husband. She cannot conceive why he is still interested in other women – ”I am here!” But the male principle is always interested in something new, in the sensational, the new thrill. And sometimes it happens that his own wife may be a beauty and he may start fooling around with an ugly woman. Nobody can see the point of it – what is happening. “You have such a beautiful woman, and what are you doing?”But you don’t understand the male principle. The male principle is basically polygamous and the feminine principle is monogamous. She wants to settle. She is more interested in marriage than in love. She is interested in love only to get married, and man gets married only because he is interested in love.There is an ancient saying that the world would be immensely joyful if every man remained unmarried and every woman was married. But how can it be done? It is impossible.The animus loves life. The anima seeks death. All sensuous desires and impulses of anger are effects of the anima. But the pupil understands how to distill the dark anima completely so that it transforms itself into pure light.But the alchemy consists in understanding these two principles in each of you – man or woman – and in transforming the anima, the dark part in you, into the light part; in helping the dark part to move, in helping the dark part help the light part and not to fight with it.If your anima can help your animus that is real marriage, the inner marriage. Then you start becoming integrated, then your light is no more shallow – it has the depth of darkness; and your darkness is no more dark – it has the light of lightness. Then anima and animus melt into each other. And when they melt utterly, the world has disappeared, you are again one. And to be one is to know God, to remain two is to remain in the world. And the secret, the experiment, has to happen within you; it has nothing to do with the outside world.Inside you these two principles are constantly in fight. Call them life-death, darkness-light, man-woman, X-Y – whatsoever you will – but these two principles are there, continuously in fight. And that is your anguish, your misery, your hell.Let them become friends. Let your energy circulate in them, not against each other. Let them come closer to each other. Let there be an inner orgasm, an inner intercourse between the woman and the man. That’s what in Tantra is called yuganaddha, the meeting of the man and woman within you. That is real Tantra. The meeting of the man and woman on the outside is just an introduction.Sudha leads the Tantra Group. That is just an introduction. The real Tantra has yet to begin. She is just preparing you. The real Tantra group will soon start when I see that now you are ready to go in and meet there with your inner woman and inner man. When I see your outer interest is no longer so strong as to keep you out, is no longer so binding on you – the chain is broken – then the real Tantra group will start. I am waiting for the new commune to happen, because the new Tantra group will need a totally different kind of climate, a totally different kind of atmosphere.This is the greatest experiment that a man can go through. And this experiment releases in you cosmic ecstasy, total orgasm.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-06/

The first question:Osho,Why is it so difficult to enjoy?It is difficult to enjoy because you will have to disappear. Joy is possible if you are not. You and joy cannot coexist: when joy is there you are absent, when you are there joy is absent. They are like light and darkness – they can’t exist together in the same place.Hence to enjoy is difficult – it is not easy – because to die is difficult, to die is not easy. And only those who know how to die moment-to-moment know how to enjoy. The more capable you are of dying, the deeper will be your joy: intense will be the flame of it and great will be the flowering of it.It is also difficult to enjoy, because you have so many investments in remaining miserable. Unless you see it, you can go on trying to enjoy, but you will never enjoy. Those investments in misery have to be dropped. And from the very childhood everybody learns that misery pays. If you are miserable the parents are more loving. If you are ill the parents are more caring. If you are happy, healthy, nobody cares – you don’t get attention. And attention is food for the ego; without the attention the ego cannot live – it is its very breath. Just as the body needs oxygen, the ego needs attention.Whenever you are healthy, happy, the parents don’t pay any attention to you; there is no need. But when you are ill, miserable, crying, weeping, the whole family becomes attentive to your needs, as if you have created a kind of emergency. They drop all their work: the mother runs from the kitchen, the father drops his newspaper, and everybody is focused on you. It gives you great ego-fulfillment. And slowly, slowly you learn the way of the ego: remain miserable and people will pay attention to you, remain miserable and they will sympathize with you. And whenever you are enjoying, nobody sympathizes with you. That’s why people pay so much respect to ascetic people. Somebody is fasting and people say, “Look, what a great saint!” He is simply being miserable. If you are feasting, nobody is going to sympathize with you, but fast, and people sympathize.If you are in love with a woman, who is going to sympathize with you? On the contrary, people will be jealous. You are a competitor. They wanted the same woman themselves. You are an enemy. Renounce sex, become celibate, move to a cave, and people will come from faraway places to pay their respects – “Here is a great ascetic” – and you are simply being miserable…but misery pays. Misery can make you a mahatma.That has been the whole history of humanity: misery has always paid, you have respected miserable people. And if the misery is self-inflicted, of course, you gain more respect; it is voluntary. Mahatma Gandhi became such a great name in the world because he was voluntarily miserable, inflicting misery upon himself. How can you not be attentive to him? If he had been enjoying and living a total life, a whole and healthy life, you would have been jealous, you would have been antagonistic.See these tricks and strategies of the mind and you will be able to drop them. Don’t ask for attention, otherwise you will remain miserable. Attention can only be given when you are miserable; that is part of a natural mechanism.It happens in your body too: if you have a headache, your attention moves to the head – you forget the whole body. If you have a pain in the leg, then the whole attention moves towards the leg – you forget the whole body. Then the leg becomes very important. It is good that legs and heads and hands are not politicians, otherwise they would constantly be in pain, they would remain constantly in pain. It is good that they don’t have any egos. If the leg had some kind of ego, then the leg would continuously create trouble, because only when there is trouble do you pay attention: you massage the leg, you take care of it.This is the inner mechanism too: attention goes to the part which is in pain. And this is the mechanism of the family, of the society, of the world at large. Once you have learned the trick it becomes unconscious, it becomes autonomous; you simply go on using the trick. The husband comes home and the wife immediately starts being miserable. This I have watched.I used to stay with many families when I was traveling around this country. The wife is laughing and is happy, and suddenly the husband comes – and I am watching – and her face changes. Not that she is doing it, no; it is not needed to be done anymore, it is automatic: seeing the husband coming, seeing the key move in the hole, suddenly an automatic change happens in her. Her face becomes miserable because the husband will only pay attention to her if she is in misery, otherwise not.This mechanism has to be made conscious. Watch out for it otherwise it will destroy all possibilities of joy in life – it has destroyed. Millions of people live in misery and hell because they hanker for attention. It is stupid to hanker for attention; it does not give you anything. It only strengthens the ego – which is not you. It is not your essence; it is only your personality, your pseudo self. It goes on nourishing the pseudo self and the essential self goes on starving.The essential self need not have any attention. The essential self can live without any attention because it is not dependent on anybody else. And the essential self is capable of rejoicing in its aloneness. It does not even need the other, so what to say about attention? It does not even need the other. Its bliss is inner. It does not come from the outside, it does not depend on any condition. It is unconditional. It is a spontaneous, inner, intrinsic phenomenon.Watch and see how you are profiting from misery, and then you will know why it is so difficult to enjoy. Stop these investments in misery, and the joy will flow again.We are born with joy. Joy is our very being. It does not need anything to be joyous. One can simply be joyous sitting by oneself. Joy is natural, misery is unnatural. But misery is profitable and joy is purposeless – it will not bring you any profit.So one has to decide. If you want to be joyous, you have to be a nobody – this is the decision. If you want to be joyous, you will have to be a nobody because you will not get any attention. On the contrary, people will feel jealous, people will be antagonistic to you. People will not like you. People will like you only if you are in misery, then they will sympathize. In sympathy your ego is fulfilled and their ego is fulfilled. Whenever they sympathize with somebody, they are higher and you are lower. They have the upper hand. They are enjoying the trip of sympathy. Sympathy is violent. They are seeing the fact that you are miserable and they are not. They are in a position to sympathize and you are in a position to be sympathized with. Their ego is fulfilled and your ego is fulfilled because “Look,” you say to yourself, “how important you are: everybody is sympathizing with you.” So ego is fulfilled from both sides. It is profitable, nobody is in a loss.When you are joyous, rejoicing, dancing, singing, just being happy for no reason at all, your ego will disappear because it will not get attention. And others will not feel good because you are not giving them an opportunity to fulfill their egos.That’s the reason why people were against Jesus and against Buddha, and why they are against me. They would like me also to be an ascetic, they would like me also to be fasting, living under a tree like a beggar, then they would be very happy. They would come in thousands, they would worship me. But if I live in my own way – and my way is the way of the feast, my way is the way of festivity – then they are shocked. They are perfectly happy if somebody leaves the palace and becomes a beggar. They are perfectly happy – they love the man. But if a beggar moves into the palace, they will all be against him. They will not like the idea at all.Just watch: you also do such things. If a man is lying on a bed of thorns, immediately you prostrate yourself as if he is doing something great, as if he is bringing some bliss to humanity. He is just being a masochist, but you love, you respect him. Your respect seems to be morbid, your respect seems to be ill, sick, and because of your respect he is lying there on the thorns. He wants your attention and this is the most simple way to get your attention and your respect. His ego is fulfilled. He is ready to lie down on those thorns and suffer.This thing is happening on a smaller scale or a bigger scale everywhere. Beware of it – it is a very ancient trap – and then you can enjoy, then there is nothing else but to enjoy. If you are ready to become a nobody, if you are not in need of others’ attention, there is no problem at all. You can enjoy…in small things you can enjoy. Very small things can give you the greatest joy possible.Just see Jesus with his friends, eating, drinking…. People could not tolerate it. They would have loved him if he had been an ascetic, but he was not.One day he came into a town and Mary Magdalene came to see this man for the first time. And she fell in love with this man. This man was worth loving. How can you avoid it? How can you manage not to fall in love with such a man? She brought very precious perfume and poured it on Jesus’ feet, and washed Jesus’ feet with that precious perfume. And she was crying with joy. And Judas said to Jesus, “This is wrong. You should have prevented the woman. The perfume was very precious. It could have been sold. It could have fed a few poor people in the town.”Now with whom are you going to agree – with Judas or with Jesus? If you are honest you will agree with Judas. If you are honest with yourself, you will agree with Judas. He seems to be the beginning of socialism, communism, Gandhism. He seems to be very logically right. He was the most intellectual disciple of Jesus, the only educated disciple of Jesus, and his logic is flawless.But what did Jesus say? Jesus said something absurd. He said, “You can feed the poor when I am gone. The poor will always be there, you need not worry. But while I am here, rejoice.”Do you agree with Jesus? If you agree, you can be joyous. If you don’t agree, you are going to remain miserable. “But look,” your head will say, “Judas seems to be right.” Jesus seems to be utterly absurd. What is he saying? “The poor will always be there, but right now you are with the bridegroom: enjoy, celebrate.” This is celebration.Now if the people were against Jesus, it seems to be absolutely fitting with our so-called intellect. Jesus says, “I cannot prevent the woman because she is in such joy. I cannot destroy her joy. Look at her tears, look at her being. She is in such a festive mood. This is just symbolic. This pouring of the precious perfume on my feet is just symbolic that she is utterly happy. She is celebrating. I cannot stop anybody from celebrating.” Then, if you agree with Jesus, you can be joyous.So it depends on you, whether you agree with Judas or you agree with Jesus.The second question:Osho,You had no master. No buddha has had a master. Sometimes I think that choosing a master means to prevent one's own enlightenment. I mean the need of one's own way, the impossibility of guidance. Please tell me what you mean.Andreas, I never asked anybody any such question. To ask the question is to search for guidance, is to seek for guidance. A question is always a need for an answer from somebody else. If you have questions to ask, you will have to choose a master.A master is one who is ready to answer you. A disciple is one who is not only asking from curiosity but is ready to stake his whole being on his questioning, is ready to transform his life according to the answer given. If you really ask the question you have already become a disciple. That is the meaning of being a disciple: to ask.Jesus says, “Ask and it shall be given to you. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find.”“Ask and it shall be given unto you….” Asking is the beginning of disciplehood. And unless you are a disciple, the master will not take much note of you, because many come just as curiosity seekers – out of curiosity but not really ready to inquire. Inquiry needs commitment, inquiry needs involvement, inquiry is risky, dangerous. It is not only intellectual, it is existential. So if you really want to ask, remember – let me make you alert – you are already becoming a disciple. And if you think that to choose a master is to prevent one’s enlightenment, please don’t ask questions.And I was surprised, because Andreas has asked at least seven questions today. The largest number of questions is from him.Secondly, you say, “You had no Master.” That is true, I had no master. That does not mean that I was not a disciple. I accepted the whole existence as my master. It needs more courage to accept the whole existence as your master. If you cannot accept even a single man as your master, how can you accept the whole existence as your master – the trees and rocks and the rivers and the clouds? If you cannot love a single human being, how can you love the whole? It is true I had no master, but that does not mean that I was not a disciple. My disciplehood was a greater involvement than your disciplehood is. I trusted the clouds – which is very difficult. I trusted the trees – which is almost impossible. I trusted existence as such. If that is possible then you need not have any master in particular, because then everything is your master.When a great Sufi mystic, Hassan, was dying, somebody asked, “Hassan, who was your Master?”He said, “Now it is too late to ask. Time is short, I am dying.”But the inquirer asked, “You can simply say the name. You are still alive, you are still breathing and talking, you can simply tell me the name.”He said, “It will be difficult because I had thousands of masters. If I just relate their names it will take months and years. It is too late. But three masters I will certainly tell you about.“One was a thief. Once I got lost in the desert and when I reached the village it was very late. Half the night was already gone; shops were closed, caravanserais were closed. There was not a single human being on the roads. I searched for somebody to inquire of. I found one man who was trying to make a hole in the wall of a house. I asked him where I could stay, and he said, ‘I am a thief, and you look like a Sufi mystic to me.’” His robe, his aura…. “And the thief said, ‘Right now it will be very difficult to find any place to stay, but you can come to my home. You can stay with me – if you can stay with a thief.’”Hassan said, “I hesitated a little bit. Then I suddenly remembered: if the thief is not afraid of a Sufi, then why should the Sufi be afraid of a thief? In fact, he should be afraid of me. So I said, ‘Yes, I will come.’ And I went, and I stayed with the thief. And the man was so lovely, so beautiful, I stayed for one month. And each night he would say to me, ‘Now I am going to my work. You rest, you pray, you do your work.’ And when he would come back I would ask, ‘Could you get anything?’ He said, ‘Not tonight. But tomorrow I will try again.’ And he was never in a state of hopelessness.“For one month continuously he came empty-handed, but he was always happy. And he said, ‘I will try tomorrow. God willing, tomorrow it is going to happen. And you also pray for me. At least you can say to God: Help this poor man.’”And then Hassan said, “When I was meditating and meditating for years on end and nothing was happening, and many times the moment came when I was so desperate, so hopeless that I thought to stop all this nonsense. There is no God and all prayer is just madness, all meditation is false – and suddenly I would remember the thief who would say every night, ‘God willing, tomorrow it is going to happen.’“So I tried one day more. If the thief was so hopeful, with such hope and trust, I should try at least one day more. And many times it happened, but the thief and the memory of him helped me to wait one day more. And one day it happened – it did happen! I bowed down. I was thousands of miles away from the thief and his house, but I bowed down in his direction. He was my first master.“And my second master was a dog. I was thirsty and I was going towards the river, and a dog came, he was also thirsty. He looked into the river, he saw another dog there – his own image – and became afraid. He barked and the other dog barked too. But his thirst was so much that he would hesitate. He would go back and come again and look into the water and find the dog there. But the thirst was so much that he suddenly jumped into the water and the image disappeared. He drank the water, he swam in the water – it was a hot summer. And I was watching. I knew that a message had come to me from God: one has to jump in spite of all fears.“When I was on the verge of jumping into the unknown, the same fear was there. I would go to the very edge, hesitate, and come back. And I would remember the dog – if the dog could manage, why can’t I? And then one day I jumped into the unknown: I disappeared and only the unknown was left behind. The dog was my second master.“And the third master was a small child. I entered into a town and a small child was bringing a candle, a lit candle, hiding it in his hands and going to the mosque to put the candle there. Just jokingly I asked the boy, ‘Have you lit the candle yourself?’ He said, ‘Yes, sir.’ And I asked jokingly, ‘Can you tell me from where the light came? There was a moment when the candle was unlit, then there was a moment when the candle was lit, can you show me the source from which the light came? And you have lit it, so you must have seen the light coming – from where?’ And the boy laughed and blew out the candle and said, ‘Now you have seen the light going, where has it gone? You tell me!’ And my ego was shattered, and my whole knowledge was shattered. And that moment I felt my own stupidity. Since then I dropped all knowledgeability.”Hassan talked about three masters. And he said, “There have been many, and no time is left for me to talk about them all.”Yes, this is true, I had no master, because I had millions of masters. I have learned from every possible source. If you can be that kind of disciple you need not have a master. But remember, it is not that you do not have a master. Either you choose one or you choose all, but in any case you have to be a disciple. To be a disciple is a must on the path.What does it mean to be a disciple? It means to be able to learn, to be available to learn, to be vulnerable to existence. What actually happens when you choose a master? You start learning how to learn. And with one master, slowly slowly you get in tune, and slowly slowly you see the point that in the same way you can get in tune with the whole existence.The master is just a miniature of the whole. Coming closer to the master you start becoming aware of the beatitude, of the closeness – of love, of intimacy, of involvement, of commitment. And slowly slowly you see the point that if just being so close to one single person can be such a tremendous joy, how much more it will be when you are close to the whole. The master is just the beginning, the master is not the end. And the true master is only a door – through him you pass and go beyond. The true master helps you to go beyond….You say, “You had no master. No buddha has had a master. Sometimes I think that choosing a master means to prevent one’s own enlightenment.”Enlightenment is simply enlightenment; it is neither mine nor yours. The ego is separate, the essence is not separate. To think in terms of your own enlightenment is to be caught in the net, in the trap of the ego again. You miss the whole point. If you think of your own enlightenment just as you think of your own car, your own house, your own wife, you are starting to think of enlightenment also as something that you will possess. You will not be there to possess it. You will be possessed by it.And to surrender to a master simply means an experiment in being possessed by somebody: you drop yourself and the other enters you and fills you. You learn surrender. It is just the ABC of surrender. But you cannot learn the XYZ if you have not even learned the ABC of it. When you go to learn how to swim you don’t go directly to the ocean, you don’t go to deep waters; you learn in shallow water near the bank or you learn in a swimming pool.The master is like a swimming pool where you can learn how to swim. Once you have learned, all the oceans are yours, then you can go anywhere. Then this whole existence belongs to you. But you are no more there. In fact, it will be better to say you belong to the whole existence – not that you possess enlightenment, enlightenment possesses you.“Sometimes I think that choosing a master means to prevent one’s own enlightenment.”You don’t have a master yet, then who has prevented you from becoming enlightened? Why are you not enlightened yet? If choosing a master prevents enlightenment, then those who don’t have masters must be enlightened. Choosing the master does not prevent enlightenment. Getting caught by the master, getting caught into the master prevents enlightenment – and these are two different things. That is why Buddha says, “If you meet me on the way, kill me immediately.” And I say to you too: If you see me on the way, kill me immediately.The master is a ladder: you have to use it and you have to go beyond it. The master is a boat: you have to use it, and when you have reached the other shore you have to leave the boat. You need not carry it on your head. If you carry it on your head you are stupid and you have not reached anywhere – you must be dreaming…because such stupid people never reach to the other shore.Choosing the master does not prevent enlightenment, but a moment comes when you have to go beyond the master, then don’t cling – clinging to the master will prevent you. But if there is a real master he will not allow you to cling to him. That is the definition of a real master: he teaches you to get involved, he teaches you to become committed, and one day he teaches you to become uncommitted again, to become uninvolved again. Then the master is perfect.The ordinary so-called masters just teach you one thing: how to become attached to them and then to remain attached to them. That’s the definition of a pseudo master. Avoid the pseudo masters.But to find a true master is not going to prevent your enlightenment. You will not become enlightened without him. It is a paradoxical phenomenon: you have to choose the master and you have to go beyond the master. If you understand this paradox, my answer will be clear to you.The third question:Osho,I want to conquer the kingdom of God. How to do it?God cannot be conquered. The very idea is foolish. You have to be conquered by God, you have to allow God to conquer you. On the contrary you are saying, “I want to conquer the kingdom of God.” This is the male ego, the aggressive mind: it always thinks in terms of conquering – conquer nature, conquer God, conquer love. And you have destroyed everything that you have conquered. You have destroyed the beauty of nature, the ecology, the inner harmony of nature by your conquering it.Even a man like Bertrand Russell writes about “the conquest of nature.” But this is how the Western mind has been thinking continuously – in terms of conquering. Either conquer this world or conquer that world, but you remain an Alexander.This is not the way to approach love, this is not the way to pray. The very word conquering is ugly. Surrendering, letting God conquer you, allowing him to enter you…. Don’t prevent him. You need not go in search of him, you need not become a soldier to conquer. That’s the difference between a soldier and a sannyasin: the soldier wants to conquer, the sannyasin wants to be conquered.There was a loud hammering on the door of heaven. St. Peter appeared and said, “I say, that’s a tremendous racket. Who is making all the fuss?”The shabby man standing there said, “I’m Paddy McGinnis and I’m strong with the IRA these thirty years.”St. Peter said, “I’m sorry, Mr. McGinnis, but we have no record of you. You can’t come in.”“And who is saying anything about coming in?” said Paddy. “I’m here a tellin’ you, you’ve got fifteen minutes to evacuate the place!”This is the meaning of conquering God and the kingdom of God.Drop this whole mind. This mind won’t allow you. This mind is irreverent. This mind is incapable of knowing what worship is, what prayer is. Be a little more aware, alert about what you are asking. Do you want to possess God in your hands? Do you want God to be in your bank balance? God is not a treasure to be put in the bank, and God is not a thing that you can hold in your fist. God is not a thing, God is not a property.Remember not to use the words that you use in your ordinary ego trips; these words will mislead you. These words show your ambition. These words are political. These words are not religious. A religious person surrenders, he prays, he waits, he opens up his being, he trusts. He says to God, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” He prays, “Let me be destroyed utterly, completely, so there is no hindrance left. Let me be absolutely empty so you can come and fill me totally.”The fourth question:Osho,My orthodox Christian parents think that you are a dangerous sophist, and some wicked force is working through you to destroy religion. Why do they think like that?It is nothing new; it has always been so. It has nothing to do with Christians – this is so with Hindus, this is so with Buddhists, and this has always been so. They were thinking in the same way about Christ too. These are the same people. They were thinking in the same way about Buddha too, and these are the same people. Man is a very strange animal. The most strange thing about man is that he never learns; he goes on doing the same thing again and again.Why did they crucify Jesus? What was wrong with this man? They thought him wicked, they thought him a representative of evil, a personification of the Devil. They were angry. And of course, the people who were interested in Jesus were younger people, because only young people can be interested in the new. The older generation has too much of an investment with the established, is too involved with the status quo. Do you think Jesus’ followers were old people? He himself was young and the people that surrounded him were young people. Parents were angry, very angry. Rabbis were angry, priests were angry, because he was bringing a revolution. If Jesus is right, then the whole established religion is wrong. If Jesus is right, then what about the priests? Jesus and the priests can’t both be right – either Jesus or the priests. The priests became organized against this man. They had to kill him. And the older generation was with them, naturally.The mind always feels comfortable with the old because it is familiar, one is accustomed to it. The new always feels dangerous, one feels suspicious of it. And religion is always new. True religion is always new, true religion is always rebellious. Whenever there is a man like Jesus or Buddha, there is bound to be great trouble. But Jesus is crucified, and then slowly slowly Jesus’ life becomes the foundation of a new, established religion. Once Christianity becomes an established religion, supported by the state and supported by the elders and Christianity itself has its own priesthood, then there is no problem. Then if a man like me comes, problems arise.You say, “My orthodox Christian parents think that you are a dangerous sophist, and some wicked force is working through you to destroy religion.”In a way they are true. What they call religion is not religion, and I am certainly in favor of destroying it. What I call religion they cannot understand; it is impossible for them to conceive. They have become too stereotyped in their thinking, their minds are too conditioned, fixed. They are no longer fluid, flexible; they are rigid. The older a person becomes, the more rigid he becomes.Let me tell you a few things that were said about Christians in the early days of Christianity, and then you will understand what your parents are saying about me.Tacitus says, “There is a group, hated for their abominations, called Christians.”And Suetonius says, “The Christians are a class of men given to a new and wicked superstition.”And Celcius says, “They worship, to an extravagant degree, this man who appeared recently. They are like frogs holding a symposium round a swamp, debating which of them is the most sinful.”And Lucian says, “The poor wretches have convinced themselves that they are going to be immortal and live for all time by worshipping that crucified sophist and living under his laws…. They receive their doctrines by tradition, without any definite evidence.”And Pliny the Younger says, “It is their habit, on a fixed day, to assemble before daylight and recite by turns a form of words to Christ as a god. The contagion of this perverse and extravagant superstition has penetrated not only the cities but the villages and the country too. Yet it seems possible to stop it and set it right.”These things were not said about me, these things were said about Christ. And similar things have been said about Buddha.Hindus have created a beautiful story about Buddha. They say that he was an incarnation of God. They had to say it. Hindus are more polite and, of course, more cunning, more sophisticated, and they know how to play with words. Buddha was an incarnation of God, they say, but not a good incarnation. But how can an incarnation of God be bad? They have a beautiful story to illustrate it.They say when God created the world he created hell and heaven and earth, the three worlds. Then millions of years passed and nobody went to hell; it remained empty. And the Devil was very angry, and also his disciples, and they were waiting and waiting and nobody would come. And every arrangement was ready: the fire was burning, and nobody was coming. Finally they had to go to God, and the Devil said, “This is nonsense. Why did you create hell if nobody is going to come there? And what are we doing there? – just waiting and waiting. And how long do we have to wait? Not even a single soul has entered, the whole thing is pointless. Either send a few people so we become occupied…. And we have rehearsed and we have trained ourselves and made ourselves so skillful that we are hankering…we have to do something. You are driving us mad. Either send a few people there or drop the whole project.”God said, “You wait. Soon I will have to come to the earth. I will be born as Gautama the Buddha and I will mislead people and misguide people. Then they will start falling into hell automatically.”Then God came as Gautama the Buddha and he misguided people, because hell needs people. And since Buddha misguided people, hell has been overcrowded.Now see the beauty of the story and the cunningness of it. Buddha is accepted as an incarnation of God, but it is just to send people to hell – so beware of Buddha, don’t follow him; otherwise you will go to hell. Buddha was here to help the Devil, to give him some occupation. Since then hell has been overcrowded; there is no space, people have to wait for years outside the gate.This has always been so and this is going to remain being so: religion, whenever it comes fresh from the beyond, is very shattering to tradition, and the traditional people become afraid – not that they are worried about religion being destroyed. They are not religious at all, otherwise they would not be afraid of it; their religion is only a social formality. They talk about God because it is convenient to talk about God. They go to the church too, because it makes things easier. The church functions as a lubricant. It is a Sunday religion. It is good; it keeps you in good company and everybody knows that you are religious. That helps in many ways.The church is no more than a Rotary Club or a Lions Club. If you are a Rotarian, it helps you; people know that you must be good if you belong to the Rotary Club. And in the Rotary Club you become acquainted with all the topmost people of the town: friendship arises, it helps in your business, in your day-to-day life. The church is nothing but a kind of religious club: it is convenient. Nobody is sincerely there. People are just showing respect to Christ, paying service – but that service is lip service. They don’t bother a bit about Christ, Christianity and all his teachings.Who bothers about Christ’s teachings? Who follows them? If you had followed Christ the world would have been totally different: there would not have been any wars. And half of the world is Christian. If Christians really follow Jesus…. Jesus says, “Love your enemies,” and Christians go on bombing the enemy. It is Christians who bombed Japan, who used the first atomic bomb. Now think of Jesus watching from his place – what will be happening to him? Christians dropping atom bombs? And he has said to these people, “Love your enemy as yourself.”Who has followed Jesus? There is no question of following. People just go to the church. It is a good feeling – to go to the church, to remain religious.I have heard….The airplane was going through some especially turbulent weather, but the pilot knew he had everything under control. He tried to calm the passengers with soothing words spoken over the loudspeaker system. He also asked the stewardesses to reassure the people that everything would be all right.One very religious little old lady, however, would not be comforted. The stewardess told her how capable the pilot was and how reliable the plane’s technology was, but the woman was still sure she’d never see the ground again.At a loss, the stewardess finally called on the highest court of appeal, “Just trust in providence,” she said soothingly.The little old lady’s eyes opened even wider, “Is it as bad as that?” she asked.A religious old lady…. But to really think of God means that death is certain – “Is it as bad as that?”People have double faces. Their original face is not even known to themselves. People have split personalities. Your parents will be thinking they are Christian and religious; they are neither Christian nor religious. If they are really religious they will understand me, because whatsoever I am saying is the same – exactly the same, precisely the same. My language may be different from Jesus’ – it has to be, twenty centuries have passed – but what I am doing is exactly the same work, the continuity of the same work. But I can understand their problem too: they are losing their hold on you and they are afraid.Just the other night I was reading an article. In Germany, parents have formed a certain society to prevent young people from going into new religions, particularly Eastern mystic experiences; in America they are creating a lot of trouble for the young people.You will be surprised that parents are hiring kidnappers. Young people are being kidnapped by their own parents, and then they are being given to psychologists. Certain psychologists are trying to deprogram them, they are called deprogrammers. They think the young people have been conditioned.For example, if you really become too involved with me, and your parents become very afraid, and you don’t want to go back to your country, you can be kidnapped. Your own parents can do it, “For your own sake,” because you have fallen in the trap of a devil, of some evil force. And it looks to them…. “What are you doing with orange clothes and a beard and long hair and the mala? And who is this man…very evil-looking? And what is wrong with wearing a cross, having a picture of Jesus? What are you doing there?” And if they come and see the Dynamic Meditation, Kundalini, they will go crazy. They will become very concerned.Yes, you can be kidnapped, and then you can be forced into what they call deprogramming to decondition you. They think you have been hypnotized, so you have to be dehypnotized. So they will teach you Christianity and the Christian catechism again. And they will force you day in, day out, for months, so that you can again become a Christian, and you can again say, “Yes, I believe in God and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” and then they are at ease. When you believe in the Holy Ghost, then all is okay. And when you start reading the Bible again, all is okay: now you have come back, you have become religious. When you start making atom bombs again, you are really Christian, Catholic. When you go to the army and they cut your long hair and make you a soldier, then you are a perfect Christian, a Catholic. When you start a cut-throat competition in the world for money, for power, for prestige, when you start destroying others so that you can reach higher and higher for worldly possessions, you are perfect, you are a religious person.Even politicians are thought to be religious persons because they go to the church, they listen to the sermon of the priest. Politicians are “religious,” and my sannyasins are “not religious”!You will have to understand it. You will have to be very very patient with your parents. You will have to be very kind too. They need compassion. They are encaged in a certain ideology and they cannot look outside it. They are incapable of feeling anything new, of being anything new. They are incapable of understanding; they have become too rigid, their whole ideology has become a settled phenomenon, and they are afraid. If they see you happy, they can only think you have gone mad, because they have lived an unhappy life and a very religious life.And they know religious people are unhappy people – sad, with long faces. They cannot believe that you can be religious and dancing, and you can be religious and laughing, and you can be religious and yet happy. Then what about all their saints? Were they fools? They lived with long faces the whole of their lives, they carried their life as a burden, as if a mountain were being carried on their head, and you are so lightfooted, so weightless, with no burden, with no seriousness around you. You are such a laughter, how can they believe you are religious? The only thing possible is that you have been hypnotized. How can you be so happy in such an unhappy world? It is not possible. You must be living in a kind of illusion. Hence they say, “This man is an evil force, he has hypnotized you. The laughter that you are going through is false, the joy that you are experiencing is false.” Their misery is right and true, and your joy is false. When they will be able to make you miserable again they will be at ease: their son has come back home, or their daughter has come back home.You will have to be understanding. They cannot understand me, they cannot understand you, but they are your parents and you owe something to them. Be loving to them. Don’t be antagonistic. Don’t resent them. Don’t start arguing and fighting with them because that will make them more convinced that they are right and you are wrong. Be more loving. Nobody has loved them; they have lived in a false world where all is pretension. Nobody has loved them. If you love them, it will be more convincing than logic.Listen to them. Don’t start arguing. Listen patiently. Nobody has ever listened to them. That’s why psychoanalysis has become so important in the world. Psychoanalysis is nothing but just finding a patient listener, the psychoanalyst, to whom you can talk to your heart’s content and say whatsoever you want – sense, nonsense, whatsoever you want.People are feeling suffocated, boiling, within. They want to say something but nobody is there to hear, the world has turned deaf. The man cannot talk to his woman, because the moment you talk conflict starts. You say something, she understands something else. The woman cannot talk to the man because talking is always risky. It is better to keep quiet and to remain silent. At least it gives you a feeling of peace, that all is quiet. Say a single word and the argument starts. Sooner or later people learn that it is better to remain silent, not to say anything.Nobody has listened to them. Just see the misery of the fact that they have to go and find a person to listen…. But they have to pay for it, and the costs are really very high. Psychoanalysis is one of the highly paying professions. It is a Jewish concern and Jews know how to do business. Freud founded the greatest empire and his followers are just looting, just enjoying. And what are they doing? They simply listen; no other help is needed. If you listen to the person for months together, years together, he loses steam. And once he has thrown his steam out he feels calm and quiet, and he thinks this is because of psychoanalysis. It is not because of psychoanalysis.In older societies, more primitive societies, this is not needed because people are very willing to listen. Go to an Indian village – people are very willing to listen. They have enough time to listen, nobody is in a hurry. People are sitting and talking and listening to each other. You cannot convince Indian villagers that there is any need for psychoanalysis, they are psychoanalyzing each other already; they need not pay for it.But in a highly sophisticated, cultured, civilized society, people are in such a hurry that nobody is available to talk to anybody else. Parents never see their children, or even if they see them, then just polite words, “Hello, how are you?” and they are gone. Or a pat on the head which is almost mechanical, or a hug which is false, or even a kiss which is just an empty gesture. But nobody talks, nobody faces the other. There is no friendship, no love. Parents live in one world, the children live in another.Parents are so suffocated by their own misery, helplessness, turmoil, that they have to drown themselves in alcohol. Children are getting drowned in drugs. And the strange thing is that the people who drown themselves in alcohol are very much against drugs. And they are doing the same thing; it is not different. It is the same thing: somehow to drown oneself, to forget all about oneself and the world and the problems. Even children have so many problems because we teach them competition, ambition. We send them to the school and the competition starts. “You have to be first. You have to bring an A grade.” Now you have made them anxious. They are continuously in turmoil, anxiety: whether they will be able to make it or not.Small children are having ulcers, young people are having heart attacks, young people are going mad, committing suicide – this has not happened ever before. Or if you don’t want to commit suicide, you don’t want to go mad, you don’t want to have ulcers, cancer, heart attacks, then drown yourself in drugs. But then the state is against you, then the society is against you, and you feel guilty. You are doing something illegal, you are a criminal; they will throw you into jail.The only possibility of getting out of this whole nonsense is to find a new space in your being through prayer, through meditation; to find your original source of life and energy. And that’s what you are doing here with me. If you really go into meditation you will not need alcohol, you will not need drugs. If you really go into meditation, your life will be a life of love, of sharing, of joy – noncompetitive, nonambitious. You will not become a politician, you will live as a nobody. You will not suffer from an inferiority complex because you will not compare yourself with anybody else. And you will live in great gratitude because your life will have joy. You will not be attached to misery because you will not have any investment in misery. If you don’t have any ego, you need not have any investment in misery. Then you can feast and your life can be a festival. That’s what I am teaching here.And to me this is religion: to make life a feast, a festival; to transform energy in such a way that you become a celebration.But your parents will find it difficult. Help them to understand. Be loving. Listen patiently to their arguments, and don’t argue; rather, love. Just show by your being, by your integrity, by your patience, by your caring about them that you are moving on the right path. It is up to you: if you can prove by your love that you are moving on the right path, only then will they think that the man you are with is not evil. If you argue and fight and become antagonistic – which seems to be very natural because they will be antagonistic and in a fighting mood, and the natural reaction is to be the same, tit for tat – if you do that, then you will be proving that your master is evil and you will be proving that you have moved on a wrong path.What I am going to be proved to be in the world, depends on you.The last question:Osho,Can't sex be transcended without going into it?Then what is the need to transcend it? The need of transcendence arises only because you are in it. You are born in it, you are born out of it: you are a sexual phenomenon.Except for Jesus, nobody has been born of a virgin. And Christians insist too much on the theory that Mary was a virgin, so that they can condemn sex. If Jesus is also born of sex, then it will be difficult to condemn sex. In fact, Jesus was born out of sex as much as anybody else.The body has to be constituted of male and female energy, otherwise the body cannot be constituted. To say that Mary was virgin is to say that you have electricity in your house with only one pole: positive, or negative. That will be just as nonsensical. Electricity needs to have both poles, positive and negative. Without those two poles electricity cannot exist, cannot come into existence – not even in Jesus’ house; the electricity will need two poles. The electricity does not care who you are – even in my house it needs two poles.You can ask Haridas. He tries, the whole day he tries, continuously working to make electricity virgin. But up to now he has not succeeded. But later on you can write stories about me that, “In Osho’s house the electricity had only one pole.” These stories are always created later on, because you have to prove that your master was exceptional.Jainas say that Mahavira never perspired. Now what kind of foolishness? He missed the joy of perspiring in the sun. And he lived naked and moved naked; in fact, he must have perspired more than anybody else. If you say I don’t perspire it may be right because I live in an air-conditioned room, but Mahavira, moving naked, never perspired? Something seems to be suspicious, fishy; he must have been stinking. To hide the fact, you have to cover it and say that he never perspired, so the whole root is cut. He never defecated, never urinated. How can you think of Mahavira pissing? That does not look right at all.These stories are created. These stories simply prove that the followers are stupid. They don’t say anything about Mahavira or Christ or Mohammed; they simply prove that the followers that came in their wake are neurotic. Jesus was born out of two sexes just as everybody else is. You come out of sex, each cell of your body is a sexual cell. Each cell of your body has two poles: the feminine and the masculine, yin and yang.You ask me, “Can’t sex be transcended without going into it?” The only possibility is not to be born. Once you are born you are already a sexual being. Whether you make love to a woman or man doesn’t matter. You can be a celibate, but to be a celibate does not mean to go beyond sexuality. Sexuality has already penetrated. The moment you were in the womb of your mother you became a sexual being. There is no way to avoid it. So all that you can do is repress it. You will become unnatural and your whole life will be a perverted life. Repression is possible, but transcendence is not possible in the way you are asking about.I have heard….Ellen and Dolph had been married thirty years and never missed a night of connubial bliss. One day Ellen visited her doctor and was told that she must have complete rest and quiet for six months or she would not live.Ellen and Dolph decided they should stay completely apart during this period. She moved into an upstairs bedroom and he remained downstairs.After three months of complete abstinence and solitude, his will-power collapsed and Dolph started for her bedroom. As he started to climb the stairs, he saw her coming down.“Dear,” she said, “I was just coming down to die.”“I’m glad, honey,” he said, “because I was just going up to kill you.”Don’t be mad, let things be simple. There is no need to kill or die. Repression will make things very complicated in your life; you will become split, schizophrenic – just celibate on the surface and deep down just the opposite of it.Transcendence means the disappearance of the need for the other, the disappearance of the desire to get lost into a woman or into a man. And this is possible only if you have understood – and understanding comes only through experience. So I don’t say drop out of your relationships; rather, become more meditative in your relationships.Making love, let it be a meditation too. And you will be surprised: if while making love you also move in a meditative state you will have great insights into what is happening, and the whole urge called sex will become conscious. And once it has become conscious it can disappear. And it disappears on its own; you need not cultivate, you need not practice anything for it. When it goes on its own it is beautiful. Yes, sex disappears – one transcends it – but not by fighting it. This is true, and because of this truth much misunderstanding has happened in the world.Sex disappeared in Buddha’s life, sex disappeared in Christ’s life. People have seen sex disappearing, and people have seen that when sex disappears there is great splendor: something of the sky dances on the earth, the beyond reaches to the earth, the mundane becomes suffused with the sacred. And because people have seen these things, great desire has arisen in them too to transcend sex. But then the whole thing goes wrong: they start fighting with it.It is a secret science, and if you don’t move rightly, everything will go wrong.A man is told by a friend that he should pick a wife who is “an economist in the kitchen, a lady in the parlor, and a prostitute in bed.”They meet sometime after the wedding and the friend asks if he is satisfied with his choice.“Well,” says the newlywed, “I did what you said, but I guess I made a mistake somewhere. The woman I married turned out to be a prostitute in the parlor, a lady in the kitchen, and an economist in bed!”Just a little mismanagement, just a thing here and a thing there misplaced and everything goes wrong.Transcendence is never through repression; transcendence is through understanding, transcendence is through awareness.Just the other night I was giving sannyas to a psychoanalyst – a beautiful man. I have given him the name Anand Veetkam. It means bliss beyond sex. And to him I said that if you become meditative while making love, you will come to know a few immensely significant things.The first and the most significant thing is that when you are going into a deep orgasm – when the climax is happening – there is great joy because in that moment sex disappears. Sex brings you to the orgasmic state, and once its purpose is fulfilled, sex disappears. In the orgasmic state there is no sexuality left in you: you are simply throbbing and there is no desire, you are utterly herenow there is no future, no fantasy, no imagination, nothing. And when the orgasm happens, the man is alone – the woman may be there but he is not aware of the woman. And the woman is alone – the man is there but she is not aware of the man.Orgasm is individual: it is happening inside the man, it is happening inside the woman. The other has triggered it, but then the function of the other is finished; you are no more interested in the other. In deep orgasm you are simply inside yourself, there is no sex in it; hence the bliss. And after a good orgasm, for hours you will feel very very blissful, and for hours you will not think of sex again – the desire has left you. What has happened? If you are feeling blissful, the desire cannot be there. If the desire is there, bliss cannot be there. Desire and bliss are never together.And if you meditate deeply while making love, you will become aware that time disappears; at the peak there is no time, suddenly you are herenow. Only then do you know the meaning of here and now, otherwise you are in the past or in the future. And when time disappears, mind disappears, because mind is another aspect of time, another name for time. Mind is past plus future. When there is no time there is no mind. Just think: no mind, no time, no sexual desire – and there is great bliss.But people miss it because they are not alert about it. People go into lovemaking unconsciously, mechanically. Go consciously, mindfully, remembering what is happening, watching, remaining a witness, and that will release understanding in you, that will release awareness in you. And awareness is transcendence, awareness is freedom.Enough for today.

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

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-07/

Master Lu-tsu said:When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized. When one begins to apply this magic it is as if, in the middle of being, there were nonbeing. When in the course of time the work is completed, and beyond the body there is a body, it is as if, in the middle of nonbeing, there were being. Only after concentrated work of a hundred days will the light be genuine, then only will it become spirit-fire. After a hundred days there develops by itself in the midst of the light a point of the true light-pole. Then suddenly there develops the seed-pearl. It is as if a man and woman embraced and a conception took place. Then one must be quite still and wait. In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing. In the physical world it is the sun; in man, the eye. This energy is directed outward – flows downward. There-fore the Way of the Golden Flower depends wholly on the backward-flowing method.The circulation of the light is not only a fantasy.By concentrating the thoughts, one can fly; by concentrating the desires, one falls. When a pupil takes little care of his thoughts and much care of his desires, he gets into the path of submersion. Only through contemplation and quietness does true intuition arise: for that the backward-flowing method is necessary.A great master was asked what is the Buddha? “Mind is the Buddha,” he answered. When after many years he was asked the same question again by the same disciple, he said, “No Buddha, no mind.”“Then why did you say before, ‘Mind is the Buddha’?”“To stop the baby crying! Once the baby stops crying, I say, ‘No mind, no Buddha’!”Philosophy is just a toy – a toy to stop the baby crying – and so is theology. Religion really consists of experience, experimentation; it has nothing to do with speculation. In its essential nature it is the science of the inner; it is as scientific as any other science. The difference between religion and science is not of their methodology but only of their object.Science looks at the objective world where our energy is flowing, where our light is flowing. Religion searches into the subjective where our light is not flowing but can be turned to flow. Hence science is easier than religion. Never for a single moment think that religion is simpler than science. It is a higher science, how can it be simpler than science? It is a superior science.First the light has to flow inwards, then it falls on your being, then your being is revealed and you can enter into your being. And to enter into one’s own being is to enter into the kingdom of God. There, you are not and God is: you exist only in the shadow. When the light flows outward you exist only in the shadow. You exist because you remain unaware of your real self. Your real self is the supreme self. Your real self is a “Self” with a capital S. It has nothing to do with you, it is the self of all. But for that, a great transformation has to take place.Nature has prepared you for the outward flow. Nature’s function is finished. With man, nature has reached to its climax; now nothing else is going to happen naturally unless man makes a decision to go further than nature. Nature has brought you to the point from where you are capable of standing on your own. Man is no longer a child, man has become adult. Now nature will no longer parent you; there is no need.Natural evolution has stopped at man. This is a fact. Even scientists are becoming more and more aware of it: that for thousands of years nothing has happened to man, man has remained the same – as if nature’s work is done. Now man has to take the course of further growth into his own hands. That’s what religion is.Religion means man starts standing on his own feet, becomes responsible for his own being, starts looking and searching and inquiring into what is the case – who am I? And this should not only be curiosity.Philosophy is out of curiosity. Religion is a very sincere, authentic search; it is inquiry. And there is a great difference between curiosity and inquiry. Curiosity is childish, just a little itching in the head; you would like to scratch and then you feel satisfied. Philosophy is that scratching; religion is a life-and-death matter. In philosophy you never become involved, you remain aloof. You play with the toys, but it is not a question of life and death. You accumulate knowledge, but you never practice it.I have heard….Once upon a time there lived an eminent Confucian scholar. He was a gentleman of nearly eighty and was said to have no equal in learning and understanding.Then a rumor arose that far away a new doctrine had sprung up that was even deeper than his knowledge. The old gentleman found this intolerable and decided that the issue had to be settled one way or the other.In spite of his age he set out on the long journey. After months of hardship on the road, he arrived at his destination, introduced himself and told the purpose of his visit.His host, who was a master of the new Zen school, merely quoted, “To avoid doing evil, to do as much good as possible, this is the teaching of all the buddhas.”On hearing this, the Confucian gentleman flared up, “I have come here in spite of the dangers and hazards of such a long and rough journey and in spite of my advanced age, and you just quote a little jingle that every three-year-old child knows by heart! Are you mocking me?”But the Zen master replied, “I am not mocking you, sir. Please consider that though it is true that every three-year-old child knows this verse, yet even a man of eighty fails to live up to it!”Religion is not a question of knowing but of living up to it. Religion is life, and unless you live it, you will not know anything about what it is. And to live religion one has to drop all philosophizing and one has to start experimenting. One has to become a lab. The scientist’s lab is outside; the religious person’s lab is his own being – his own body, his own soul, his own mind. The scientist has to concentrate on the object on which he is experimenting: his work has to be done with open eyes. The work of religion has to be done with closed eyes: he has to concentrate upon himself.And the complexity is great because in the world of religion the experimenter and the experimented upon are the same – hence the complexity, hence the strangeness, hence the incomprehensibility, hence the illogicalness. The knower and the known are the same in the world of religion. In the world of science the knower is separate. the known is separate – things are clear-cut, demarcated. But in religion everything merges, melts into everything else – even the knower cannot remain separate! Religion does not give you knowledge separate from the knower. It gives you experience, not separate from the knower, but as the very essence of the knower.To be a religious seeker one has to drop all philosophizing, one has to drop all a priori knowledge, because all a priori knowledge is a hindrance. It stops your inquiry, inquiry becomes dishonest – from the very beginning it becomes poisoned. How can you inquire if you have already concluded? To be a Christian and to be religious is impossible, or to be a Hindu and to be religious is impossible. How can you be religious if you are a Hindu? Being a Hindu means that you have already concluded, you have decided what truth is. Now what is the point of inquiry? What are you going to inquire into? All that you will be doing is finding support, arguments for what you have already concluded. And your conclusion may be wrong – nobody knows – because your conclusion is not yours, it has been handed to you by the society.Society is very interested in giving you conclusions. The society is not interested in giving you consciousness so that you can conclude on your own. Before you become conscious, before any inquiry starts, the society stuffs you with all kinds of conclusions – to stop the inquiry – because the inquirer is dangerous to society. The non-inquirer is convenient, the non-inquirer is obedient. He simply takes the orders, the commands, and follows them. He is conformist, he is conventional. Once you have stuffed somebody’s mind a bit with a belief, you have drugged him; belief is a drug. He starts believing, he goes on believing…slowly slowly he starts thinking that his belief is his experience.Belief is a system of hypnosis. You go on suggesting to the child, “You are a Hindu, you are a Hindu,” you take him to the temple, you lead him through religious, so-called religious rituals, ceremonies, and by and by he becomes conditioned to the idea that he is a Hindu, and that all that is Hindu is right and all that is non-Hindu is wrong.And the same is being done in every kind of society – you have drugged the child, his very source of consciousness has been poisoned. And if you believe something, it starts appearing to be true. If you start believing something, you will find all kinds of supports for it, all kinds of arguments to help it – your ego becomes involved. It is not only a question of truth, deep down it is a question of, “Who is right, me or you? How can I be wrong – I have to be right.” So you choose all that supports you. And life is so complex, you can find all kinds of things in life – whatsoever you choose, whatsoever you decide. If you are a pessimist, you will find all kinds of arguments in life which support pessimism. If you are an optimist, there are all kinds of arguments available to you.Life is dual, life is paradoxical, life is multidimensional. Hence so many kinds of philosophies, “isms,” theologies exist in the world. And every theology lives confined by its own conclusions and feels perfectly right.It is only in this age that the believers are finding a little difficulty – and this is a great blessing – because they have become aware of other believers too. Now the Hindu is not so complacent, he cannot be; he knows that there are Christians. And the Christian cannot go on believing that he has the sole copyright for truth, because he knows that there is the Mohammedan and there is the Taoist and there is the Buddhist, and who knows?This age is very confused – it has never been so before. But remember, this confusion is a great blessing; something is on the way, something tremendously important is going to happen. This chaos in the mind is the beginning of a new dawn. In the future people will not be Mohammedans and Hindus and Buddhists. People will be inquirers. Belief is disappearing and the darkness of belief is disappearing. Nobody in the future is going to believe. People will inquire, and when they find, they will trust. Belief is borrowed, trust is one’s own experience.What I am teaching you here is that kind of religion which is going to happen more and more in the future. I am bringing the future to you in the present: I am making you pure inquirers with no belief system, ready to go into experimentation but with no conclusion, open to whatsoever the truth may be, ready to accept it – but only ready to accept the truth.The man who believes is a closed man: his windows and doors are closed, he lives in a kind of prison. He has to live in a kind of prison; if he opens the windows and doors and the sun comes in and the wind comes in and the rain comes in, it is possible that his belief systems may be disturbed. If the truth enters from every side, it will be impossible for him to protect his belief. He has to hide from truth, he has to live in an enclosed world, windowless, so nothing can disturb him, so he can go on believing, undisturbed. This is good for the society, but very hazardous for the health of the individual.Society has been giving you toys to play with – just as you give toys to the children so that when they become involved in playing they don’t disturb you. The parents are at ease, the father can read his newspaper, the mother can work in the kitchen – the child is involved in the toys.In India, in the villages, this has been the usual practice: poor women who have to go to work in the fields have to take their small children with them. If the children are big enough they can play on their own, but if they are very small and they cannot play on their own, they are a constant distraction for the mother. They will cry, they are hungry or they have wet the place or they are cold, and the mother has to come and care for them continuously, and this is distracting to the work and the boss won’t allow it. So it has been the usual practice to give a little opium to the child. Then the child is fast asleep in the blissful slumber that the opium has given to him, dreaming beautiful dreams, and the mother can remain undistracted in her work. This is good for the work, this is good for the mother, this is good for the landlord, but this is very hazardous and dangerous for the health of the child – for his future also this is poisonous. But this is what has been happening.Society gives you beliefs so that you need not experiment, so that you need not be distracted into the inquiry, because the inquiry will take so much of your energy that you will not be able to be a good clerk or a good stationmaster or a good collector or a good policeman. You will be distracted by your inquiry; you will become more interested in the inner and your interest in the outer will start disappearing.Society wants you to live an extrovert life, society wants you to be efficient in the world, to be more productive in the world – whether the production is good or bad is not the point. If you work in a factory where bombs are created you have to be efficient and productive. If you work in the army you have to be efficient and always obedient. Wherever you are, whether the work is good or bad is not the question: whatsoever the society has decided you have to follow, you have to fall in line.If you become an inquirer, then there is danger: you will become more and more of an introvert, your priorities will change, your values will be different. You may not care much about money, you may not care much about power, you may not remain ambitious, you may not be possessive anymore, your interest in property may disappear. You will start searching for inner riches, the inner kingdom of God. But then you will become less and less efficient for the society, and the society cannot afford it – although it will be a better world, where more people are introverted and are doing their own thing rather than being pulled and pushed by others to do their things. It will be a better world where people are more meditative. Then politicians will not be able to create as much mischief as they have been creating in the past. Wars will disappear automatically if people are more introverted. Then who will care to fight and who will care to kill and murder?And violence is being painted in such ways so that it appears beautiful. Murder in the name of “nation,” murder in the name of Islam, murder in the name of Christianity – and then murder becomes beautiful. Murder is murder; whether you murder for Christianity or the Church or the country or the nation doesn’t matter. These are just excuses to murder, excuses to be destructive, excuses to be mad.After every ten years a great world war breaks out upon the world, because in each ten-year period people gather so much pus in their beings that it has to be poured out. They gather so much poison in their beings that they cannot contain it anymore – a madness, a global madness, explodes.If people are more introverted, wars will disappear, politics will disappear. If people are more introverted, of course they will not be so efficient, but there is no need – they will be happier. They may not be so continuously occupied, madly occupied in things, but they will be more happy, more joyous, more celebrating. They will create enough of what is needed, they will not be concerned with the unnecessary.But we have become too concerned with the unnecessary, which is not needed at all – we can afford to be without it. But yet we cannot, because our training has made it in such a way that we have to go on rushing and running. We don’t know any other way to be.Society drugs you with beliefs and kills your inquiry from the very beginning. Religion means reviving your inquiry, religion means taking you back to your original source.And remember, it is not curiosity; it is a very sincere search. To live without knowing oneself is almost synonymous with being dead. How can one really live without knowing who one is? What will life mean if you don’t know yourself? What will you do with yourself if you don’t know who you are? How will you decide what is going to be your destiny? Yes, there will be much noise, but there will be no music. There will be much calculation, but there will be no celebration. And there will be much running and rushing hither and thither but no arrival. Between birth and death you will live in a kind of constant tension but you will not know the beauty, the benediction of life and existence, because you could not even know the beauty and benediction of your inner being – which is the closest thing to know, the first thing to know.The first step towards life is that of self-knowledge. It cannot be just curiosity. There are many people who inquire out of curiosity, but curiosity can never be life-transforming; again it is just an itch which can be satisfied very easily.Once upon a time there was an innkeeper who, strange to say, was unable to make both ends meet. Nothing that he tried was of any effect. He tried to put his house under an entirely new management, but that too was in vain. So in despair he consulted a wise woman.“It is quite simple,” she said, as she pocketed her fee. “You must change the name of your inn.”“But it has been ‘The Golden Lion’ for centuries,” he replied.“You must change the name,” she said. “You must call it ‘The Eight Bells’ and you must have a row of seven bells as the sign.”“Seven?” he said. “But that’s absurd! What will that do?”“Go home and see,” said the wise woman.So he went home and did as she told him. And straightaway every wayfarer who was passing paused to count the bells and then hurried into the inn to point out the mistake, each apparently believing himself to be the only one who had noticed it and all wishing to refresh themselves for their trouble.And the innkeeper waxed fat and made his fortune.This is how people are. The name of the inn is “The Eight Bells” and the symbol has only seven bells – enough to make people curious, enough to keep them occupied. But this kind of curiosity is not going to lead you anywhere.People ask about God, people ask about truth, but you can see from their eyes, by the way they have asked, that they don’t mean business. Just as people talk about the weather, people talk about God too – it is polite conversation. Nobody seems to be involved, nobody seems to be in a passionate search. And unless your search is of great passion, of tremendous commitment, of utter involvement, you will not be able to know the secrets of your being, because much work will have to be done. The curious person cannot do that much work. Curiosity is not enough to take you far away; its energy is very small, very tiny. Only a sincere passion to know can take you through all the trouble that will be needed. It is an uphill task.So the first thing to understand The Secret of the Golden Flower is: not to be philosophic, not to be drugged by society, not to believe and not to disbelieve either. Remember, whenever I say, “Don’t believe,” I am not saying that you should disbelieve – disbelief is another kind of belief, a negative kind. When I say, “Don’t believe,” I am saying both belief and disbelief have to be dropped. You have to be simply open, with no conclusion. You have to be simply aware of your ignorance, with no knowledge hiding your ignorance. You have to be innocent, innocently ignorant. You have to say, “I don’t know.”All right approaches begin with this: “I don’t know.” If you “know” anything already without knowing, if you are knowledgeable, then that very belief will hinder, that very belief will create experiences which are not true. And when you are drugged by a belief – and belief is like LSD or marijuana or hashish – when you are drugged by a belief, it creates its own projected world, it gives your imagination free play. And when your imagination starts playing around you, you are no longer part of reality – you have created a separate private world – you are an idiot.That is the meaning of the word idiot: one who lives in a private world, who has his own reality, who has completely broken away from the real, whose imagination has become so real to him that reality has simply disappeared from his vision. And that’s what happens when you take LSD or marijuana or other kinds of drugs: it creates a small fantasy world in you, very colorful – at least it looks colorful when you are lost in the drug – and when you are in the drug, all that you experience appears to be ultimate truth.Every day somebody or other comes to me and he says, “It is through drugs that I became aware how beautiful the world is.” What you became aware of is only your dream world; the drugs simply take away your critical faculty. Drugs only drug your reason and then your dream world opens all its doors and flows in all directions. And when there is no critical faculty functioning, when there is no reason functioning and the imagination has full play and absolute autonomous power, it feels as if it is the ultimate truth – it is not. It has nothing to do with truth.Truth is available only to those who are completely undrugged – not only chemically, but religiously too. Those who are completely undrugged, only they have the capacity to know the truth.I have heard….Under the influence of nitrous oxide, the great psychologist, William James, came to an ultimate “truth.” He was one of the first experimenters – and in those days there were no drug people around.Under the influence of nitrous oxide, he felt that he had stumbled upon the ultimate truth. He was a great psychologist, and a great philosopher too, but he did one thing that very few people do: he immediately wrote it in his notebook. He still had that much sense to know that something of immense value had arisen in his consciousness and it had to be written down immediately. Who knows? – once he was out of the drug experience he might forget it. So he wrote it down and he waited for the moment when the drug and its impact disappear so that he could read what ultimate truth he had come upon. He was thinking that he had become a Buddha or a Christ, seen God or seen something which the seers of the Upanishads saw, or Lao Tzu, or Zarathustra, or Mohammed – but something of that importance.But he was very puzzled and surprised when he came back to his senses and looked at his notebook. What he had written was this:“Hogamous, Higamous,Man is polygamous.Higamous, Hogamous,Woman is monogamous.”This was the ultimate truth that he had stumbled upon.Any absurd thing can look ultimate when you are not in your senses, when the reason is not functioning, when the critical faculty has completely gone to sleep – any stupid thing. But in that moment it is not stupid, in that moment it looks like the ultimate truth.Aldous Huxley says that when he first took LSD, he was sitting in a very ordinary room and just in front of him was a very ordinary chair. Once LSD started working into his system, into his chemistry, the chair started looking so beautiful that he could not believe his eyes: he had never seen anything so beautiful in his life. It was luminous, light was flowing from the chair in all directions – multicolored, psychedelic. The chair is the same chair – just your imagination is creating the whole game, just that LSD has driven you mad. It has taken away all possibility of being critical.That’s why I say belief is against doubt, but trust is not against doubt. Trust grows through doubt, belief grows by repressing doubt. That’s why belief is a kind of drug. That’s exactly what the drug does: it represses your doubting faculty, which only keeps you alert – not to become an idiot, not to fall victim of your own imagination. And that’s what religions have been doing down the ages. They say, “Don’t doubt. Doubt, and you will fall in hell. Believe! If doubt comes, repress it, throw it away. Just go on believing. And believing,” they say, “is seeing. If you believe, you will see.”Trust is a totally different phenomenon. It comes out of an undrugged consciousness, an open consciousness – neither believing nor disbelieving, with no conclusions tethered to it – just free, innocent.Doubt remains useful. Until you arrive at truth doubt helps. Doubt is a friend of trust. The very process of doubt helps you not to become a victim of your imagination; otherwise, imagination has been playing havoc.For example, if you are a born Hindu and you have been reading about kundalini, then your imagination can create the whole experience: any day, down from the spine, the snake will start uncoiling, and with a great hushing sound it will rush towards the seventh chakra. And the experience will look so real that you cannot doubt it, if you have ever believed in it. But Jesus never came across kundalini, Mohammed never knew anything about it…even Buddha, who was born a Hindu. But because he was a man of sincere inquiry and had dropped all kinds of beliefs he never came across kundalini. Mahavira never knew anything about it, Zarathustra has not talked about it. So what happened? Did they miss? It is a belief: if you believe in seven chakras, those seven chakras will become facts in your life. If you believe in anything you will start seeing it.Gopi Krishna, who has become a propounder of kundalini energy in the modern age, says he was working for thirteen years, sitting and waiting for the kundalini to arise. Thirteen years is a long time. If for thirteen years you can believe in kundalini and you can wait and you can go on looking deep down into the spine, it is not a miracle if it happens.Then one day it happened: the serpent uncoiled himself, rushed with great energy, penetrated the brain with a sound, the roaring sound of a waterfall – and since then Gopi Krishna thinks that his genius has been released. He thinks that if your kundalini rises you will become a genius. But I don’t see what his genius has done. Yes, he writes some stupid poetry, very ordinary, fourth-rate. If that is genius then it will be good if people keep their kundalini deep down, repressed. If everybody becomes a fourth-rate poet, that will not be a good situation. What kind of genius is released?These are not the ways, these are just imaginings. And if you believe in a certain thing, you will start seeing it – that is the danger. Don’t start with belief. That is the vision of Tao: inquire, experiment, and wait for the conclusion to come on its own.The sutras.Master Lu-tsu said:When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized.Your consciousness is flowing outward – this is a fact, there is nothing to believe in it: when you look at an object your consciousness flows towards the object.For example, you are looking at me: then you forget yourself, you become focused on me; then your energy flows towards me, then your eyes are arrowed towards me – this is extroversion. You see a flower and you are enchanted, and you become focused on the flower; you become oblivious of yourself, you are only attentive to the beauty of the flower. This we know – every moment it is happening. A beautiful woman passes by and suddenly your energy starts following her.We know this outward flow of light – this is only half of the story – but each time the light flows out, you fall into the background, you become oblivious of yourself. The light has to flow back so that you are both the subject and the object at the same time, simultaneously, so that you see yourself. Then self-knowledge is released. Ordinarily, we live only in this half way – half-alive, half-dead, that’s the situation – and slowly slowly, light goes on flowing outward and never returns. You become more and more empty inside, hollow. You become a black hole.This is exactly what happens on a greater scale in the universe. Now physicists have discovered black holes. Taoists discovered black holes long before, but they were not concerned about the black holes there in the faraway space, they were concerned about the black holes inside you. A black hole is a state when all your energy is spent, exhausted and you have become empty, and you have forgotten completely how to go on nourishing this source of energy. Scientists say that sooner or later this sun will become a black hole, because continuous energy is being released but nothing is returning to it. It is an immense source of energy. For millions of years it has been giving light to the solar system. For millions of years trees are growing, flowers are flowering, man is living, animals are moving, birds are flying, because of the sun’s energy. But the sun is becoming spent. Slowly slowly, one day, it will collapse; there will be no more energy left. Suddenly all light will disappear, the last rays will disappear from it. Then it will be a black hole.And that’s how many people live their lives: they become black holes – because of this constant extroversion. You see this, you see that, you are continually seeing without ever returning the energy to the seer. In the day you see the world, in the night you see dreams, but you go on remaining constantly attached to objects. This is dissipating energy. By the time a man is thirty he is almost finished; then he is a black hole.People die nearabout thirty, although they are buried nearabout seventy – that is another matter – but they die nearabout thirty. And I see a grain of truth in the hippie idea that don’t believe a man above thirty. There is a grain of truth in it, because it is very rare to find a man beyond thirty who is alive. People become black holes – spent, utterly exhausted. They go on dragging somehow, they live without being alive, as if just the momentum of the past helps them to remain alive.It happens: if you love bicycling, you have to pedal the bicycle. But sometimes you can just stop pedaling and out of the momentum created by the past pedaling the bicycle goes on for a while without pedaling. And if it is a downward slope, it can go far. And after thirty or thirty-five it is a downward slope. Thirty-five is the peak; if seventy is the average age of dying, then thirty-five is the peak. After thirty-five you are on a downward slope: you can go on rolling down without any energy.The Taoist experience is that this energy that you spend in your extroversion can be made more and more crystallized rather than spent. If you learn the secret science of turning it backwards, it is possible. That is the whole science of all methods of concentration.Just standing before a mirror some day, try one small experiment. You are looking at the mirror, your own face in the mirror, your own eyes in the mirror – this is extroversion. You are looking into the mirrored face – your own face, of course, but it is an object outside you. Then, for a moment, reverse the whole process. Start feeling that you are being looked at by the reflection in the mirror – not that you are looking at the reflection but the reflection is looking at you – and you will be in a very strange space. Just try it for a few minutes and you will be very alive, and something of immense power will start entering you. You may even become frightened because you have never known it, you have never seen the complete circle of energy.And this seems to me, although it is not mentioned in Taoist scriptures, but this seems to me the most simple experiment anybody can do, and very easily. Just standing before the mirror in your bathroom, first look into the reflection: you are looking and the reflection is the object. Then change the whole situation, reverse the process. Start feeling that you are the reflection and the reflection is looking at you, and immediately you will see a change happening – a great energy moving towards you. In the beginning it may be frightening because you have never done it and you have never known it. It will look crazy, you may feel shaken, a trembling may arise in you, or you may feel disorientated, because your whole orientation up to now has been extroversion. Introversion has to be learned slowly slowly. But the circle is complete. And if you do it for a few days you will be surprised: how much more alive you feel the whole day – just a few minutes standing before the mirror and letting the energy come back to you, so the circle is complete. And whenever the circle is complete there is a great silence. The incomplete circle creates restlessness, when the circle is complete it creates rest, it makes you centered, and to be centered is to be powerful. The power is yours. And this is just an experiment; then you can try it in many ways.Looking at the roseflower, first look at the roseflower for a few moments, a few minutes, and then start the reverse process: the roseflower is looking at you. And you will be surprised how much energy the roseflower can give to you. And the same can be done with trees and the stars and with people. And the best way is to do it with the woman or man you love. Just look into each other’s eyes. First begin looking at the other and then start feeling the other returning the energy to you; the gift is coming back. You will feel replenished, you will feel showered, bathed, basked in a new kind of energy. You will come out of it rejuvenated, vitalized.Master Lu-tsu said: When the light is made to move in a circle…This is what they mean by moving light in a circle. Your light is moving in an arc: it simply goes out and never comes back. You become a black hole sooner or later. If the circle is complete you will become a white hole. Now, after black holes, physics is discovering white holes too. A white hole is very pregnant with energy, just the opposite of the black hole.When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth…Heaven and earth mean inner and outer, above and below, God and the world, the invisible and the visible, the unknowable and the knowable. Heaven represents God and the earth represents the manifested world. They become one when the circle is complete. Then you are not only dust unto dust; something of the sky has penetrated you. Then you are no longer just earthly, no more just a human being – you have become divine.Remember the root of the word human: it comes from humus. Humus means the earth. Man is made of the earth, that’s why man is called human. Man is dust, hence he is called human. When the dust starts becoming luminous with the divine, then you know the splendor of life. And that is possible if the energy comes back. And it can be brought back, from everywhere; there is no problem in it, you just have to practice the secret. And once you have got the knack of it, you will find it, from everywhere.Looking at a green tree you can be so alive – as if the whole sap of the tree has flown towards you, the whole juice of the tree has gone into your being. Looking at the moon and you will be surprised: there is no need to get drunk with any alcohol or any other drug, with the moon you can become a drunkard. The moon can return so much energy if you know how to take it back.In India, in the ancient Rig Veda, there is talk of soma. Scientists think that soma is something like LSD. Scientists think it must have been a kind of mushroom that has disappeared from the Himalayas because of the change in the climate or something. Or maybe it has not disappeared, maybe people have just forgotten about it. It may be still growing somewhere in the deep valleys of the Himalayas and we have simply forgotten what it is. Maybe the ancient seers knowingly helped humanity to forget about it; it may have proved too dangerous.Aldous Huxley says that soma was the ultimate drug, and in the future when we will have discovered the ultimate LSD we will again call it soma. But you will be surprised to know that in Sanskrit soma is another name for moon. Hence, Monday in Hindi is called somwar, the day of the moon. Soma is another name for the moon; it is not a mushroom, it is not some kind of LSD, it is not a drug. It is a secret science of getting in communion with the moon. And just as the ocean is affected by the moon, if you can get the energy back from the moon, you will be surprised: great juice, great nectar, showers on you – you can be drunk without getting drunk on any drug.The moon can affect you to the very core of your being, and it will make you cool and calm because the moon is the feminine energy. Just as when you embrace a woman that you love and suddenly you feel great calm and quietude arising in you, exactly the same happens on a greater scale when energy returns to you from the moon.The moon is the feminine principle, just as the sun is the masculine principle. The moon is yin, the sun is yang. The moon can mother you. There is no need to go in search to the Himalayan valleys for some mushroom; that mushroom is always there in the sky – it is the moon. You have to learn the secret of how to get energy back from the moon. There have been secret methods to get energy from the moon and from the sun too.Sun worship was born out of a certain technique; great temples of the sun arose. The sun temple of Konarak was just an expression of gratitude to the sun. It was not just worship, it was a science – how to get yang energy in you. It is particularly good for women to get sun energy in them so that their hidden, dormant yang becomes active and it is good for men to get moon energy so that their dormant feminine principle becomes alive, moving again. It is good for a woman to be a sun worshipper and good for a man to be a moon worshipper. But the worship has not to be just a ritual, it has to be this method.When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized.Light and dark symbolize man-woman, light-heavy, grace-gravitation, life-death, movement-rest. All these things are represented by light and dark.In short, if the energy can move in a circle, slowly slowly you will not know who you are – whether a man or a woman. Extroversion is the principle of yang, introversion is the principle of yin. Man is naturally extrovert, woman is naturally introvert. Even while making love, man keeps his eyes open – he wants to see, he is a voyeur; hence the possibility of pornography. No woman is interested in pornography; no woman sees any point in it. Even while making love to her beloved, she closes her eyes. She is an introvert, her energy moves inwardly.But the energy has to become a circle, otherwise one remains a man, one remains a woman, and both are half – two halves of the same whole – hence the attraction and the need for the other. The day you are able to circulate your energy in a circle you will not need another woman, you will not need another man, because your own man, your own woman will meet and merge into each other. You will be whole, and to be whole is to be holy.This is Tao and this is Tantra too: to be whole is to be holy.When the light is made to move in a circle, all the energies of heaven and earth, of the light and the dark, are crystallized.This is what Carl Gustav Jung called “individuation,” crystallization. This is what George Gurdjieff used to call “the birth of the self” or “the soul.”Ordinarily you are just fragments, ordinarily you are a crowd, you have many selves. You don’t have a single “I,” you have many “I’s,” small “I’s,” and all struggling and competing with each other to dominate. This is the misery of man: that he is many. How can you be at ease if you are many? One part says, “Do this,” another part says, “No,” and a third part says, “Do something else.”Whichever you follow you will repent, because the other parts which were not willing to go will create trouble. They will go on insisting that you are on the wrong path, that the other alternative would have been far better: “If you had followed me, you would have arrived by now. And look, you didn’t listen to me.” But if you had listened to that part, then the other parts would have taken revenge.Man is never contented – cannot be – because he is many. If you become one, contentment follows of its own accord. If you are many, discontent is natural. If you are many, you live in constant conflict. If you are one, conflict disappears; you have come home. This is what Taoists call crystallization, and the method to achieve it is to make the light move in a circle so your yin and yang are no longer separate.The light has to move just exactly as your breathing moves: in and out, out and in, you exhale, you inhale. Just think of a person who only exhales: he will not be able to live, his body will die. Or think of the person who only inhales: he will also die. And that’s exactly what has happened to your soul: your soul is dead, because either you exhale light or you inhale light. You have not yet learned that exhalation and inhalation have to become a circle, one process. Exhale deeply and inhale deeply.Just as breath is necessary for the life of the body, consciousness is necessary for the soul. So consciousness should not be left as a half, the circle should be completed. The woman has to learn how to be a man too, and the man has to learn how to be a woman too. And when the man and the woman have come to an equal balance, when they are utterly balanced, that is crystallization, individuation – the soul is born.When one begins to apply this magic…And, yes, it is magic, because its effects are really unbelievable.When one begins to apply this magic it is as if, in the middle of being, there were nonbeing.This is what I meant by “black hole.”When one begins to apply this magic it is as if, in the middle of being, there were nonbeing.As if you are surrounded by being, but you are an island of nonbeing, of nothingness – a black hole. The trees are alive, the stars are alive, the birds are alive, the earth is alive, the sun and the moon are alive, everything is alive, and you…just a dead black hole. In this vast ocean of being you are a nonbeing. This is the situation when you begin.When in the course of time the work is completed, and beyond the body there is a body, it is as if, in the middle of nonbeing, there were being.Then everything changes; then you become a being, a white hole. You become so integrated, so crystallized, that compared to you, all the suns and the moons and the trees and the birds and the animals look like nonbeing.Just think of a buddha: he has being – the whole existence feels pale compared to him. He has life – life eternal, life abundant. The whole existence is poor, he is rich. He is an emperor, the whole existence is beggarly.When in the course of time the work is completed, and beyond the body there is a body…When this circle of light becomes stabilized in you, crystallized in you, you will start feeling another body within the body. This body is made of dust, that body is made of God, of divinity. This body has form, that body has no form. This body is gross, that body is subtle. This body will have to die, that body knows no death. This body is part of time, that body is part of eternity.When this second body is born – and it can be born only when you have learned how to inhale and exhale light…. Just as you are inhaling and exhaling breath, when you have learned how to inhale and exhale light – the second body, the body of light…. This is the body of darkness, this is the body which is part of the earth, part of gravitation. It is heavy, it is pulled downward. The other body is pulled upwards, it is part of grace, it is light – light in both senses of the word: it is illumined and it is weightless – you can fly.That’s what Zen people call “flying without wings.” Then the whole sky and the infinity of it is available to you.…as if, in the middle of nonbeing there were being. Only after concentrated work of a hundred days will the light be genuine.In the beginning the light will look almost like imagination – in the be-ginning it has to be imagination. Only after a time, a hundred days, the…concentrated work of a hundred days…It depends on how concentrated your work is; a hundred days is not a fixed time. If your work is totally concentrated, then a hundred days; otherwise it will take a hundred years or a hundred lives – one knows not. It depends on the intensity. If your being is totally involved in it, committed to it, you are bent upon it, you are ready to risk all for it, then in one hundred days the light will become genuine. In the beginning it will be imagination.Imagination is not wrong; imagination is wrong only when it takes you against reality, when it becomes a barrier. Imagination is not wrong when it cooperates with reality. Then it is a great blessing. In the beginning you will feel it as imaginary – just looking in the mirror, you will feel, “This is all imagination, that the reflection is looking at me.” It is imagination in the beginning, but soon you will realize that it was not imagination – you were just turning the key in the lock of reality – it starts happening.In the beginning, if you touch a tree with great love, you know the tree cannot respond – and if you feel some response from the tree, you will think it is imagination. It is not – the tree responds – but it will take a little time for you to recognize the truth of it. When you are loving, the tree responds with love – love is always responded to with love. And if love is not responded to with love, then know well your love is not love, that’s all; then something else is masquerading as love.…then only will it become spirit-fire.After a hundred days’ concentrated effort it will become spirit-fire.After a hundred days there develops by itself in the midst of the light a point of the true light-pole.First it is a diffused light, you just feel it very slightly there; sometimes it is there and sometimes it is not there, it is very dim and very fragile. But slowly slowly it becomes very centered, it becomes a light-pole.Then suddenly there develops the seed-pearl.Then, just at the very center of the light-pole, the seed-pearl.It is as if a man and woman embraced and a conception took place.And it is exactly so: the inner man and the inner woman have embraced. It is a kind of inner intercourse. It is real Tantra: your feminine part and your masculine part are making love to each other, are joined together, and then there is no need for them to separate.With the outer woman you will have to separate, otherwise it will become very ugly. With the outer woman you will have to separate, otherwise it will become repulsive. With the outer man you will have to separate – it can only be momentary, only for a moment can you have the glimpse of unity – but with the inner there is no need to separate.A buddha lives in a constant orgasmic state: the inner woman and the inner man go on making love. You must have seen the shivalinga in Hindu temples; that is a symbol. Just below that linga is the yoni, the feminine part; it is a symbol of the inner man and woman meeting. It is not just phallic as Freudians will interpret it. It is symbolic. It symbolizes the inner polarity.And once this meeting has happened, you are born anew. When Jesus says to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born again…” this is what he means. I don’t know what Christians say and I don’t care either, but this is what he means. “Unless you are born again….” This is the birth he means. And this is what Hindus call dwija, twice-born: you have given birth to yourself. If the outer man meets with the outer woman you create a child, you reproduce. If the inner man meets the inner woman you again create a child, but you are the parent and you are the child. A new life begins in you – the life of a buddha, the life of enlightenment, the life of deathlessness.Then one must be quite still and wait.When this conception has been felt inside, when you feel that the inner man has penetrated the inner woman and the woman is pregnant, then nothing is left but to wait – just as the woman waits for nine months. With great joy, with great prayer, with great hope, she waits. Nothing else has to be done, no need to do anything – the doing part is finished.The male part is action. To make light circulate is the male part. Once the conception has taken place and the inner woman is pregnant, then the male part need not work, it has to rest. Now things will grow on their own.Meditation is the first part. Now there is only prayer left. Hence I say to you that without meditation you will never know what prayer is. Prayer is the highest form of meditation. Prayer is like fragrance, meditation is like the flower. One has to go through meditation.People ask me why, if their path is that of prayer, are they supposed to do so many meditations here in my ashram. Prayer will come; you have to pave the way for it to come. You have to go through all kinds of meditations – these are cleansing processes. This is the male part of you that has to be satisfied, and then the female part will take possession. You will be pregnant! And to be pregnant is to be prayerful, because then nothing is left to be done. Effort is finished and now you are effortless. This is what Taoists call “inaction through action.”You have been doing many experiments on moving the light in a circle, you have succeeded – after a long concentrated effort something has crystallized in you, the man and woman are no more separate, they have become one, the child is there – now except for waiting, nothing is needed. Wait with hope, wait with trust. And this is what prayer is.In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing.And what will make you alert that the pregnancy has happened? You will start seeing an inner radiance. Whenever you close your eyes you will not see darkness but radiance. And not only will you see it; those who love you, they will start seeing an aura around you.In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing.How do you know that a woman is pregnant? Have you not seen a certain aura around a pregnant woman? Have you not seen some light coming out of her eyes, her face, her very being? It is exactly the same, but on a much higher plane: when you are pregnant with God within you, you will see radiance. Whenever you close your eyes you will be all light inside – a sourceless light, coming from nowhere, very cool light, moonlight, but immensely enchanting, magical – and others who love you and are very close to you will also start feeling it.That’s why we draw an aura around the pictures of saints: it is not available to everybody. If you had seen Christ you would not have seen his aura…but his disciples saw it. Certainly the people who crucified him didn’t see that aura. They could not see; they were blind, they were closed. The aura was seen around Buddha…by the disciples.These secrets are available only to lovers. They are such intimate secrets that they are not available to all and sundry, to any Tom, Dick and Harry. They are only available to those who are intimate, those who come close, close, closer and closer, and those who are open, vulnerable.In the midst of the primal transformation, the radiance of the light is the determining thing. In the physical world it is the sun; in man, the eye.And when the inner radiance starts growing in you, the eyes become aflame, they look drunk. There is a dance in the eyes – a subtle light, a totally different quality comes to the eyes. Now the eyes not only see things, but they share too. Tao cannot be divided but it can be shared, and the sharing of Tao is through the eyes.When I initiate you into sannyas, I ask you to look at me. I want to look into your eyes, I want my eyes to dig deep into your eyes, to have a contact there, because behind your two eyes is hidden the third eye. If the third eye is contacted – and if you are open it happens within a split second – time is not needed. If the third eye is contacted, I know a disciple has come. If it is not contacted, then I only hope that you will become a disciple some day. In that hope I give you sannyas. But that is a hope; it may be fulfilled, it may not be fulfilled – it will depend on a thousand and one things. But when I see a disciple, when the third eye immediately starts responding to me, then you have come to the place you have been seeking and searching for. Now there will be no need to go anywhere, now you will not need any master, any teaching – you have come home.This energy is directed outward – flows downward.Ordinarily, the energy that is coming from the eyes flows outward. “Outward” and “downward” are synonymous.Therefore the Way of the Golden Flower depends wholly on the backward-flowing method.Ordinarily the energy is going outward and downward. You have to bring it backward, inward – and “inward” is synonymous with “upward.” Once it starts coming back to you and you become a circle of energy, you will be surprised – a new dimension has opened up: you start moving upwards, your life is no longer horizontal. It has taken a new route – the vertical.God exists on the vertical route. You will not come across him in the world – not that he is not in the world, but unless you are moving vertically, you will not come across him. Just as a blind man cannot see light, the horizontal man cannot see God.Many come to me and say, “If you show us God, we will believe.” But how can I show you God? How can I show a blind man light unless he is prepared to go through the treatment so that his eyes open? I will have to turn you from your horizontal way of life into a vertical way of life. That’s what sannyas is all about: a vertical way of being. And once the light starts moving upwards, the golden flower opens up.These are symbols; there is no flower inside you. “Flower” simply represents flowering, “golden” simply represents its lightfulness, its radiance.The circulation of the light is not only a fantasy.Remember: the circulation of the light is not only a fantasy. In the beginning it may appear so – you will have to be patient – soon it becomes a fact. It is a fact, it is a fact from the very beginning, but just because you have never been in contact with it, in the beginning it looks like a fantasy.By concentrating the thoughts, one can fly; by concentrating the desires, one falls.Desire is the Taoist name for energy moving downward, outward, and “thought” is the Taoist symbol for energy moving inward. So don’t misunderstand. By “thought,” Taoists don’t mean your so-called thoughts; by “thought” they mean thought-energy purified of desire. If it is purified of desire and all desire has disappeared, then there is no need to go out, because you go out only because you are desirous of something. You desire a house, you desire money, you desire power, you desire a man, a woman, this and that – then you go out. If there is no desire, thought need not go out; it starts turning inwards – the one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn happens.Desireless thought is inward-moving, desireful thought is outward-moving. Hence the insistence of all the buddhas on desirelessness.When a pupil takes little care of his thoughts and much care of his desires, he gets into the path of submersion.When a disciple takes little care of his thought and too much care of his desires, he is drowned in the world.Only through contemplation and quietness does true intuition arise: for that the backward-flowing method is necessary.Thought has to be purified of desire. Once thought is purified of desire it is no-thought. Mind without desires is a no-mind. It is what Patanjali calls samadhi, Zen people call satori, Taoists call crystallization: the balance of the outward and the inward. And no energy is lost; it goes into the world and comes back like a bird flying in the morning into the sky, and by the evening it comes back to the nest.Let your energy come back to the nest again and again. Don’t let it go forever without turning it back to you. And you will become a reservoir, and you will become tremendously powerful inwardly. Only in that power does intuition start functioning. In that power spirit-fire is born. In that power the true light-pole arises. In that power suddenly there develops the seed-pearl.It is as if a man and woman embraced and a conception took place. Then one must be quite still and wait.Meditation is complete and prayer begins. To bring meditation to prayer is the whole work of Tao.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Would you talk about the relationship between disillusionment and celebration? I'm feeling a strange mixture of the two – a dying and a coming to life at the same time.Venu Gopal, mind lives in illusions. And to live in illusions is to be miserable, because they cannot be fulfilled. You can go on hoping but you will always be moving into a mirage. The moment you reach the place you were hoping for, the mirage will disappear, you will be in utter despair. Out of your despair you will again hope.Hope is just an effort to keep oneself alive somehow. You will again create illusion. This is how the whole game goes on: you are in despair, out of despair you create an illusion; out of illusion more despair is created, and out of more despair, more illusions. One goes on from despair to illusion, from illusion to despair. No energy is left to celebrate. You are in a constant tension between despair and hope. Your life becomes nothing but a tension between that which is and that which should be. You cannot feel being, you remain engrossed in becoming; becoming is misery, being is celebration.Celebration is not because some desire is fulfilled – because no desire is ever fulfilled. Desire as such cannot be fulfilled. Desire is only a way to avoid the present moment. Desire creates the future and takes you far away. Desire is a drug; it keeps you stoned, it does not allow you to see the reality – that which is herenow.Celebration means dropping this whole trip of becoming – just being here. When becoming disappears, all the smoke of becoming disappears, there is the flame of being, and that very flame is celebration.Celebration is without any cause. Celebration is simply because we are. We are made out of the stuff called celebration. That’s our natural state – to celebrate – as natural as it is for the trees to bloom, for birds to sing, for rivers to flow to the ocean. Celebration is a natural state. It has nothing to do with your desires and their fulfillment, with your hopes and their fulfillment; it is already the case. But to see the celebration that is already happening at the deepest core of your being you will have to drop becoming, you will have to understand the futility of becoming.So something tremendously beautiful is happening, Gopal. Allow it. Yes, it is exactly so: when you are utterly disillusioned and you don’t create any more illusions – that is what I mean by utterly disillusioned…. Disillusionment comes many times in everybody’s life, but out of disillusion you again create new illusions. You cannot live without illusions; it has become a habit, a habit of many lives. You cannot live in the reality as it is, you want it to be something else – you are always wanting it to be something else – and reality has no obligation to anybody to change itself. And it is good that it doesn’t bother about your desires, otherwise there will be chaos because there are so many people desiring, projecting.Reality remains as it is, utterly unaffected by what you desire. It never takes any notice of your desires. But once you are absolutely disillusioned – and by “absolute disillusionment” I mean you no longer create any more illusions, you simply remain with it – even if it is despair, you remain with it, you remain in it, you accept it. The moment you accept despair, it starts disappearing, because it can exist only as a shadow of hope; it cannot exist on its own. You cannot just be in despair without any illusion, that is impossible – it is as impossible as if there were just a shadow walking on the road. If you walk there will be a shadow, but the shadow cannot walk alone. Despair is a shadow of illusion. If you are utterly disillusioned, despair starts disappearing, and a new being, a fresh being, a resurrection, a celebration arises in you.Aniruddha has written a question saying that when he came here he was thinking about me as vast, special, extraordinary. Now he says, “Living here with you for so many days, you appear ordinary, just as any other man. So what is the fuss all about?”I have no obligation to fulfill your demands. I am just as I am, utterly ordinary. Reality is ordinary. The rose is a rose is a rose, the rock is a rock, the river is a river. Reality is absolutely ordinary, utterly ordinary. I am an ordinary man. Then what is the difference between you and me? The difference is: I celebrate my ordinariness, you don’t celebrate it. That is where the difference is. I welcome it, I am utterly blissful with it; you are not. I am a being, you are a becoming. There is the difference. Not that I am special and you are ordinary – that is utter nonsense. If I am special then everybody is special, if you are ordinary then I am ordinary. We belong to the same reality. I am utterly ordinary, but the difference is that I am celebrating it: I have no grudge, I have no complaint, I am not trying to become somebody that I am not. I have accepted myself in absoluteness – not even a single thing do I want to change. In this relaxation, in this acceptance, celebration has started happening to me.Now Aniruddha says he is in a difficulty. He created his difficulty himself. I have never told anybody that I am special. That was your idea, your projection. And in fact, why was Aniruddha thinking that I am special? Deep down he wants to be special. Deep down he wants to be special, that’s why he stayed here, seeing that “Here is a special man, so there must be some secrets to being special. Learn from this man so you can also become special, so you are no longer ordinary.”People have such condemnation for the ordinary. I have tremendous respect for it because the ordinary is the real. God is the most ordinary thing in existence – has to be. How can he be special? – compared to what, compared to whom? He alone is, he cannot be special. He can only be ordinary, as ordinary as the rose and the peacock and the eagle, and the river and the rock and the cloud.But Aniruddha must have had a desire deep down to become special. People search for masters in order to become special. People search for masters out of their ego desires. The very search is an ego trip. Then naturally, one day you will be disillusioned. That was your illusion; I have nothing to do with it. If you project something on me, how am I supposed to be responsible for it? You project; sooner or later your projection will fall down. In fact, I will help in every way so that it is broken, shattered, so that you can see me as I am, so that one day you can see yourself too as you are.My whole teaching is drop all these stupid efforts to become special, extraordinary. Just enjoy reality as it is – wherever you are, whosoever you are. Celebrate it. This I call prayer, this I call being religious: celebrating one’s being. It is a gift from God. Just to be is more than you can ask for. Just to be is the greatest miracle. What more of a miracle can happen?Venu Gopal, something tremendously beautiful is on the way. Don’t create any more illusions again. The mind will try. Don’t listen to the mind. Remain disillusioned. It will be a kind of dying, because you have lived up to now through illusions. That has been your nourishment. You will feel like dying. But die – and with this death a new life will arise in you, you will be resurrected. Let this be a death – and a total death. Don’t die in a lukewarm way; die totally, wholly. Allow this death to happen, and the next moment, out of this death, some new life arises that you have not seen and that has been always within you – but you were not available to see it.And to Aniruddha also I would like to say: It is very good, Aniruddha. Now you are seeing my reality. I am an ordinary man and I am here to make you ordinary also. I am here to help you come out of your ego trips. I am here to help you to celebrate this immense ordinariness. Only then are you grateful to God.What are you trying to do – trying to become somebody else, trying to decorate yourself? But all those decorations will be falsifications. You can never be anybody else, you can only be yourself. There is no way for the roseflower to become a lotus. There is no way for the lotus to become a roseflower. You can only be yourself. If you allow it there will be celebration, because there will be no possibility of misery, and the energy that becomes misery becomes celebration. If you don’t allow it to move into becoming misery, what else will you do? It is the same energy that cries in you – it can become laughter. It is the same energy that becomes hate in you, sour, bitter – it becomes love. It is the same energy that can become destruction – it becomes creation. The energy is not different. When you are engaged in an ego trip of becoming somebody special, then your whole life will be nothing but a long tragedy.What is the difference between Alexander and Buddha? Alexander wants to be special, wants to possess the whole world, wants to be unique. And Buddha? – Buddha simply wants to be himself. There is no need to go anywhere, there is no need to become at all. No future is needed, no time is required: Buddha can be this very moment what he wants to be because he already is that. But for Alexander even millions of lives will not be enough, his journey will remain incomplete. He will never be able to bring it to a conclusion. It is a vicious circle: he will be frustrated again and again, and out of frustration he will create bigger illusions, stronger illusions. He will need bigger illusions and stronger illusions.It is like a drug, I say again. If you take a drug, any drug, sooner or later you become accustomed to it. Then you need more quantities of it, stronger doses of it, and so on and so forth. Small illusions won’t do; once you have become accustomed to them, you will need greater illusions.This is how people become mad. A madman is one whose illusions have gone completely contrary to reality. Now he lives only in his illusions – there are not even intervals when he sees reality as it is, not even moments of truth. He simply lives in his illusions – he is a madman. And what others are may be a lesser madness, but the madness is there. The difference is only of degree, quantity, but not of quality. Unless you are ready to relax into your being as you are, you are not sane.I am ordinary, and I say to you Buddha is ordinary. And I say to you all the buddhas have always been ordinary. That is their specialness, because in this world nobody wants to be ordinary. That is their extraordinariness, because they are people who have chosen to be ordinary. That is their humbleness. Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek for theirs is the kingdom of God.” By “meek” he means exactly this: to be just what God has meant you to be; not to aspire to anything at all, to live in a relaxed state.It is good, Aniruddha, that your illusion is broken. Thank me for it, feel grateful for it, that I have not supported your illusion at all. If you carried it for so many months it was just your work. I was not a support to it.But his question shows that now he thinks I am ordinary so the problem is arising for him again. Then what is he doing here? Then he should go again to somebody else who is extraordinary. Now will be the decisive moment for him. If seeing that I am ordinary he understands the beauty of being ordinary, celebration will start. If he is feeling frustrated – as if I had deceived him, as if I had been pretending to be extraordinary and now he has found that I am not – then he will have new illusions. He will project his desires onto somebody else. He will find another screen and again he will be frustrated. And he will need bigger and bigger doses, and sooner or later he will be a victim of somebody who is there to exploit people, who is there to pretend, according to your illusions.That’s why I am so much against Satya Sai Baba: he is trying to help your projections. That is my criticism of his effort. He tries to go with your projections. He is not an independent man, he depends on you. You project and he will try to fulfill your projections – at least he will pretend that you are in the close vicinity of a special man who can do miracles, who can make things appear from nowhere.Now Aniruddha can become a victim of a man like Satya Sai Baba because then he will think this is special; no ordinary man can do it. That’s true, but ordinary magicians are doing it. But these tricks are very dangerous. They are very subtle in their exploitation. Aniruddha can easily become a victim of any charlatan, of any deceiver. Now will be the decisive moment for him. He will have to decide either to live with this man who is ordinary and drop all desire for extraordinariness and all projections and to become ordinary himself and let celebration happen, or he will have to project his illusions somewhere else.And then you can go on and on. That’s how you have been going on for centuries. For so many lives you have been going on and on: you simply change your screen, but you don’t drop your projection; you carry your projector and your whole film of hopes, dreams, desires. You just become frustrated with the screen – “This screen is not right” – so you find another screen. When are you going to drop the projector and the film? When are you going to burn the whole ego trip? In that very moment death has happened, and resurrection.Venu Gopal, you say, “I’m feeling a strange mixture of the two – a dying and a coming to life at the same time.” That’s how it will happen in the beginning: you will die a little bit and you will be born a little bit. Learn a lesson from it: die totally so that you can be born totally. And then you know: each moment one has to die so that each moment one becomes again fresh, young – is born. This can happen each moment, and a true life consists of death-resurrection, death-resurrection. Each moment it happens. Each moment one has to die to the past, only then does the present become available – and there is celebration, and there is great joy, and there is great flowering.The golden flower blooms if you are ready to die to the past, if you are utterly in the present. And you can be utterly in the present only if you have no desire to be anywhere else in the future, if you have no desire to be somebody else. This I call enlightenment.The second question:Osho,Why is love so essential for spiritual growth?Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity – just like man-woman, life-death, darkness-light, summer-winter, outer-inner, yin-yang, the body and the soul, the creation and the creator. Love and awareness is the highest form of polarity – the last polarity – from where transcendence happens.Love needs two. It is a relationship; it is outgoing, it is energy moving outwards. There is an object: the beloved. The object becomes more important than yourself. Your joy is in the object. If your beloved is happy, you are happy; you become part of the object. There is a kind of dependence, and the other is needed. Without the other you will feel lonely.Awareness is just being with yourself in utter aloneness, just being alert. It is not a relationship, the other is not needed at all. It is not outgoing, it is ingoing.Love is the movement of the light out of your being. Awareness is the reverse movement: the backward movement of the light to the source again, returning to the source. This is what Jesus calls repentance – not in the sense of repentance, but in the sense of returning to the source. Patanjali calls it pratyahara, coming back home; Mahavira calls it pratikraman, coming back to oneself – the circle is complete. The Secret of the Golden Flower is based, totally based, on this backward movement of your energy. But the backward movement is possible only if you have moved forward. You have to go into love, you have to relate in order to come to yourself. It looks paradoxical.The child has to get lost into the world to become a child again. The innocence has to go into all the turmoil of cunningness and calculation to become really innocent again. A child is innocent, but his innocence is that of ignorance. A saint is also innocent, but his innocence is not of ignorance but of experience, of ripeness, of maturity. He is again innocent, but that “again” has great importance – he cannot be distracted from his innocence anymore. The child is bound to get distracted: every Adam has to leave the Garden of Eden, the world of innocence. Every Adam has to go into the world, into the mud of it, because only there will you mature, will you ripen. Only there will you learn, only there will you see in contrast the beauty of innocence, will you understand the splendor of innocence. The day you have learned the beauty of innocence, you have become aware of it, you will have come back home.The Adam cannot become Christ if he does not leave paradise; he will remain a child. Adam means outward movement, Christ means inward movement. Adam means love, Christ means awareness. The circle is complete. The difference between Adam and Christ is only that of direction. Adam is going extrovertedly, and the same person, when he turns back and becomes introverted, is Christ. Adam is the potential Christ, Christ is the actualized Adam.Love is very essential. You have to lose yourself to gain yourself. Love is the only possibility of losing yourself totally. When you are lost totally, then you will be able to remember what you have done.It is like a fish which has always lived in the ocean: it will never become aware of the ocean and the benediction of it; it has to be caught in a net, a fisherman has to come to take it out, throw it on the shore. Only on the shore, in the hot sun, will it remember for the first time. Although it lived for years in the ocean it was oblivious, completely oblivious of the ocean. Now the thirst, the heat, makes it mindful of the ocean. A great longing arises to go back to the ocean. It makes every effort to jump back into the ocean.That is the state of a seeker: thirsty to go back into the original source. And if this fish can enter the ocean again…can’t you imagine the celebration! And the fish has lived in the ocean forever but there was no celebration. Now there is the possibility of celebration; now it will feel so delighted, so blessed.Love is a must for spiritual growth. And moreover, love functions as a mirror. It is very difficult to know yourself unless you have looked at your face in the eyes of someone who loves you. Just as you have to look into the mirror to see your physical face, you have to look in the mirror of love to see your spiritual face. Love is a spiritual mirror: it nourishes you, it integrates you, it makes you ready for the inner journey, it reminds you of your original face.In moments of deep love there are glimpses of the original face, although those glimpses are coming as reflections. Just as on a full moon night you see the moon reflected in the lake, in the silent lake, so love functions as a lake. The moon reflected in the lake is the beginning of the search for the real moon. If you have never seen the moon reflected in the lake you may never search for the real moon. You will go again and again into the lake to search for the moon because in the beginning you will think, “This is where the real moon is, somewhere deep down at the bottom of the lake.” You will dive again and again and you will come up empty-handed; you will not find the moon there.Then one day it will dawn on you that maybe this moon is just a reflection. That is a great insight. Then you can look upwards. Then where is the moon if this is a reflection? If it is a reflection you have to look in the opposite direction. The reflection was there, deep in the lake – the real must be somewhere above the lake. For the first time you look upwards and the journey has started.Love gives you glimpses of meditation, reflections of the moon in the lake – although they are reflections, not true. So love can never satisfy you. In fact, love will make you more and more dissatisfied, discontented. Love will make you more and more aware of what is possible, but it will not deliver the goods. It will frustrate you, and only in deep frustration, the possibility of turning back to your own being. Only lovers know the joy of meditation. Those who have never loved and have never been frustrated in love, those who have never dived into the lake of love in search of the moon and are never frustrated, will never look up to the real moon in the sky; they will never become aware of it.The person who loves is bound to become religious sooner or later. But the person who does not love – the politician, for example, who cannot love any person, he loves only power – will never become religious. Or the person who is obsessed with money, who loves only money, who knows only one love, love of money, will never become religious. It will be very difficult for him for so many reasons. Money can be possessed; you can have money and you can possess it. It is easy to possess money, it is difficult to possess a beloved – impossible, in fact. You will try to possess, but how can you possess a living person? The living person will resist in every way, will fight to the last. Nobody wants to lose their freedom.Love is not as valuable as freedom is. Love is a great value, but not higher than freedom. So one would like to be loving, but one would not like to be imprisoned by love. Hence, sooner or later you become frustrated: you try to possess, and the more you try to possess, the more love becomes impossible and the more the other starts going away from you. The less you possess, the closer you feel to the other. If you don’t possess at all, if there is freedom flowing between the lovers, there is great love.Firstly, the effort to possess a person is bound to fail; in that frustration you will be thrown back on yourself. Secondly, if you have learned not to possess the person, if you have learned that freedom is a higher value than love, a far more superior value than love, then sooner or later you will see: freedom will bring you to yourself, freedom will become your awareness, meditation.Freedom is another aspect of meditation. Either start with freedom and you will become aware, or start with awareness and you will become free. They go together. Love is a kind of subtle bondage – they go together – but it is an essential experience, very essential for maturity.There is a beautiful definition of realness through love, in Margery William’s beautiful book The Velveteen Rabbit.“What is real?” asked the Rabbit one day. “Does it mean having that buzz inside of you and a stick-out handle?”“Real isn’t how you were made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become real.”“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are real, you don’t mind being hurt.”“Does it happen all at once like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”“It doesn’t happen all at once.” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand…. Once you are real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”Love makes you real; otherwise you remain just a fantasy, a dream, with no substance in it. Love gives you substance, love gives you integrity, love makes you centered. But it is only half of the journey; the other half has to be completed in meditation, in awareness. But love prepares you for the other half. Love is the beginning half and awareness is the ending half. Between these two you attain to God. Between love and awareness, between these two banks, the river of being flows.Don’t avoid love. Go through it, with all its pains. Yes, it hurts, but if you are in love it doesn’t matter. In fact, all those hurts strengthen you. Sometimes it really hurts badly, terribly, but all those wounds are necessary to provoke you, to challenge you, to make you less sleepy. All those dangerous situations are necessary to make you alert. Love prepares the ground, and in the soil of love the seed of meditation can grow – and only in the soil of love.So those who escape from the world out of fear will never attain to meditation. They can sit in the Himalayan caves for lives together, they will not attain to meditation. It is not possible – they have not earned it. First it has to be earned in the world; first they have to prepare the soil. And it is only love that prepares the soil.Hence my insistence for my sannyasins not to renounce the world. Be in it, take its challenge, accept its dangers, its hurts, wounds. Go through it, don’t avoid it. Don’t try to find a short-cut because there is none. It is a struggle, it is arduous, it is an uphill task, but that is how one reaches the peak.And the joy will be more, far more, than if you are dropped on the peak by a helicopter, because you will reach there ungrown; you will not be able to enjoy it. Just think of the difference…. You try hard to reach Everest – it is so dangerous, every possibility of dying on the way, every possibility of never reaching to the peak – hazardous, dangerous, death waiting for you at each step; so many traps and so many possibilities of being defeated rather than being successful – out of one hundred possibilities there is only one possibility that you may reach. But the closer you come to the peak, the higher the joy rises in you, your spirit soars high. You earn it, it is not free, and the more you have paid for it, the more you will enjoy it. Then think: you can be dropped from a helicopter on the top. You will stand on the top and you will just look silly, stupid – what are you doing here? Within five minutes you will be finished. You will say, “So I have seen it! There is nothing much here!”The journey creates the goal. The goal is not sitting there at the end of the journey, the journey creates it at each step. The journey is the goal. The journey and the goal are not separate, they are not two things. The end and the means are not two things. The end is spread over all the way; all the means contain the end in them.So never miss any opportunity of living, of being alive, of being responsible, of being committed, of getting involved. Don’t be a coward. Face life, encounter it, and then slowly slowly something inside you will crystallize.Yes, it takes time. The Skin Horse is right: “Generally, by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand…. Once you are real, you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”It is forever, but one has to earn it. Let me repeat it: in life you cannot get anything free, and if you do get it, it is useless. You have to pay for it, and the more you pay for it the more you will get out of it. If you can risk your whole life in love, great will be your attainment: love will send you back to yourself, it will give you a few reflections of meditation. The first glimpses of meditation happen in love, and then a great desire arises in you to attain to those glimpses – not only as glimpses but as states so that you can live in those states forever and forever. Love gives you the taste of meditation.A loving, orgasmic experience is the first experience of samadhi, of ecstasy. It will make you more thirsty. Now you will know what is possible and now you cannot be satisfied with the mundane. The sacred has penetrated you, the sacred has reached your heart. God has touched your heart, you have felt that touch. Now you would like to live in that moment forever, you would like that moment to become your whole life. It becomes. And unless it becomes, man remains discontented.Love on the one hand will give you great joy, and on the other hand will give you a thirst for eternal joy.The third question:Osho,Why do you live like a king?Why not? I am an old Jew! You know Jews? – if you ask them a question, they answer it with another question.There is a famous story about a king. He had many Jews in his court because they were rich people, but he was very annoyed by their habit. Whenever he asked anything, they would answer it with another question. He became so tired, so irritated that he asked his Grand Vizier, “What to do about these people? They cannot be thrown out of the court, but they annoy me very much. Whenever I ask something they always answer with another question.”The Vizier said, “It will be good if we ask the rabbi. Call the rabbi. He is a wise old man; he will help us and he will be able to explain to us too what is the cause of this Jewish habit.”So the rabbi was called and the king asked the rabbi, “Why do you Jews always answer a question with another question?”And the rabbi said, “Why not?”You ask me, “Why do you live like a king?”There are four possibilities after you become enlightened. The first possibility Janak and Marcus Aurelius followed: they were born as kings, after they became enlightened they remained kings.The second possibility Jesus and Kabir followed: they were born as beggars, after they became enlightened they remained beggars.The third possibility was followed by Mahavira and the Buddha: they were born as kings, when they became enlightened they remained beggars.Then, I thought, for a change…. I was born as a beggar, I decided to live as a king. That is the fourth possibility and there is no other, so I am finishing the last. Somebody had to do it, otherwise history remains incomplete.One Zen master was dying. Just before he breathed his last he opened his eyes and asked his disciples, “Please help me to find an alternative way to die.”They asked, “What kind of question is this?”He said, “Should I die lying down or sitting or standing? Have you ever heard of anybody dying sitting?”They said, “Yes, we have heard that many people, particularly Buddhist monks – they sit in a siddhasan, in the full lotus posture, and die. We have heard of many dying in a sitting posture.”“Have you ever heard,” the master asked, “of anybody dying standing?”They said, “It is very rare, but we have heard one story that once a master died standing.”Then he said, “Then no other alternative is left. I will die standing on my head.”And he died – standing on his head. Somebody has to fulfill it. All alternatives have to be tried.The fourth question:Osho,My question concerns the quantum leap. How to jump, where to jump, and who or what is doing the jumping?The meaning of the quantum leap is that you find nobody there inside you who can jump, you find no place where you can jump and you find no means to jump. That is the meaning of a quantum leap. The quantum leap is not a leap, it is a disappearance. The quantum leap is utter discontinuity with the past. If it is continuous it is just a leap, not quantum. That is the meaning of the word quantum.You have been somebody up to now; if you do something, then you will remain continuous with the past because the doer will be the past. If you ask how to take the quantum leap, who will use the methodology? The old, the past, the mind, the accumulated mind will use the methodology. But how will you become new? It is the old trying to become new. You may have new clothes, a new face, new varnish, but you will remain the same; you continue. A quantum leap is a moment of understanding that the past is no more there, that it is just a memory, just a figment of imagination now; it has no reality. If the past is no more there, who are you? – because you consist only of your past.Krishnamurti says, “The process of thought creates the thinker.” And he is right – it is not vice versa. Ordinarily you think, “I am a thinker, hence the process of thought.” It is not so. There is no thinker in you but only a process of thought. And when you think about the whole process of thought and you take it together, the thinker is born.The thinker is not there. Let thoughts disappear, and as thoughts disappear, the thinker will disappear. If there is no thought, there is no thinker inside. So “thinker” is nothing but another name for the whole thought continuum. If you can understand this – that the past is just nothing but thoughts – suddenly a great emptiness will arise in you, a great abyss. You are not, nobody is there inside. This is what Buddha calls anatta, no-self, no ego. In that moment when you cannot find yourself, the quantum leap has happened.The Emperor Wu of China asked Bodhidharma, “My mind remains very tense, in anxiety. I am always feeling restless, uneasy. I never find any peace of mind. Help me, sir.”Bodhidharma looked into his eyes. And that was not an ordinary look – Bodhidharma was a very ferocious master. The king was a very brave man, had fought in many battles and won, but he started trembling when Bodhidharma looked into his eyes.And he said, “Okay, you come tomorrow, early in the morning at four o’clock, and bring your mind to me and I will put it at ease forever.”When the king was going down the steps, Bodhidharma shouted again, “Listen, don’t forget to bring your mind! Come at four o’clock and bring your mind. And I am going to put it at ease forever!”The king was a little puzzled. “What does he mean, ‘Bring the mind, don’t forget’? Can I come without the mind too? I and my mind are the same. This man looks mad! And the way he looked at me…those ferocious eyes…. And he looks murderous too! And going alone, early in the morning at four o’clock when it is dark, to this madman…and one never knows what he will do, how he will treat me.”But he could not sleep. Many times he decided not to go, but there was a great attraction too, something like a great magnetic pull. The man was ferocious, but there was great love in his eyes too. Both were there – his eyes were like swords and also like lotuses. He could not resist. He said, “I have to take this risk.” And at four o’clock he had to go.Bodhidharma was waiting with his big staff. He told the king, “Sit in front of me. And where is your mind? I have told you to bring it with you!”And the king said, “What nonsense are you talking about? If I am here, so my mind is here. Mind is something inside me. How can I forget it? How can I ‘bring’ it?”Bodhidharma said, “So one thing is certain: that mind is inside. So close your eyes and go inside and try to find it. And whenever you catch it, just tell me and I will put it at rest forever. But first it has to be caught, only then can I treat it.”The king closed his eyes. The whole thing was stupid, but there was nowhere to go now – it had to be done. He closed his eyes. And the master was sitting there with his staff – and he might beat or he might hit, so it was no ordinary situation. He could not go to sleep. He had not slept the whole night – he had been thinking of whether to come or not to come…. And the presence of the master and the silence of the forest and the darkness of the night and the whole weird situation: that this man could even cut his head…he became very alert! The danger was such that he became very attentive. For the first time in his life he looked inside himself.But the book of The Secret of the Golden Flower says, he turned his light inwards for the first time: he looked inside, he searched inside – he really searched, sincerely he searched – and the more he searched, the more aware he became that there is no mind. There is nobody inside – it is an empty house – we had only believed in it. We have accepted others’ belief about the soul, the self, the ego. We never looked at it, we never checked it. And the more he found that there is nobody to be found, the more happy, joyous he became. His face relaxed, a great grace surrounded him. Hours passed, but for him there was no question of time at all. He was sitting and sitting, and enjoying this blissfulness that he was tasting for the first time in his life. Something immensely delightful was descending in him.Then the sun started rising, and with the first rays of the sun Bodhidharma said to him, “Sir, it is time enough. Now open your eyes. Have you found yourself inside or not?”And the king opened his eyes, looked at the master, saw the beauty that the ferociousness was out of compassion, saw the love, bowed down, touched the feet of the master and said, “You have put it at rest forever. It is not there. Now I know that I was creating an unnecessary fuss about somebody who doesn’t exist at all.”This is the quantum leap. Searching inside you find you are not; then there is no question of “how” and no question of “where.” It has already happened.I would like to tell you: just for a few hours every day, close your eyes – become as alert as Emperor Wu became; remember me just in front of you with a sword in my hand, ready to cut you at any moment if you fall asleep – and go in. And one day, the quantum leap. You will know only when it has happened. You don’t do it, it is nothing of your doing; it is a happening. You can’t do it because you are the hindrance – how can you do it? There is nowhere to jump, nobody to jump, no method to jump. When all these three things have been realized, it has happened.Then one lives as an emptiness, utterly empty and yet utterly full.The fifth question:Osho,I desire to become a sannyasin, but at the very idea a great fear grips my heart. It is so new. And moreover, I had not come here to become a disciple, I had just come to see a friend who is a sannyasin.But you are caught, you are trapped! Now it will be very difficult to escape. It is always difficult to choose the new, but only those who choose the new, live. To choose the old is to choose death, not life. To choose the familiar is to remain in the prison of the familiar. To choose the known is to avoid really the unknown that is knocking on the door. To choose the known is to reject God, because God is always unknown – not only unknown, but unknowable.God is always fresh, as fresh as the dewdrops. God is always utterly new, unfamiliar, unmapped, unscheduled, uncalculated. God comes only as the unknown. And if you become afraid, if you shrink back, then you have to live in your so-called dark hole.What is your past that you cling to? What is there to cling to, except that it is familiar? But it is all misery, it is all tragedy. But people even cling to miseries if they are familiar – they look friendly. Even if health is knocking on your door, you don’t listen to the knock; you cling to your tuberculosis, to your cancer, because they are familiar, you have lived with them so long, it looks almost like a betrayal to leave them and become healthy.That is why people are clinging to miseries. Even when opportunities arise, when miseries can be dropped and the celebration can start, they continue to cling to the misery. They persist in it, they insist on it. Even if it drops they catch hold of it again and again. If one misery disappears, they create a similar misery, immediately. They don’t even give a little interval for joy to enter in their being.But remember, only those who choose the new, live. Life means readiness to go into the uncalculated, unscheduled. Life means to be ready always to listen to the challenge that comes from the unknown source. It is dangerous, but to live is dangerous. The most secure and safe place in the world is the grave – there, nothing ever happens.In a small village where Mulla Nasruddin lives, the municipal committee was thinking of creating a wall around the graveyard. Mulla Nasruddin was also a member of the committee. He stood up, and he said, “There is no need.”The whole committee looked puzzled, because everybody was in favor of making a wall around the graveyard. People don’t want to see graves and people don’t want to see death. People don’t want to become aware that death is. That’s why graveyards are made outside the town, far away. When you have to go there, only then do you go there, otherwise it is better to avoid.The village had grown bigger and the graveyard that used to be outside the town was no longer outside the town – the town had grown and spread. So the whole committee was agreeing, but Mulla said, “There is no need.”And the president asked, “Why do you say that there is no need?”He said, “For two reasons. One: those who are outside – they don’t want to go in so they don’t need any wall to prevent them. And two: those who are inside – they cannot come out. So what is the point of making a wall? The wall is needed only to prevent either those who are in from coming out or to prevent those who are out from coming in. Those who are out, they don’t want to go in; they go in only in utter helplessness. When they have to go, when they have to be carried by four persons, then they go. And once they are in they cannot come out – nobody has ever heard of anybody coming out. It is pointless.”The grave is the most safe and secure place in the world, because nothing new will ever happen there. Remember it: don’t become a grave.Sannyas is new for you, and you did not come here to become a sannyasin. Do you think all those who are sannyasins here came to become sannyasins? They have been caught unawares! Before they could escape I caught hold of their hearts. You are also caught now. If you escape, you escape at your own risk. You will repent forever and you will feel sorry forever, because there was an opportunity of being transformed, an opportunity to learn the ways of let-go, an opportunity of falling into your own being, resting into your own being, an opportunity to bloom. But you became afraid because it is new.Meditate on these lines of Robert Frost:Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel both,And be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,And because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that, the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.Always choose the new, the less traveled by. Always choose the unknown, the less traveled by, “And that has made all the difference.”Life grows only by choosing challenges. Life grows only by going into the storms. Life grows only by risking, gambling.Sannyas needs courage. The old sannyas was not so dangerous. People think my sannyas is easier than the old, ancient idea of sannyas. They are utterly wrong. The old sannyas was very simple because it expected – not only expected but demanded – that you renounce the world. It was simple. You went into a monastery, you lived there – undisturbed, undistracted by the world. Meditation became your whole life with no distractions. It was a monotonous life. The words monastery and monotony come from the same root, so does the word monk. Life was settled, monotonous, repetitive, the same, and the world was left far behind. It was easy.My sannyas is far more complex. You have to live in the marketplace and yet live as if you were living in a monastery. You have to accept all the distractions of life and yet remain undistracted. You have to be in the world and not be of it.I have thrown a great challenge to you. The old concept of sannyas was not challenging enough. It was very appealing to the cowards, to the escapists – those who were weary of life, those who were tired of life, those who were incapable of life, those who were feeling incompetent, inferior somehow. It became very attractive to the inferior, the untalented, the unintelligent.If you go to the Himalayas or into a monastery and look at the monks, you will be surprised. One thing you are bound to find: their faces show no signs of intelligence, their eyes don’t shine with any light from the beyond. They look dull, insipid, stupid, unintelligent, incompetent. They have escaped from life.It is life that gives you sharpness, otherwise your sword will never be sharp. It is the struggle in life that provokes all the springs of your talents to come to the surface. You have to be intelligent to survive. In the monastery you are protected by the monastery, by the sect, by the church. You need not make any effort to survive. Food is given, clothes are given, and you just have to do some prayer, some chanting, and you have to repeat, parrot-like, the words of others. Naturally, if one becomes unintelligent there is no wonder in it. It will be a wonder if somebody becomes intelligent there, because all the opportunities for intelligence have been prevented – because they are the same opportunities which are opportunities for distraction too.Distraction is an opportunity. You can be distracted – that is for you to decide – or you can remain undistracted, then it will give you centering, crystallization.My sannyas is the most complicated phenomenon that has ever happened on the earth because I don’t say to you leave the world. I say live in it, indulge in it, love it, enjoy it, go as deeply as possible so your intelligence is sharpened, your life provoked, your dormant sources of energies become dynamic, flowing. And yet, keep yourself centered in your being – a watcher on the hills. Remain an actor and let the life be just a drama where you are fulfilling a certain role. But don’t get identified with the role. Remember continuously that this is a role. That you are a carpenter or a doctor or an engineer or a teacher, husband, wife, mother, father, son – that these are all roles, and the earth is a great stage and a great drama is on. God is the author of it and the director of it, and you are just actors, participating. When the curtain falls, your roles will disappear. You will again be just a pure being, you will not be the role that you had played.The world has to be transformed into an opportunity to remember yourself, for self-remembering. Hence sannyas is arduous. And I know that everybody hesitates before they take the jump. But if the desire has arisen, if the longing is there, don’t kill it, because that will be suicidal. Experiment with it, explore this new dimension. You have lived one way – what is the point of going on repeating it again and again? Live this new style too. Who knows? – you may come across God on this way. Who knows? – fulfillment may await you on this path.The last question:Osho,Why do I love, then hate and then show indifference to the same person?You don’t know yet what love is. You don’t know yet that many other things masquerade as love, play tricks on you – many things. Yes, sometimes even hate can have the mask of love, sometimes sheer sexuality pretends to be love. And this must be so.You say, “Why do I love, then hate, and then show indifference to the same person?”You have not loved yet; it is just a sexual appetite in you. And I call it appetite knowingly. When you are hungry you are interested in food. The aroma coming from Vrindavan canteen attracts you, everything else becomes unimportant. You find yourself moving towards Vrindavan. Once you have eaten, all interest in food disappears, and if you have eaten too much, you even become repelled by food. If you have eaten too much, more than was needed, you feel nauseous – a sickness arising in you. And when you are satiated with food, you can pass by Vrindavan – you don’t smell the aromas, you can go on thinking a thousand and one thoughts and you can remain indifferent to food.Your love is nothing but sexual appetite. That’s why first you feel attracted, “in great love.” That attraction you call love. Just as people say they love ice cream, that’s the way you love people. But how long can you love ice cream? You can eat, but how much?Once I stayed with a family in Bombay. The people are beautiful people, but they have a strange idea of how to serve a guest. Because I was staying there, they invited many people – they gave a feast – and then the four brothers started forcing each guest to eat more and more. They actually started physically forcing food into people’s mouths, and people were saying, “No!” looking very aghast and puzzled, “What is happening?” And there were four persons on each guest!I asked, “What is the matter? What are you doing? If they don’t want to eat, leave them to themselves!”They said, “But this is our tradition. In our family, unless the guest starts fighting, we have to…otherwise we have not been real hosts.”And this was their idea of being a real host: unless the guest starts fighting…. And that actually happened. When the guest…how long can you suffer? There is a limit! The body is not infinite and the stomach has a limit. And the guests started shouting. And they were very happy because they had been good hosts.First, you think you are in love, but that is not love – just a physical appetite, a bodily phenomenon, a chemical phenomenon – nothing to do with love.Love is a very different thing. It has not necessarily anything to do with sex. Sex may be a part of it, may not be a part of it. You can be in love with a person without any sexual relationship. That’s what we call friendship. It has disappeared from the world. Now friendship has almost disappeared from the world because we know only one kind of love, which is sexual. A non-sexual love has become non-existent. In fact, that is love. Friendship is a deeper love than sexual relationship because friendship gives and asks nothing in return.Sexual relationship is mutual exploitation: you are exploiting the other’s body and he or she is exploiting your body – both are using each other. But just to say it is pure sex looks ugly so we call it love. It will be very good if you call it simple sex – it will be true, sincere – and there will be no problem arising, because then you will know it is appetite. You are fulfilled one moment and then, if the other goes on demanding and you go on playing the game, there will be hate because you will be repulsed. And sooner or later you will become indifferent, because you have explored the other’s body and he has explored your body – now there is no more to it, the territories are known. Now there is no more intrigue, no more mystery to go into. You are finished: indifference arises.What you call love is just sex. Call it sex, don’t call it love. And it will be good to call it sex because then you know it is sex – there is no need to pretend. If you don’t pretend, it will not turn into hate. If you pretend that it is love and it is not, sooner or later you will see it is turning into hate. If you don’t pretend, if you call it simply sex, you will be grateful to the other, you will not hate the other. And it will never become indifference, you will always feel thankful.But calling it by a big name, “love,” creates the whole trouble. Then the problem arises – why does it turn into hate? Love never turns into hate. Love goes on becoming more and more love. Love ultimately becomes prayer, and God.But this is not love. The first thing, my suggestion is: call it simple, pure sex. And there is nothing wrong in pure, simple sex; it is natural. There is no need to hide it behind the beautiful word love, there is no need to create a cloud of romance around it. Be simple, be true, sincere. If this is done, half the work is done. Then one day you will be able to see the difference. One day you will fall in love and you will see there is not physiological, chemical attraction only, but something higher, something superior – two vibes falling in tune, two spirits feeling close, two beings feeling harmonious.My own words are: if two bodies are feeling attracted to each other, it is sex; if two minds are feeling attracted to each other, it is love; if two souls are feeling attracted to each other, it is prayer. And prayer is the highest form. Sex is the lowest form. Don’t think of the lower as the higher, otherwise you remain misguided.A man and woman had been going together for some time and finally she agreed to go to bed with him. While going to his apartment, they passed some swank shops. The woman admired some expensive Italian shoes.“Don’t worry, baby, I’ll get them for you,” he said. Then she saw a real Parisian dress.“Don’t worry, baby, I’ll get that for you, too.” Finally, a mink coat caught her eye. “Don’t worry, baby, I’ll get that coat for you.”They finally got to the apartment, made love, and in leaving, again passed the shops.“There is the coat you are going to buy me,” she said.“Come on away from there,” he snapped.“Oh, and there is the dress.”“Come on away from there,” was again the reply. Finally she saw the shoes and pointed them out. Again he responded, “Come on away from there.”She began to cry and sobbed, “I don’t understand. Before we made love, you promised me all those things. Now, just two hours later, you are breaking your promises.”“Baby, it’s like this. When I am hard I am soft, but when I am soft I am hard.”Enough for today.

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

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-09/

Master Lu-tsu said:Release is in the eye….The seed-blossoms of the human body must be concentrated upward in the empty space.Immortality is contained in this and also the overcoming of the world.The light is not in the body alone, nor is it only outside the body. Mountains and rivers and the great earth are lit by sun and moon; all that is this light. Therefore, it is not only within the body. Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment, and all movements of the spirit are likewise this light; therefore, it is not just something out-side the body. The light-flower of heaven and earth fills all the thousand spaces. But also the light-flower of the individual body passes through heaven and covers the earth. Therefore, as soon as the light is circulating, heaven and earth, mountains and rivers, all are circulating with it at the same time. To concentrate the seed-flower of the human body above in the eyes, that is the great key of the human body. Children, take heed! If for a day you do not practice meditation, this light streams out, who knows whither? If you only meditate for a quarter of an hour, by it you can do away with the ten thousand aeons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness. This marvelous magic cannot be fathomed.But when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine. Everything depends on there being no interruption. The beginning and the end of the practice must be one. In between there are cooler and warmer moments, that goes without saying. But the goal must be to reach the vastness of heaven and the depths of the sea, so that all methods seem quite easy and taken for granted. Only then have we mastered it.An old fable has it that when God was creating the world he was approached by four questioning angels. “How are you doing it?” the first one asked. The second queried, “Why?” The third one said, “May I have it when you finish?” The fourth one said, “Can I help?”The first one was the question of the scientist, the second, the philosopher’s, the third, the politician’s, and the fourth was the question of the religious one.The scientific inquiry into existence is that of detached observation. The scientist has to be objective. To be objective he has to remain uninvolved; he cannot participate, because the moment he becomes a participant he becomes involved. Hence the scientist can only know the outer circumference of life and existence. The innermost core will remain unavailable to science; its very methodology prohibits it.The philosopher only speculates, he never experiments. He goes on asking ad infinitum, “Why?” And the question is such that whatsoever the answer, it can be asked again – “Why?” There is no possibility of any conclusion through philosophy. Philosophy remains in a state of non-conclusion. It is a futile activity, it leads nowhere.The politician simply wants to possess the world, to own it. He is the most dangerous of all because he is the most violent. His interest in life is not in life itself but in his own power. He is power-hungry, power-mad; he is a maniac, he is destructive. The moment you possess something alive you kill it, because the moment something becomes a property it is no longer alive. Possess a tree and it is no longer alive. Possess a woman or a man and you have killed them. Possess anything and death is the outcome, because only death can be possessed.Life is freedom. It remains basically free. You cannot possess it, you cannot put it into the bank, you cannot draw a line around it. You cannot say, “This is mine”; to say so is disrespectful, to say so is egoistic, to say so is mad.Life possesses us. How can we possess it? We have to be possessed by life more and more. The whole gestalt has to change: from being possessive one has to become capable of being possessed by the whole.The politician never comes to know the truth of life.The religious person participates. He dances with life, he sings with existence, he helps life, he is surrendered to existence and he is not detached and aloof. He does not really ask any question, he is not after knowledge; his whole effort is how to be in harmony with existence, how to be totally one with it. Hence the Eastern word for the ultimate experience: samadhi.It comes from two words. Sam – sam means together with. The same root “sam” has moved into English too; it is in “sympathy,” it is in “symphony.” A little bit changed it is in “synthesis,” “synchronicity.” Sam means together with. Adhi means the lord, God. Samadhi means union with God, to be one with God. And that is exactly the meaning of the English word religion. It means to become one with existence; not to be divided, not to remain separate but to become one. And only in this oneness does one come to know, see, experience and be.Religion is also a great experiment – the greatest, in fact – but with a difference. Science experiments with the object, religion experiments with the subject itself. Its whole concern is: Who am I?One should begin from the beginning. Unless I know myself, I am not going to know anything else. If deep down I remain ignorant, then my whole knowledge is just garbage. It is based on ignorance, it is rooted in ignorance. First the light has to happen inside me and then it can spread, then it can go to the very boundaries of existence – if there are any boundaries. But first this has to happen within me. The first flame has to come from my subjectivity. When my center is full of light, then only will whatsoever is known really be known. Unless you know yourself, unless the knower is there, how can you know anything else? If you yourself are in deep darkness, all the lights that you have created outside are deceptions, illusions.The religious quest is the greatest quest in existence. A few things have to be understood about this quest.The first thing: religion cannot creep; it has to dance or die. And that’s what is not happening in the world – religion is not dancing, hence it has died. Religion is creeping and crawling; it has forgotten how to fly. Religion has become dogma. Dogma is death, it is a corpse. To be flowing and alive and flying, religion has to exist as an experience not as a theory, not as theology but as meditation – not as a philosophy about God but as a personal experience of God. And know perfectly well: to know about God is not to know God. You can go on knowing about and about, but you will never know God. To know about is to go round and round without penetrating the very center of it.Religion cannot creep, and religion is creeping. Christianity, Hinduism, Islam – they are all creeping. They have all become apologetic. They are all afraid of the scientific growth in the world. They have been fighting against science. They tried all that they could do to prevent scientific growth, but they failed. Now they try to get all the support from science – whatsoever they can manage – but they know perfectly well that they have become secondary. They can exist only if science supports them. They can exist only if scientific argument becomes a prop. This is creeping: religion is no more on its own ground, on its own feet; it needs support from science. It is living a borrowed existence, a borrowed life. Its time is gone.Why has it happened? Once a religion becomes dogma and is no more experience, it dies automatically. And a dead body cannot stand on its own, it needs support. All the churches and the temples are supported, they are not standing on their own.When there is a buddha he stands on his own. When there is a christ he stands on his own. Then religion dances, sings a song. Then it is alive, it blooms – there are a thousand and one flowers, and great fragrance is released.My effort here is to make religion dance again. There is no need for any support, because religion in itself is the greatest authentic experience: others should look towards religion for support, not religion towards others. If religion starts dancing, starts becoming alive, science will need its support, because science itself is losing ground. It is becoming uglier and uglier every day. It is becoming more and more life-negative every day. It is becoming more and more political every day. All that science discovers is possessed by the politician. And all that science discovers serves death; it is no more serving life. Ninety percent of scientific effort goes on war. Science is losing face. Unless religion starts dancing, even science will no longer have any future. Science will need some release of energy from religion to support it. And if religion can be alive again and science becomes a part, a shadow of religion, then only can it be free of the politician and his madness; otherwise it seems impossible.Man is coming closer and closer to the ultimate destruction of life on the earth. Only a release of religious energy can save him, can save humanity. What we are doing here may look like a very small experiment but its potential is infinite. The future of humanity depends on only one thing: if religion can again lead man, if religion can again become the central influence on man, if religion can again become humanity’s dream.And remember, it is a very difficult dream – almost impossible. To dream to be with God, to dream to be in God, is bound to be something like an impossible dream. Man has lost courage. His dreams are tiny now, his dreams are very mundane; he no longer dreams of the transcendental. And remember, if you stop dreaming about the transcendental, you will live a meaningless life.Meaning arises only in contact with the transcendental. Meaning arises only when you are part of a greater whole, when you are part of something higher than you, something bigger than you. When man tries to surpass himself, then there is religion. And that’s what I call the dance of religion: man trying to transcend himself. No other animal can do it, no other animal is capable of it: only man has the potential and the possibility to surpass himself. A few men have surpassed themselves; a few men have reached to the other shore.And when I am talking to you, I am talking from the other shore. Hence I am not saying it from borrowed knowledge, I am saying it from my own experience. I know the impossible can become possible. It has become possible in me, it can become possible in you. Once your inner being becomes full of light, once you know no darkness within yourself, then you are religious.Dream the impossible dream. It may look almost absurd in the beginning – it does look – but if it is strong enough, it transforms your reality.I have heard….Three trees once grew on a hillside, and as they swayed in the breeze they would dream what they would like to be.“I should like to be cut down one day,” said the first tree, “and turned into a baby’s cradle.”“I should like to be cut down one day,” said the second, “and become a great ship sailing the seas, carrying treasure and precious stones.”And the third said, “I should like to stand on a hilltop and point people to heaven.”One day the woodcutters came along and cut down the first tree. “Let’s make it into a cattle stall,” they said.“But I don’t wish to be a cattle stall,” cried the tree. “I want to be a baby’s cradle.” But they turned it into a cattle stall, and when the child Jesus was born they laid him gently in the cattle stall for there was nowhere else to put him. And the tree said, “Why this is far far more wonderful than ever I dreamed.”The woodcutters said of the second tree, “Let’s make this tree into a fishing boat.”But the tree said, “No! I don’t wish to be a fishing boat; I want to be a great ship carrying treasure and precious stones.” But they turned the tree into a fishing boat and put it on an island lake, and a fisherman called Simon Peter bought the boat, and Jesus sailed in the boat and taught the people from it. And the tree said, “Why, this is far far more wonderful than ever I dreamed.”And of the third tree they said, “Let’s make it into a cross.” But the tree said, “I don’t want to be a cross – a thing of shame on which men die. I want to stand on a hilltop and point people to heaven.” But they turned the tree into a cross and Jesus was nailed to that cross. And all down the years men have looked to that cross and it has pointed them to God.Even if trees can dream something, they become it, so what to say about man?Man has the greatest potential on the earth, in existence. If you are lacking something, it means you are lacking a great dream of surpassing yourself. You have become satisfied with the mundane. You have started creeping on the earth, crawling on the earth. You don’t look upwards. There is a great beyond calling you forth. There is a great beyond challenging you. And only that man is truly a man who accepts the challenge of the beyond. All others are only men in name, in form, but not really men.Be a man: accept the challenge of the unknown, of the beyond. Let it become a great dream in your being. That which you appear to be is only a seed and the seed has to fall into the soil and has to die, and has to become a tree and has to bloom.If you cut the seed, you will not find flowers there. That’s where science is missing the whole point – it goes on cutting the seed. It says, “You say this seed will bring great flowering? We will cut, dissect the seed and see.” And they cut and dissect the seed – and they have the methodology to dissect the seed – but no flower is found, so they say there is no flower. That’s how they have come to the conclusion that there is no God in existence, that there is no soul, that there is no beyond, that life is just an accident and there is no destiny to life.There is a famous saying of the Zen master, Ikkyu.“If you break open the cherry tree, where are the blossoms? But in springtime, how they bloom!”Wait for the springtime. If you want to see, then wait for the springtime; and then you will find a Buddha not a man, and you will find a Jesus not a man, and you will find a Krishna not a man. Then you will find the flower and the seed is no more found there; the seed has disappeared, its function fulfilled. It was protecting something of immense value; it was carrying a blueprint, now it is no more needed: the soil has been found, the spring has arrived, and the seed was courageous enough to die.Man’s ego is nothing but a seed. It is very protective. People ask me, “If ego is such a barrier towards God, then why in the first place does ego exist? If mind is such a barrier to God, then why does mind exist at all?” It exists to protect you, just as the hard shell of the seed exists to protect the potential. The potential is very soft; it will be destroyed if the hard shell is not around it. The hard shell is not the enemy. The hard shell will be the enemy only if the spring has come and the soil has been found, and the seed rejects death. If the hard shell says, “Now, I will go on protecting you, even against the spring. I will protect you against this soil,” then there is going to be trouble. That’s where the problem arises.The ego in itself is not a problem. The child needs it, otherwise the child will be very unprotected. He will not know how to survive in this world of struggle. He will not know how to protect himself against so many hazards. He is so soft, tender, he will die before he becomes a buddha. The ego helps him. The ego is a kind of armor, and so is the mind – it protects him.It is not your enemy. It is the enemy only when the moment has come and you are ready to move into meditation: you have found a master, you have found a method and you are ready, but the mind says, “No, I cannot die. Just think of all the blessings that I have showered upon you. Just think of all the benefits that I have given you. Just think of all that I have done for you and feel grateful! And don’t try to destroy me.” Then the problem arises: then the protector becomes destructive. Then you have to fight against your own mind, you have to fight against your own ego, you have to fight against your own armor, because the armor is no more needed. You have to release your inner potential – the spring has come. So when spring has come, only then is it a problem; otherwise it is not a problem, it is a help. The helpful can become a hindrance. When its time is gone, it has to go.Dream of the impossible: dream of surpassing yourself, dream of nirvana, dream of moksha, dream of the kingdom of God. Only then will you start working and moving towards it, and only then with that dream, will your feet have the quality of dance.Without the dream you will become dull. That’s why people are dragging. How can they dance? For what? Just to go every day to the office and work, and come back home and quarrel with the wife and listen to all the complaints of the children? And next day the same rut starts again – year in, year out. What is there to dance about? In fact, it is a miracle how man goes on living, why he does not commit suicide. What does he live for?There is nothing that is awaiting him, there is nothing that he can look up to. There is no star in the night; it is all darkness. It is a miracle how man goes on living, how he manages. The people who commit suicide seem to be more logical. The people who go on living seem to be very illogical. Miserable, bored, dragging – but they go on living. But it shows something. It shows one thing, that your innermost being knows that the possibility is there: any day you may become alert about the potential, about the possible, any day the dream will possess you – and then there will be meaning and there will be dance.“Religion is art,” said William Blake. “Religion is art, not money.” This is a very very pregnant statement. And only a man like William Blake could have made it. He is a mystic poet.What is art? “Art is a way,” he says, “of doing something” – painting, poetry, dancing, sculpture, music, pottery, weaving. “Art is a way of doing something.” – he does not say anything about creating oneself. But that is exactly what religion is. It is not painting, it is not poetry, it is not sculpture, it is not music, but something on the same lines, but beyond – of creating oneself. Religion is a way of doing something also – living, loving, seeing, being.All art is “making.” It is helping God to create. That’s why I call the man who said to God, “Can I help?”, the religious man. If you want to know the creator you will have to become a creator in some measure on your own. Poetry may not be religion proper, but it points in the right direction. When a poet is really in a creative state he knows something of religion – a faraway distant music – because when he is in a creative state, he is no more himself. He participates – although in a very small measure, but he participates in God: just a drop of divinity enters into him. That’s why great poets have always said, “When we write poetry, we are not the creators of it. We become possessed. Some unknown energy enters, sings, dances in us. We don’t know what it is.” When a painter is lost into his painting, he is utterly lost into his painting, his ego disappears. Maybe only for moments, but in those egoless moments God paints through him.If you participate in God, God participates in you. Art is an unconscious form of religion. Religion is conscious art. Art is as if you are religious in a dream, but it is pointing in the right direction. The artist is the nearest to the religious. But it is not understood that way. You don’t think of a poet as religious or a painter as religious; on the contrary, if somebody fasts, tortures his body, makes his being ugly, you start thinking that he is religious. He is simply being violent with himself. He is just suicidal, he is neurotic, and you think he is religious.Neurotics become mahatmas: they are respected and worshipped as saints; they are not religious at all. The difference between a so-called saint and a murderer is not much. The murderer murders somebody else, and your so-called saint murders himself. But both do the same thing: both are violent, both are destructive. And whenever you are destructive you are farthest from God, because God is creativity. To me, aesthetics is the closest neighbor of religiousness, not ethics.Lenin is reported to have said, “Ethics will be the aesthetics of the future.” I say no, just the contrary: aesthetics will be the ethics of the future. Beauty is going to be the truth of the future, because beauty can be created. And a beautiful person who loves beauty, who lives beauty, who creates beauty is moral – and with no effort. His morality is not a cultivated morality; it is just his aesthetic sense that makes him moral. He cannot kill because he cannot think of killing as being beautiful. He cannot cheat, he cannot be dishonest, because all these things make him feel ugly. His criterion is beauty. And I agree with William Blake that religion is art.All art is making. All making necessitates a kind of faith. You see what is not there and work in such a way that what was invisible, intangible, inaudible is given shape in time and space. What is produced will be apparent to the senses – a painting, a poem, or a garden. Art is not to be confused, however, with the object it produces. It is a beautiful distinction to be remembered. It will help you immensely to understand religion.Art is not a painting or a piece of sculpture. What art dealers buy and sell are works of art, not art itself. Works of art are a form of property. Just as art is not the same thing as works of art, so religion is not to be confused with the objects and effects it produces – such as dogmas, doctrines, Bibles, Korans, Gitas, churches, temples, cathedrals. These are works of art. You can call them works of the art of religion, but religion should not be confused with them.A church is a church. It may be beautiful, but it is not religion in itself. It is a by-product, a spin off. A Koran is a beautiful poem – but as a work of art, a spin off. Something happened in Mohammed’s heart – that was religion, but that remains invisible. Because something stirred in his soul, he started singing, he went into a mad expression. That’s exactly what he thought when for the first time alone on the mountains he started feeling the presence of God. He became so frightened, so afraid, he thought he had either gone mad or become a poet.He rushed home. He was in a feverish state, trembling. His wife thought he had suddenly got a high fever. She asked, “What has happened to you?” And he said, “Either I have gone mad or I have become a poet. Something tremendously great is happening and I don’t know what it is or from where it is coming. And I am so unworthy of it…I cannot believe my own eyes, and I cannot believe my own heart – what I am feeling. It is so immensely beautiful, so great, so vast, I am incapable of conceiving it.” That was religion.A few days fever, and Mohammed cooled down and settled into his new state, his ecstasy, his samadhi. And then the flow started: the beautiful Koran was born. But the Koran is a by-product, so is the Gita, so is the Dhammapada. Remember always that no scripture contains religion – cannot contain it. All scriptures are by-products of religion – shadows, footprints, left on the banks of time. But footprints are footprints.When Buddha walks on a sea beach, naturally, he will leave footprints, but those footprints are not Buddha himself. Those footprints are beautiful because they belong to Buddha – bow down to them – but don’t forget: they are just by-products, and you have to be a buddha, not just the worshipper of a footprint.Works of art are a form of property, that’s why you can sell them, purchase them; but you cannot sell art and you cannot purchase art. If you ask Pablo Picasso to sell you his art, it will be impossible. You may be ready to pay any fantastic price for it, but he cannot sell it. He can sell his paintings, but he cannot sell his art. There is no way of selling it because it is not a thing. It remains always invisible. Only effects become visible.God remains invisible, only in the world does he become visible. You are invisible, only the body is visible. That’s why Blake says religion is not money. He is right. He means religion is not property. Religion is not like that, religion is like love – you cannot buy it, sell it, or keep it in a bank. You cannot possess it; on the contrary, it possesses you.The work of art can be possessed; it is property, it is dead. You can learn the Koran and the Gita and the Bible, but you cannot learn religion. You have to live it – there is no way of learning it. You have to be possessed by God, you have to become available to God. You have to open up your being. You have to withdraw, you have to become empty so that God can enter and possess you totally. In that very possession, you have transcended humanity. You are no more a human being, you are a god – a christ, a buddha.These sutras are the secrets to help you release this buddhahood that you are carrying as a blueprint, that you are carrying in a seed form; how to help it bloom, how to help it become a great tree with great foliage and many flowers.The sutras.Master Lu-tsu said: Release is in the eye…This potential that I have been talking to you about, this buddhahood, this Christ-consciousness or Krishna-consciousness, or whatever you wish to call it, is in the third eye. Just between your two physical eyes there is an empty space, and that empty space is the seed of your being a god. Unless that third eye starts functioning, your potential will not be released.Hence,Master Lu-tsu said:Release is in the eye…Release means nirvana, moksha, deliverance, freedom. Release means enlightenment. If your third eye can start functioning – which is dormant, nonfunctioning, your energy has not reached up to it…. It is a mechanism – perfect, but without any energy reaching it. Your energy is flowing downward into your sexuality, into your greed, into your anger, into your worldly affairs – your energy is moving downwards and outwards. You don’t have enough energy to bring to the third-eye center. Unless you have an abundance of energy, it will not reach the third eye.You have to become a reservoir of energy. And when you become a reservoir and energy is not wasted, its level starts going higher and higher every day – one day it reaches the third eye. And the moment the energy touches the third eye, immediately, instantly, it starts functioning. And then you know, and then you see for the first time. Then you have the vision of life – what it is. And only through the third eye will you be able to know God, reality, that which is.Through the two physical eyes you know the world. And because the eyes are two, your world is divided – it is dual. Your two eyes make the world divided. The world in itself is not divided, but your way of seeing it divides it. It is like a ray passing through a prism. The ray is one; the moment it passes through a prism, it becomes seven, it is broken up into seven colors. That is how the rainbow is created: sunrays passing through drops of water hanging in the clouds. Those hanging drops function as prisms, and the sunrays passing through them are immediately split into seven colors.Your energy moves through your two eyes and the whole world becomes dual. Then you see day and night as opposite, life and death as opposite, love and hate as opposite, matter and consciousness as opposite. Your two eyes make all things dual and polar, and because of these two eyes you cannot see the oneness of existence. Unless your two eyes become one eye, you will never know the indivisible, the universal.The book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, says: energy going outwards becomes dual; if you bring it backwards it becomes again one – it loses duality, it becomes non-dual. When energy moves back from the two eyes, it starts falling into the original source.If you mix the seven colors of the rainbow into one, it becomes white, it becomes one color. The method is the same. Energy moving outwards passes through two eyes and the whole existence becomes dual. Energy moving backwards passes through two eyes and moves into one eye, the third eye – which is just exactly in between the two – and suddenly all is one. This is samadhi: you are one with God.Release is in the eye….The seed-blossoms of the human body must be concentrated upward in the empty space.Right now it is an empty space. But once energy starts moving inwards, it becomes full of light.Immortality is contained in this and also the overcoming of the world.And the moment you have reached the one point in your being – Jesus says, “When your two eyes become one, you have entered the kingdom of God.” – you know immortality, because now you know life and death are not opposite but two wings of the same bird. Death does not destroy life but helps it to renew itself again. Death is not the enemy but the friend. It simply helps life to change its garments because they have become rotten; they have been used and they cannot be used anymore. It simply helps you to change the house, it does not end you. It only gives you a new beginning, a fresh lease of energy.Then darkness and light are not two. Then opposites disappear and they become complementaries. Then the whole existence becomes a dance between the masculine energy and the feminine energy – then it is an orgasmic dance. Then both are one – meeting, melting into each other – the conflict disappears. And when you see the whole existence without any conflict, certainly, great joy arises – there is no death. Death one sees only from the outside. You see somebody else dying, you have never seen yourself dying. Nobody has ever seen himself dying.When Socrates was given poison, he was very enchanted. His disciples were crying and weeping, and he said, “Don’t weep. Soon I will be gone, and then you can weep to your heart’s content. Right now, see this great experiment that is happening to me. I am very intrigued by the idea of death – whether I am really going to die or not. Don’t miss this opportunity! Just sit around me and watch.”A master teaches through his life and also teaches through his death. A master uses every opportunity – even his own death he will use to teach his disciples.Because he shouted and was very angry and said, “Stop crying and weeping and come close! Don’t miss this opportunity!” the disciples looked. And Socrates said, “Wait. The poison was given to me. Now I will tell you what is happening to me inside, so you can become aware of something that you cannot see.” And then he said, “Up to my knees, my legs are dead. But as far as I am concerned, I am intact and I am as whole as before.”Then he said, “My whole legs have gone dead – below the waist I cannot feel anything.” He asked a disciple to touch his feet, to pinch them, but he could not feel anything. He said, “I cannot feel them, so half of my body is dead, but I am as whole as ever. My inner feeling is not that I am half-dead and half-alive, I am as alive as ever! Half of the body is gone, but my being is untouched by it.”And slowly slowly his hands became dead, and his chest started sinking. And then he said, the last words he said, “My tongue will not be able to say any more words. It is getting numb. But the last thing that I want to tell you is this: that although almost ninety percent of my body is dead, I am a hundred percent alive. If it is an indication of something, it shows that even when the body is one hundred percent dead, I will be alive, because I have seen ninety percent of my body go, but I am as whole as before. So ten percent more will go…. You cannot see what is happening to me inside, but I can see it.”Socrates is not an ordinary philosopher as other Greek philosophers are. Even his own disciples, Plato, Aristotle…. Aristotle, in fact, is not a disciple but an enemy. He does not understand Socrates at all, and what he proposes is absolutely against Socrates.Socrates is a mystic. His philosophy is just a method of inquiry – and a very penetrating inquiry. He will not leave even death; he inquired into death. To the very last moment he was true to his method of inquiry.Death one sees only from the outside – you see other people dying – but to be alive is different: you can see it from the inside. To be alive is to feel pain and pleasure, to love and to fear. To be alive is to be able to create; to think of something which is not and make it happen. That’s why the creative person only knows the highest form of life because when you create you are at the optimum of your energy. When you create you are part of God. How one can do it is a mystery. How one can exist is a mystery. Every effect must have a cause. That is what we call the law of causation – that is what we are taught – but I can see no cause for the effect which I am.I wake up riding on a miracle. My reason serves me well, but with the mystery of my being, it fails. My reason itself is a tool of this mystery, hence it cannot know it.You have to look within. First, to see what life is, you have to feel it from the interior. And the best way to feel your life is to be creative, because then you are at your maximum. Ordinarily, people live at their minimum, and whatsoever people go on doing can be done at the minimum because those are just habits, those are just routine things your body has learned. They have been transferred from your consciousness to the robot part of your body which goes on functioning on its own. For example, once you learn driving: when first you learn you are very alive, very alert, because there is danger. You have to be alert – you don’t know what is going to happen. You have to keep aware of so many things. The steering wheel, the road, the clutch, the gears, the accelerator, the brakes – so many things to be aware and alert about – and the traffic, and the people passing by, and the cars passing by. But once you have learned, your knowledge is transferred to the robot part of your body. Then you need not bother; you can talk to your friend, you can sing a song, you can smoke, you can listen to the radio, and your body goes on doing. You need not be alert – only in exceptional situations. If some accident is going to happen, for a moment you will wake up because the danger is so great and the danger is so unknown that the robot part cannot face it; it has not happened before, it is new.Ordinary life becomes a mechanical routine, and you start living at the minimum. You never flare up to your maximum. In creativity you flare up. And that is going to be one of my messages to my sannyasins: be creative, because to be creative is worship, to be creative is prayer, to be creative is meditation, and to be creative is to be close to God. There is no need to go to the Kaaba, because God is here as much as in the Kaaba. There is no need to go to the Himalayas, because God is everywhere, equally available – but available only to those who live at their maximum, whose life flame is not a dull flame, who pour their whole energy into it. And that happens only through creativity.So, to me, the definition of a sannyasin is not the definition of the old kind of saints, sitting dull and dead. The definition of a sannyasin is to be creative. Dance, sing, create music, paint, sculpt, or whatsoever you feel like doing. Find out what is your innermost joy – and do it! And doing means bring it from the invisible to the visible, doing means make the dream exist on the earth. Let the dream become actual, transform the potential into the actual, and that is the greatest joy there is. The real bliss is attained only when you are able to bring something from the unknown to the known, when you make, create, when you are able to transform a dream into reality, when you have helped existence. When in a certain way, in your own way, you have made the world a little more beautiful, when you have enhanced its joy, then you are a sannyasin.And to know this way, your inner life, will help you to know that you are deathless, because once you know who you are in your uttermost capacity, when your inner torch is burning from both the ends together, at the optimum, then you will know there is no death. And at the optimum your third-eye center starts functioning – and only at the optimum. So don’t live life as a drag. Don’t live it as if it is a burden, a duty to be fulfilled. Make it a dance, let it be a celebration.Immortality is contained in this and also the overcoming of the world.If you can allow your energy to reach, your flame of life to reach to the third eye, you will see there is no death, and you will suddenly see that you are no more attached to the world.Now, the difference has to be remembered. The old sannyas, the so-called, old religious way of life, has been teaching people to renounce the world. I don’t teach renunciation, I teach: bring your life energy to the optimum, and once you have seen the true in your being, the world carries no meaning anymore. The higher has happened, the lower becomes insignificant. You need not renounce it; it has already dropped. You need not escape anywhere. You can live in the world, but you have overcome it. And remember, escaping and overcoming are two totally different things. The real sannyasin has to overcome the world, not renounce it.The light is not in the body alone, nor is it only outside the body.And once you have seen the light inside, then you will become aware that it is not only inside, it is also on the outside. It is not confined to you. Remember, darkness is individual, light is universal. Death is individual, life is universal. Misery is individual, bliss is universal. For misery to exist you have to exist as separate, and for bliss to come into existence you have to become part of the whole, in harmony with the whole.The light is not in the body alone, nor is it only outside the body. Mountains and rivers and the great earth are lit by sun and moon; all that is this light.Once you have seen it on the inside you will recognize it everywhere: in the moon, in the sun…. All light is the same – inner and outer make no difference.Therefore it is not only within the body. Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment, and all movements of the spirit are likewise this light…It is the same light that you see in the moon, and that you see inside yourself in the third eye. Once you have seen that it is the same light, the inner and the outer are no longer distinct. The inner is the outer, the outer is the inner. That’s why the Zen masters say that samsara is nirvana; the world – the very world – is enlightenment. This very body the Buddha, this very earth the paradise. That’s why when Buddha became enlightened, he said, “It is incredible, it is unbelievable that the moment I became enlightened, the whole existence became enlightened with me.”Down the centuries Buddhist meditators have been meditating over it, “What does he mean? What does he want to say – ‘The moment I became enlightened the whole existence became enlightened’? But how can it be? – because there are still so many unenlightened people. What can he mean?” The meditator himself thinks, “I am as yet unenlightened, so how has the whole existence become enlightened?” It has become enlightened for the Buddha because he has seen that the distinction between the inner and the outer was nothing but the ego – the small thin curtain of the ego. Once that curtain has fallen there is nothing inner, nothing outer.So Buddha cannot say, “I have become enlightened.” He says, “The whole has become enlightened.” All the trees, and all the rivers, and all the mountains, and all the people, and all the animals, and all the planets – all have become enlightened, because now he has no separate identity. He does not mean that you have become enlightened; he is simply saying, “I cannot say that I have become enlightened. I was in bondage, that much I can say. I was ignorant, that much I can say. I was in misery, that much I can say. But now, I am no more.”Existence is blissful. Existence is full of light. And the inner and the outer light are the same – there is nothing inner, there is nothing outer, all distinctions disappear. When the light enters into the third eye – the one eye, the single eye – all distinctions disappear: the rainbow again becomes a single ray of white light.Just the other day there was a question, “Osho, why do you tell us to wear orange and you wear white?”It is just symbolic, just to tell you that you have to come to the point where colors disappear and the single white ray remains, without any distinctions.Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment, and all movements of the spirit are likewise this light; therefore it is not just something outside the body.It is neither outside nor inside; it is everywhere – inside too, outside too. And it is the same light – the same light that you see shining on the greenery and the flower, and dancing on the lotus. It is the same light that becomes clarity inside – enlightenment, perception, understanding.And remember, the master says understanding, not knowledge. The master says clarity, not answers. One simply becomes so clear that the questions disappear, not that you attain to some answers; only you are so clear that the confusion is no more there, that’s all. It is absence of questions not presence of answers, hence it is called understanding, not knowledge.Just the other day, Aniruddha also asked, “What is the difference between our knowledge and your knowledge? I don’t see any difference,” he says.The difference is not in knowledge. He must have been thinking that I know more than he knows. Just the contrary is the case: I don’t know more than you know; in fact, you know and I have no knowledge. I am only clear – a clarity, an understanding – not knowledge. Here are many people who know more than me – and that is their problem – and they will have to drop that knowledge.I don’t know a thing, but there is only clarity….When you ask me a question, it is not that I have an answer for it, but I just focus my clarity on it, try to understand, and whatsoever response comes out of the clarity I give to you. It is not knowledge. It is just a capacity to see.Knowledge makes people blind. Their eyes become so full of knowledge they cannot see. Even before you have asked the question they have the ready-made answer there. They are ready to answer it. They don’t listen to your question, they don’t listen to the questioner, they don’t listen to his being. They don’t look into him to see what he means; they have a ready-made answer. They are in a hurry to answer you – and they must prove the answer with arguments and scriptures, and they must give all kinds of support to it.I have only a kind of understanding, a vision, a capacity to see. That’s why the master says:Understanding and clarity, perception and enlightenment…It is not knowledge, it is just an utterly cloudless sky within.The light-flower of heaven and earth fills all the thousand spaces. But also the light-flower of the individual body passes through heaven and covers the earth.It is a light-flower, this whole existence. This is the experience of the mystics…that existence is made of nothing else but light – it is all light, light is the basic constituent of existence. And modern physics agrees with it. They call it electricity. “Light” is much too poetic a word for them, they have to drag it down to earth – it becomes “electricity.” But what they are saying is exactly the same.Matter has disappeared from modern physics, matter is no more. At the deepest core of matter is nothing but electricity, electrons, electrical particles dancing, energy particles dancing, with no matter in them, no weight. This has been experienced by mystics down the centuries, unexceptionally; whether the mystic was born in India or in China or in Tibet makes no difference. This has been the most fundamental experience of all the mystics: that the existence is made of light and nothing else.The Secret of the Golden Flower says, “This light, this flower of light, these petals of light fill all the spaces outside and also inside.”Therefore, as soon as the light is circulating, heaven and earth, mountains and rivers, are all circulating with it at the same time.The same thing that Buddha said is said in different words. The moment you see light circulating in you, you will be able to see the dawn of light all over. Stars moving, and mountains and rivers – all will be nothing but streams of light, a tremendous dance of light energy.To concentrate the seed-flower of the human body above in the eyes, that is the great key of the human body. Children. take heed! If for a day you do not practice meditation, this light streams out, who knows whither? If you only meditate for a quarter of an hour, by it you can do away with the ten thousand aeons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness. This marvelous magic cannot be fathomed.The Master Lu-tsu says only fifteen minutes in twenty-four hours will do. If you can sit silently for fifteen minutes, concentrated in the third eye, that will be enough to change your whole future. You will not need to be born into the body again, you will not need to be thrown into the world again. You have learned the lesson, you have become worthy of moving without the body and the limitation of the body. Your soul will be free, unentangled, without any bondage, and then there will be no death, no birth. You will be an eternal flowering of light in this infinite existence.Only fifteen minutes? Yes, only fifteen minutes can do the miracle. But people are not even ready to give fifteen minutes…to quietness, to silence.I have heard….When Ignatius Loyola heard the news that an unfriendly man had been elected pope, he was asked what he would do if the new head of the church should order the Society of Jesus dissolved, the work in which Loyola had invested his whole life. He replied, “Fifteen minutes in prayer and all will be the same.”An immensely significant reply.An unfriendly pope had come into power and there was every possibility that Loyola’s whole work would be dissolved. He had created a small society of mystics. The work was esoteric, and Christianity has always been against esoteric work, has always been afraid of the mystics because these are the dangerous people: they bring truth to the world. And once they bring truth to the world, people are no longer interested in rituals, impotent rituals. Who cares about the church then?So Christianity has consistently been destroying all mystic schools so that nobody can go outside the church, so that nobody can have any other door to reach God, so that everybody has to come to the priest. Whenever the desire to seek and search for God arises, no alternatives are to be left. Because of this stupid idea, Christianity destroyed religion in the whole world, because there are different types of people and they need different types of schools and they need different types of techniques. And those who are really sincere in their search have to find esoteric groups. They cannot become part of the formal religion – that is not enough for them; it is very lukewarm, it is very superficial.In the West, real religion had to go underground because of the church. People have to create many false facades to hide behind. Alchemy was one of the facades; the real work was something else, but the alchemist was trying to create around himself the idea that he was working to transform baser metal into gold. This was allowed. The church was very happy: if you are trying to turn baser metal into gold, it is perfectly okay, you can do it. If you succeed, the church will have more gold, that’s all; there was no fear about it. But this was just a facade, it was not real alchemy, it was just on the outside. Behind the curtain the real work was totally different: it was transforming the lower being into the higher being. It was exactly the secret of the golden flower: how to transform your sexuality, the baser metal, into spirituality, the gold.But unnecessary trouble had to be taken: they had to make arrangements on the outside such that the society remained convinced that their work was something to do with gold. And everybody is interested in gold. The church is very interested in gold, not in God.Loyola was a great mystic – he had created the Society of Jesus – and a very antagonistic pope was in power. Somebody said to him, “What will you do? What will happen now? The Society can be dissolved by the order of the pope.”Loyola said, “Fifteen minutes in prayer and all will be the same. It will take me just fifteen minutes to go deep into meditation, that’s all, because whenever I am there, nothing matters. Nothing matters at all.”Master Lu-tsu says: Just fifteen minutes….…by it you can do away with the ten thousand aeons and a thousand births. All methods end in quietness.Remember it. Whatsoever the method, the goal is the same: quietness, utter silence inside, thoughtlessness, only consciousness without any content.This marvelous magic cannot be fathomed.It is an unfathomable depth. When thoughts disappear and you are simply silent, then the silence is a bottomless abyss; it cannot be fathomed. The Pacific Ocean can be fathomed – it has a five-mile depth; but the Pacific Ocean inside you cannot be fathomed – it is infinite. You can go on digging and digging and diving deeper and deeper: you will not come to fathom it, you will not come to the bottom of it at all.Only thoughts can be measured, thoughtlessness is immeasurable. Hence, thoughtlessness is another name for God. But remember, thoughtlessness should not be a kind of sleep, because that is very ordinary, it happens every day. Deep in sleep, when dreams disappear, you fall into that abyss, that’s why deep sleep is so rejuvenating, so refreshing. In the morning you feel alive again, new, reborn. But that is unconscious. Patanjali has said deep sleep and samadhi are very similar, with only one difference: in sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious. But you go to the same space, the same unfathomable, magical space within you, where there is no thought, no desire, no vibration in your mind – all is quiet. All methods lead to it. Yoga, Tantra, Tao, Hassidism, Sufism, all methods lead to it. From different angles, for different people they have been created.But when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine.In the beginning great effort is needed. One must press on from the obvious to the profound. What is obvious? – the obvious is your continuous process of thought. And what is profound? – just a state of no-thought. What is gross? – all contents of the mind are gross. And what is subtle? – a state of no-content is subtle. One must go pressing on. In the beginning, great effort will be needed. In the beginning, you have to be utterly committed to the work, only then the blissful moment arises, when meditation becomes effortless.First, meditation has to be masculine energy. Only then, in the end, can it become feminine energy. That’s why my insistence for dynamic methods in the beginning. Bring all your effort to the maximum, put all that you have at stake, don’t hold anything back, and then one day, you will be able to relax without effort: you will be able, just by closing your eyes, to reach the third eye.…when the practice is started, one must press on from the obvious to the profound, from the coarse to the fine. Everything depends on there being no interruption.And make it a regular phenomenon.The beginning and the end of the practice must be one. In between there are cooler and warmer moments, that goes without saying. But the goal must be to reach the vastness of heaven and the depths of the sea, so that all methods seem quite easy and taken for granted. Only then have we mastered it.The real mastery is when no effort is needed, when all efforts can be dropped. The real mastery is when no method is needed, when all methods can be dropped. The real mastery is when meditation is no longer a thing to do but has become your very state. You live in it, you walk in it, you sit in it: sitting in Zen, walking in Zen. You eat in it, you sleep in it, you are it– that moment also comes. But in the beginning one has to go with all one’s energy.Remember, just as water evaporates at a hundred degrees’ heat – not at ninety-nine, not at ninety-nine point nine, but exactly at a hundred degrees – so whenever you put your total energy, one hundred degrees at stake, immediately the baser metal turns into gold: immediately the sexual energy has penetrated into the spiritual world, immediately the energy that was going out has taken a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, and the two eyes become one eye. And then all, inner and outer, is enlightened.Jesus has said, “Cleave the wood and you will find me. Strike the stone and I am there.”This is the ultimate state: when you cleave the wood and you find God, and you strike the stone and you find God. Then you walk on God, in God, as God; then you breathe God, then you eat God, you drink God – because all is God.This ultimate experience is what Master Lu-tsu says is released. And it is in the third eye.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,All my life I have said yes and now that I am here with you and the yes seems really right, there comes only no. What is this no?It is very natural. If all your life you have been saying yes, it must have been false, it must have been pseudo. You must have forced yourself to say yes, you must have repressed your no continuously. And I teach relaxation, and I teach expression, so the repressed no is coming up, surfacing. You allow it. Please don’t repress it anymore. If you repress it here, then where are you going to express it? Once it is expressed, you will be free of it, and then the real yes will come.The yes that you have known up to now was not real. You have been cultivating this yes. It was just on the surface. Deep down the no has always existed in you. But this is how we are brought up, this is how we are conditioned. This is how people have become utterly false, hypocrites – split: their face says one thing, their being is saying just the opposite. This is how the whole of humanity has been turned into a kind of schizophrenia.My approach is that yes and no are both absolutely necessary, part of inner rhythm. The man who cannot say no cannot say yes either; and if he says yes, his yes will be impotent. Only the man who can say “no” vitally can say “yes” vitally. They depend on each other – just as life and death depend on each other, just as darkness and light depend on each other, just as love and hate depend on each other. This is the intrinsic polarity of life.In a better world, with more freedom, with more understanding, a child will not be taught to say yes when he feels like saying no. He will be taught courage. Whenever he feels like saying no, he has to say no, and then his yes will have meaning.A child will not be taught religion, because religion is yes-saying. He will not be forced to become a theist – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan. He will be encouraged by the parents, by the school, by the university, to be honest, to be sincere, and to wait for the real yes to come on its own.The world has become so false – can’t you see? From where is this falsity arising? Millions of people go to the churches, temples, mosques, gurudwaras, and not a single person is religious. What kind of neurosis is this? They go just as a formality, they go because they have been taught to go, they go because they have become addicted to the habit of going. It is just a habit. If they don’t go they feel guilty, if they don’t go they feel as if they are betraying their parents, their society. If they go there is no joy in it, they simply drag themselves into it. They simply wait there until the ritual ends, the prayer ends, so that they can escape out of the temple, out of the church. It is a bogus kind of religion. And the reason is that they have never been allowed to say no.No has to come first, only then can yes come. To really be a theist, first one has to go through the process of atheism. To really be a believer in God, first one has to go through the dark night of doubt – only then the dawn. There is no other alternative.It is good, that the no is arising. You are being true for the first time in your life – let it happen – and the yes will follow just as day follows night.But this mischief has been done to you – and in the name of great things: God, prayer, country, love, religion, church, Jesus, Buddha, Krishna. In the name of these great things much mischief has been done to you, you have been manipulated. And what is the outcome? You have become a plastic phenomenon, you don’t have that sincerity which can make a person really religious.My own observation is this: that a person who has not said no to God will never be able to say yes, or if he says it, his yes will be pointless.The so-called religion is what Gregory Bateson calls “the double bind;” one is ordered to do two things which are mutually exclusive: to be sincere and to believe. How can you be sincere if you are told to believe? To believe means to be insincere. To believe means to believe in something that you don’t know, to which your whole heart says, “No, I don’t know. How can I believe?” Belief is insincerity, and you have been told to be sincere and to believe – this creates a double bind in you.Your religion, so-called religion, is based on insincerity. How can it be religious? – the very beginning is poisoned, the very source has gone sour. No child should be taught religion. Every child should be taught inquiry, doubt, logic, reason.And why are you so afraid of logic, doubt and reason? Because if a child really goes deep into doubt, he will find the futility of it on his own. And out of that finding trust arises, and then that trust has beauty, grandeur.If a child reasons to the very end, he will come to the point where he will be able to see that now reasoning has come to an end but existence goes on and on. Existence is something beyond reasoning. But let every child feel it in his own guts!A religion, to be true, has to be a religion of the guts, not of belief. Let the child think as much as he can, to his full capacity. Let him burn with doubt, logic, reasoning, to the maximum, and he will see the limitations of the intellect. It is bound to happen. And when the limitations of the intellect have been seen, experienced by yourself, you start moving into the beyond; you start surpassing the mind.Belief is of the mind. This so-called yes-saying is of the mind. I teach you another kind of yes which is not afraid of no, another kind of trust which is not afraid of skepticism; which on the contrary, uses skepticism as a jumping board, which uses doubt as a process of cleansing.Truth is to be trusted – to trust is an act of faith; but any statement of truth is to be tested too – to test it is an act of doubt. Faith and doubt both serve truth – this is what I teach you. Faith and doubt are two wings of the bird called trust; if you cut off one wing, the bird cannot fly. Yes and no are two wings; use them, and use them in their totality. Never be insincere, not even in the name of God.Sincerity is far more valuable than any dogma, than any Christianity, Hinduism, Islam. Sincerity is the foundation. But to be sincere means you have to give expression to all that is within you. Sometimes it is yes and sometimes it is no, and you have to accept both.So, it is something beautiful that is happening, don’t be worried. I am not trying to force any yes on you. I am simply helping you to go through the whole process of both yes and no, so that one day you become aware that they are not enemies – not opposites, but complementaries.Man is a question mark…and it is a blessing – celebrate it. It is a blessing because only man is a question mark; no dog is, no tree is. The rose bush is beautiful but not as beautiful as man, and the moon is beautiful but not as beautiful as man – because they are all unconscious. Only man is consciously on a quest. And how can you be on a quest if you don’t have a question mark in your being?God sends you with a question mark in your being. Celebrate it – it is a great responsibility, a great heritage. Ask questions, inquire, doubt. And don’t be worried, because I know that if you doubt long enough you will arrive at trust. And that arrival is incredible, because then you have arrived on your own, it is your own experience. It is no longer belief, it is knowing.Sri Aurobindo was asked by a philosopher, “Do you believe in God?” and he said, “No.” The philosopher was for a moment shocked. He had come a long way, believing that this man had come to know God, and this man says, “I don’t believe in God.” For a moment he could not gather courage to ask anything else. Shocked, he was dumb.Then he said, “But I thought that you had seen God.”Sri Aurobindo laughed and said, “Yes, I have seen, that’s why I say I don’t believe. Belief is out of ignorance. I know! I don’t believe.”And remember it: you have to know, you are not here to believe. My help is available for you to know. Belief is a trick of the mind: without knowing, it gives you the feeling that you have known. Man is a question mark – and it is a blessing. Celebrate it, dance it, rejoice in it, because without that question mark there could be no faith, or doubt – nothing but dead certainty. That’s where animals live: in dead certainty. And that’s why your priests and your politicians want you to live in dead certainty.Life hesitates. Life is uncertain. Life is insecure. That’s why it is life: because it moves.Socrates is reported to have said, “I would not like to become a contented pig. Rather than being a contented pig, I would like to remain a discontented Socrates.”Meditate over it – a statement of immense value. The pig is contented, absolutely certain. That’s why people who are stubborn and think themselves absolutely certain are called piggish. For example, poor Morarji Desai is called piggish.People who are stubborn are bound to be stupid. A man who is alive moves into uncertainties, moves into the unknown. He cannot live in a dead certainty. Certainty simply means you have not doubted.There is another kind of knowing which comes out of doubting, which comes out of growth. And when that kind of knowing comes, again you are not certain. But now the uncertainty has a totally different flavor. If you had asked Buddha about God, he would have kept quiet. That’s where he is far superior to Sri Aurobindo. He would have kept absolutely silent, he would not have said yes or no. Why? – because he says, “The ultimate is so tremendously vast that to say yes will be wrong, to say no will be wrong, because our words are so small they cannot contain the ultimate. The ultimate can only be conveyed through silence.”A Zen master was asked, “Can you say something about God?” He remained utterly silent; he listened to the question with open eyes and then he closed his eyes. A few moments went by. For the questioner those few moments seemed very long. He was waiting and becoming restless, and the master had moved into some other space. There was great ecstasy on his face but no answer.That ecstasy was the answer. There was utter silence in his being, and the silence was vibrant all around him. You could have almost touched it, it…it was so solid. But the restless questioner was not aware of it at all; he was too concerned with his question and he was waiting for the answer.He shook the master and said, “What are you doing? I have asked a question and you closed your eyes and you are sitting in silence. Answer it!”And the master says, “But that’s what I was doing. This is my answer.”Certainly this is far superior to Sri Aurobindo’s answer.But the man, the questioner, was not satisfied. He wanted something conveyed verbally. He insisted and he would not leave the master. So the master said, “Okay.”They were sitting on a river bank. The master wrote in the sand with his finger: meditation.Now, the question is about God and the answer is about meditation – it is utterly irrelevant. And the questioner was right to say, “Are you joking or something? I am asking about God and you write on the sand: meditation.”And the master said, “That’s all that I can say, or that is allowed to say. You ask about the goal, I talk about the way, because the goal is incomprehensible – so mysterious, nothing can be said about it: I can simply sit in silence. If you have eyes to see, see! If you have ears to hear, hear! Hear my silence and the song that my silence is and the music that arises in it. If you cannot hear it, that simply shows you need meditation. So meditate.”The man said, “Just this much – one word, meditation? Won’t you elaborate on it a little?”He wrote again in bigger letters: meditation. That was his elaboration.The man was puzzled and he said, “But you are simply repeating. Just writing it in bigger letters won’t help.”So he wrote again in even bigger letters: meditation. He said, “Nothing more can be said about it. You will have to do it. You will have to be it.”There is a kind of uncertainty when you don’t know, because how can you be certain when you don’t know? And there is a kind of uncertainty when you know, because how can you be certain about the ultimate? It is so vast – to be certain about it will make it small, to be certain about it will show that it is in your grasp, that it is in your fist. And God cannot be possessed; on the contrary, you have to be possessed by God.Accept your no, accept your yes, and don’t think that they are opposites; they are not. Just as there can be no courage without danger, so there can be no faith without uncertainty, without doubt. Risk is part of the game that we are born to play. We must learn to lean on possibilities – not on certainties but on possibilities.I can only say to you: God is possible. I can only say to you: yes is possible. Lean on the possibilities, don’t ask for certainties. Because you ask for certainties, you create authorities; out of your need to be certain you become victims of people who are stubborn, ignorant, but certain. Only parrots can be certain because they have ready-made answers. Pundits can be certain because pundits are nothing but parrots.A real man of knowledge will help you to be silent: will help you to go through yes and through no, through faith and through doubt, through warmer moments and through cooler moments; will help you to go through days and nights, peaks and valleys, and will not teach any dogma, but will only teach you courage, adventure, quest.Listening to your question, I remembered two stories.There was a boy, about five or six years old, who had acquired the habit of using swear words in his ordinary conversation. His parents tried their best to break him of this habit, and in final desperation hit upon a plan which they thought would work. They called their son into a family consultation and laid out the facts before him, saying, “Now, son, we just can’t have a little boy in our home who continues to use this kind of language. So we have decided that if you cannot break yourself of the habit, something drastic must be done. We are giving you fair warning that the very next time we hear a swear word in your conversation, you are simply going to have to pack your bag and move out of this house. We can’t put up with that language any longer. Do you understand?”He did not say anything, although he did nod his head. But the habit, it seemed, was too great for him to break all at once, and they soon heard him interspersing his favorite swear words in conversation.His mother said, “Son, we have given you fair warning and now you are going to move out. Go pack your bag.”The boy went to his bedroom, reluctantly, packed his suitcase, said goodbye to his mother and left. He did not know what in the world he was going to do, so he sat on the front steps trying to collect his thoughts. As he waited there a neighbor came by, looked at him and asked, “Is your mother home, dear?”He looked at her with a sour face, and said, “How the hell should I know? I don’t live here anymore.”You cannot force, you cannot repress, you cannot order these things. These things need understanding. And parents are doing it all the time, just saying, “Don’t do this, do that” – just giving commandments, never giving understanding, insight. Children need insight, not commandments. They need your love, they need your help to understand things. They don’t want to imitate you. In fact, they should not be forced to imitate you, because if you force them to imitate you, you will be destroying their very soul. Give your love and give them freedom, and help them to become aware, help them to be more meditative.But that is not being done. We simply force. Forcing a thing seems to be a very short-cut procedure. Who bothers? Because you don’t love enough, that’s why you don’t bother. Who bothers to give an insight to a child? It is very simple: “Just go and do this because I say so, because I am your father and I know more because I am older than you.” The child may be forced to do a certain thing because he is helpless, but deep down he will carry the wound. And, you must have been carrying many wounds deep down.My love to you, my help to you is bringing your wounds to the surface. It is good, because once the wounds come to the surface, in the sunlight they can be healed – there is no other way to heal them. You are coming to health: don’t be afraid, let all those no’s come up; they will be released and you will be free of them.A little girl had disobeyed her parents and they decided she should be punished. They took her upstairs to the bedroom, put her in the clothes- closet, closed the door and said, “Now dear, you just take time to think it over and see if you can’t make up your mind to be more loving toward your parents and not disobey them.”After a few minutes the parents’ consciences began to bother them and they went up, knocked on the door and said, “Dear, how are you?”“Oh, I am fine.”“What are you doing?” asked her mother.“Well,” she replied, “I spit on your dress, I spit on your coat, I spit on your shoes, and I am just sitting here waiting for more spit.”The second question:Osho, Please say something about this news item: The Indian Express of 18th August reports that the Osho film won't reflect the real image of India. The Union Information Minister, L.K. Advani said in the Parliament, “Foreign television and film units have been refused permission to document the activities of the Osho Ashram, as it is felt that a film on the activities of the Ashram would not reflect favorably on India's image abroad.”This is really surprising from a politician, because the politicians are the people who destroy the images of countries. The politicians are the people who are the most corrupt – from the peon to the prime minister. Their corruption is not going to help the image of the country in the world. They should think about it. Their continuous quarreling for stupid reasons destroys the image of a country – and you cannot find more quarrelsome politicians than in India. And the quarrels have no ideological basis at all; the quarrels are simply quarrels which are personal – their own personal greed.The Indian politicians seem to be the most greedy – greedy for power, hungry for power – continuously fighting with each other. Their whole time is wasted in quarreling. The country is going to the dogs, and sitting in New Delhi, all that they do is fight with each other – how to topple the other. Everyone wants to become the prime minister. And once you become the prime minister, all that you do is protect your prime ministership. First the whole time is wasted in becoming the prime minister – almost your whole life.Morarji Desai’s whole life was wasted in becoming the prime minister. Now at the age of eighty-three, he has arrived. Now the whole time is wasted: how to remain in the seat till you die? And once you are in the seat you don’t want to die. You can do anything. He drinks his own urine; he thinks he is going to become immortal through it.Now is this urine-drinking prime minister helping the Indian image abroad? They should think about it. They should not be worried about me and my people. But politicians are the lowest as far as intelligence is concerned. They are the most inferior people in the world.I have heard….A politician went to the psychoanalyst and he said, “I suffer from an inferiority complex.”The psychiatrist worked upon the politician – many sessions of analysis – and then finally he said to him, “You need not worry.”The politician said, “I need not worry? So there is no problem?”And the psychiatrist said, “Yes, there is no problem, because you simply are inferior. You need not suffer from any inferiority complex. It is simply so.”Once I was staying in a circuit house with a politician. In the morning we were sitting on the lawn. He was reading the newspaper. That’s all they read – that is their Koran, Bible, Gita. Suddenly he looked up at me and said, “I’ll never be able to understand how people always seem to die in alphabetical order.”And another time, I was traveling in a train and unfortunately, in the same compartment was a politician. I say unfortunately because they stink. Nothing stinks like politics. It is the dirtiest thing in the world.He started talking to me, and I asked him if he had heard the latest joke about politicians.“I am warning you,” he said, “I am a politician myself.”“That’s all right,” I told him, “I will tell it very very slowly.”I am not part of any tradition, that’s what is creating trouble for the Indian politicians. I don’t belong to the past, I belong to the future. They cannot understand me – it is impossible for them. If I had belonged to the past, there would have been no difficulty. But I don’t belong to the past. A really religious person never belongs to the past. Buddha never belonged to the past, that’s why Hindus were angry. Jesus never belonged to the past, that’s why Jews were angry. Jesus, Buddha, Krishna – they all are pointing to the future, not to the past.Do not embrace the past or you will have missed the whole point. Tradition is not religion. Religion is always a surpassing, a transcending, a going beyond.If I had been a Hindu there would have been no difficulty. I am not. If I had been a Mohammedan there would have been no difficulty. I am not. I am neither a Buddhist nor a Jaina. And they are very confused: they cannot categorize me, they cannot pigeonhole me. No religious person can ever be pigeonholed, because religion basically is freedom – freedom from the past, freedom to be herenow, and freedom to be available to the future.What I am trying to bring to you is something of the future: people will be able to understand it only after hundreds of years, and then these same politicians will pay respect, as they pay respect to Jesus. And these are the people who crucified him, and these are the people who stoned Buddha and Mahavira, and these are the people who poisoned Socrates. These are the same people – beware of them!They are always against the future. Why are they against the future? – because their vested interest is always rooted in the past. They can manipulate the past, they cannot manipulate the future. They can exploit the past, they cannot exploit the future. They can exploit irreligious people, they cannot exploit religious people. They can exploit the pseudo-religious very easily, there is no problem in it, because a pseudo-religious person is almost a shadow, not a reality. And the pseudo-religious person is always ready to be manipulated, to be transformed into a slave.I am creating rebellious people here, rebellious in a multi-dimensional way. The politicians are bound to be afraid. And they will find excuses.Now he says, “The Osho film won’t reflect the real image of India….”I would like to say to him: Do you understand the meaning of the real? The real means that which is happening – and this ashram is happening, I am happening. Any image of India that does not include me will be unreal – only because it will not include something which is happening. What do you mean by “real image”?A real image means that which is existential, that which is happening. You may not like me, you may not like my people, but you cannot say that I don’t reflect the real image of India. You may be against me, but still I am part of this country. I am here and I am going to be here! And my people are going to increase. This is part of reality. This may be just a seed now, but soon it will become a great tree. How can you deny its reality?We have two million sannyasins all over the world. Nobody else can claim that. And we have almost a million lay followers, lay disciples. It is part of reality now. Three thousand sannyasins are almost always present here. Every year nearabout 25,000 people visit from all over the world, from all the countries. No other place can claim this. How can you say this is not real?I think, Mr. Advani, you will have to learn language a little bit more. Real is that which is happening. It may not be according to you – right, that is another point – but it is real. And I would like to tell you also that it is not something which is alien to the spirit of India; what is happening is this phenomenon which is really the very soul of India. It happened in Buddha’s time, it happened in Mahavira’s time, it happened in Krishna’s time. It has happened again and again. The real India – if you really want to say what the real India is – consists not of politicians but of the mystics. The politicians come and go; the mystics remain.Do you remember any politician’s name of the time of Buddha? Where are they? And they must have been as noisy as Mr. Advani. In their own time they must have been very noisy, must have created much fuss. Do you remember the politicians who crucified Jesus? And if you remember the name of Pontius Pilate, you remember it only because he crucified Jesus; otherwise who would have remembered? There have been thousands of governor-generals in the world.A politician said to the dying Socrates, “We are sorry that you had to be sentenced to death.”Socrates opened his eyes and said, “Don’t be worried. You cannot kill me, I will live. And remember, your name will be remembered only because of me.”And that is so.The real India is a quest of the innermost soul of man – not the geography, not the political history, but the inner journey. The journey of meditation is the real India. Mahavira represents it, Buddha represents it, Krishna and Christ and Nanak – they represent the real India. And I have the heritage of all of them – and much more.But it has been always so. If Advani were Minister of Broadcasting in Mahavira’s time, he would have stopped the BBC from filming Mahavira because Mahavira used to live naked. Or, if he had been a minister in Lalla’s time…. Lalla was a mystic woman; she lived naked. Certainly he would have prevented any television unit, any film unit from approaching these people – for the same reason: that they don’t represent, they don’t reflect, the real image of India.Mr. Advani reflects the real image of India? You will be gone soon, down the drain. I predict: by the next election you will be heard of no more – you and your whole company will go just down the drain, because the country has seen that you have deceived and cheated it. In the name of democracy all kinds of wrong people have become powerful in India. And they have not done a single thing since they have been in power, except quarreling.I must remind you of the three monkeys of Mahatma Gandhi. You must have heard of them – those three monkeys are very famous. He had always a statue of them. Somebody from Japan or from China had presented him three monkeys. One monkey keeps his hands on his eyes, representing that you should not see that which is wrong. Another monkey keeps his hands on his ears, symbolizing that you should not hear that which is not worth hearing. And the third monkey keeps his hands on his mouth: you should not say what is not worth saying, you should keep quiet.These three monkeys have come to rule. Now they are called the trimurti – the three monkeys are Mahatma Gandhi’s. The chief monkey keeps his hands on his ears; he will not listen. The whole country is shouting, “We are dying. We are starving. The population is growing.” But he will not listen. His name is Mahatma Morarji Desai. He will not listen. The whole country is crying, “Your son is a criminal, his activities should be investigated – he is accumulating money by illegal means.” But he will not listen. He is the chief monkey of Mahatma Gandhi: he keeps his ears shut and goes on smiling; drinks his own urine and keeps himself healthy. That’s all that he is doing.The other monkey keeps his eyes shut, because he represents the untouchables, the down-trodden, the lowest of the low – and they are being burned alive. They are being killed, butchered, murdered, raped. And never before has it happened like this: all over the country their lives are in danger. And the man who represents them, Jagjivan Ram, simply keeps his eyes closed because if he opens his eyes and sees what is happening he will not be able to say that he is their representative there.But the third monkey who was supposed to keep quiet and not say anything has betrayed the others and has said something – Charan Singh – and because of his saying something he has been thrown out of the trinity. But he is trying to get back in again, and the other two monkeys are trying to keep him out because he started saying things that he should not say. And why did he start saying things? – because he is getting old. Heart attacks and everything are happening to him, and he seems to have no chance of becoming the prime minister of India. He has to speak: time is running fast – he has to struggle, he cannot keep quiet anymore.These monkeyish people in New Delhi, they think that they represent the real India? They simply represent the neurotic part of India, they represent the people who suffer from inferiority complexes. That’s what the great psychologist Adler says: a man goes into politics only if he suffers from an inferiority complex. He wants to prove to himself that he is somebody. He has to prove it, otherwise there is great anguish in his being, that “I am inferior.” Untalented people, unintelligent people go into politics. Those who are talented become artists, painters, poets, philosophers, mystics, dancers. They have a thousand and one other beautiful things to do, not politics. Only the third rate, the most unintelligent part of a country, moves into politics. Those who cannot do anything else, at least they can go into politics. The politicians are almost hidden criminals; the same quality of people become criminals. If they cannot reach to power, they become destructive.And what wrong is happening here that they are afraid should not be known in the world at large?One thing: a great synthesis is happening here – something that has never happened before, of which they are afraid – and which needs to happen. It is a must for humanity’s survival. I am trying to create a great synthesis: the synthesis between Zorba the Greek and Gautama the Buddha, the synthesis between materialism and spiritualism. I am trying to create a spiritual materialism. These two things have always remained separate, antagonistic to each other. And because of their antagonism man has remained schizophrenic because man is both, body and soul. Man is not only soul, man is not only body. To insist that man is only body is materialism; to insist that man is only soul is spiritualism. Both are half, and both are wrong because they are half. And both are unsatisfactory, they have proved unsatisfactory.Man has to be accepted in his totality. As far as the body is concerned, a man has to be Zorba the Greek, and as far as the soul is concerned, a man has to be Gautama the Buddha. If body and soul can exist together, why cannot Buddha and Zorba exist together in a single man? That will be the highest synthesis.The West has remained materialistic. It suffers from materialism. It has all the benefits of materialism: great technology, beautiful houses, better medical facilities, longer life, more beautiful bodies, more healthy bodies. It has all the benefits of materialism – it is rich, affluent – but it suffers because it has lost its soul, the inner world is empty, hollow. The West has all that is needed on the outside, but in managing the outside it has leaned too much towards materialism and forgotten its own inner world. The master is lost, the soul is lost; the kingdom is there but the king is dead. Hence the Western anguish, hence the Western search for the king, hence the inquiry into meditation, because meditation is the only way to seek and search for the inner king. Where has he gone? Where is the inner light?The East has remained spiritual. It has all the beauties of spirituality: calmness, quietness, relaxedness, loving, compassion. It has a certain quality – a flavor of the inner – but the body is sick and there is great poverty and starvation all around, and the outer world is ugly. It has suffered much too. And both are tense, because unless you are whole you will be tense.Can’t you see that the East is no more interested in meditation? That’s why you don’t see many Indians here. The East is no more interested in meditation, it is no more interested in Buddha; its interest has shifted, and it is natural. It wants to know more about physics, chemistry, engineering, medical science. The Eastern talent goes to the West – to Oxford, to Cambridge, to Harvard, to Princeton – to learn what has happened in the West. The Eastern talent has only one desire: how to go to the West and learn something of modern science. The Eastern talented person cannot believe: Why are you Westerners coming to the East? You have Oxford and you have Harvard, why are you coming here? We are trying to get there and you are coming here. It looks so absurd.But the West has to come to the East; Harvard and Oxford have proved lacking. They have given much, but they have not given inner richness. The West is affluent, and because the West is affluent, the West has become more aware – in contrast to its affluence – of the inner poverty, the inner black hole. The outside is so full of light that the inner black hole, in contrast, has become very clear. The search has started: the West is moving towards the East, the East is moving towards the West.The Eastern intellectual becomes a communist and the Western intellectual becomes a meditator. This can go on and this can lead again to another kind of shift and misery. The West can become the East and the East can become the West and the problem will remain the same. My effort here is a great experiment in bringing the East and West together.Kipling has said: East and West shall never meet. I would like to tell Kipling – he must be somewhere in his grave, because he is a Christian and he will not leave the grave before the last judgment day – “Sir, East and West are meeting; they have already met, they are meeting here in this place,” which Advani says does not represent the real image of India.It represents the East, but it represents more than the East: it represents East plus West, it represents the whole of humanity – it is an experiment in universal brotherhood. You will find Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Parsees, Jainas, Buddhists, Hindus – all kinds of people – here. They have all dropped their identities, they have fallen into a universal brotherhood…and you say this does not represent the real image of India?And remember also: India is not a small country, it is a vast continent; it is not one tradition, it is many traditions. But the people who are in power now are basically Hindu chauvinists. A very wrong kind of person has come to power. Their whole idea is of a very narrow Hinduism – so narrow that it does not even contain the whole current of Hinduism. Hence it is very much afraid.If these people are allowed to have their say, sooner or later they will bulldoze Khajuraho, Konarak, because they will say they don’t represent the real image of India.Why are they so much against me? – because here Yoga is happening, Sufism is happening, Zen is happening, Tao is happening, Tantra also – and Tantra is creating trouble. These people in New Delhi are utterly sexually frustrated, repressed people.Khajuraho is being born again here. To whom does Khajuraho belong? I have not made that temple. I would suggest to Advani: Destroy Khajuraho, because the BBC people may come and film it. It is a beautiful temple, one of the most beautiful on the earth – because there is nothing more beautiful than love, there is nothing more graceful than a couple in deep love, in a deep loving embrace. There is nothing more divine than that. Something of God descends when a couple is in deep love, in an orgasmic ecstasy. Khajuraho represents that. Konarak represents that. And there are thousands of Tantra scriptures. Please destroy them before anybody comes to know about them. Destroy Vatsyayana’s Kama Sutra.Why are you so afraid of me and my people? They are not doing any harm to anybody. They are not training for any war, they are preparing for a more loving life. Yes, alongside with Yoga, Tao, Zen, Tantra is also a part. And because a few newspapers – and they also belong to the same repressed sexual mind – print some nude pictures about the ashram…. That is all they have against me.That nudity in itself is part of a long Indian tradition. Jaina digambara munis are nude – prevent them, they are still nude. Thousands of Hindu sannyasins live in nudity – prevent them. Destroy all the temples of the Jainas, because Mahavira and the other twenty-three tirthankaras have their nude statues there. And destroy all the Hindu temples of Shiva, because the shiva-linga is nothing but a phallic symbol. Then only can you say….First, destroy all these things, then only can you say that Osho and his ashram don’t reflect the real image of India. Otherwise, India is a vast continent; thousands of years have passed and many traditions have lived together. Tantra has existed side by side with Yoga.Yoga is repressive, Tantra is expressive. Yoga is afraid of sex, Tantra rejoices in sex. Yoga says, “Avoid sex if you want to go to God,” and Tantra says, “Use sex if you want to go to God.” And my own observation is that Tantra is far more profound than Yoga, because sex is the energy given to you by God; repressing it will be very disrespectful to God. Use it. And it is the creative energy in you: it creates the child, it brings new life. It has some other aspects also, hidden aspects: if you use it meditatively, if you use it as prayer, it can create you anew, it can give you a rebirth. You will become a dwija, a twice-born.Sex energy has two poles to it. One is if it moves downwards, it reproduces children; a tremendous miracle, the birth of a child. If it moves upwards, it creates you: a new integrity, a new individuation, a new center of being is born. Tantra is one of the greatest sciences ever born for the transformation of man. And this place is not an ordinary ashram, just as Indians have become accustomed to ashrams – dull, dead. This place is an alchemical academy. We are doing great experiments in expanding human consciousness and we are using all kinds of techniques available to humanity, both Eastern and Western. They are very much afraid of this.He says, “The Osho film won’t reflect the real image of India…it is felt that a film on the activities of the ashram would not reflect favorably on India’s image abroad.”But just by preventing the BBC, the Spanish TV unit, the Australian TV unit, the German TV unit, and journalists from reaching here, do you think you will be able to prevent me from reaching people? If Jesus could reach without the BBC, do you think you will be able to prevent me from reaching people? If Buddha could reach without any modern media available to him, do you think you will be able to prevent me?It cannot be prevented. Truth can never be prevented. If there is some truth in me, it has to reach people. It will reach, and people will reach me. No government can prevent me from reaching people. Yes, you can prevent newspapers, you can prevent television stations, you can prevent radio. Who cares?I will reach through my people to millions of people. If there is truth, people will come from all over the world, seeking and searching. If they are thirsty, they are bound to seek and search, because I have something here which can quench their thirst.And without ever coming here – Advani has never come here, no other minister has ever come here – saying such silly things is not right.And, sir, I would suggest to you…your government is very skillful in creating commissions. That’s all that you have done within this year and a half that you have been in power. All that you have done is to create commissions. Why don’t you create a commission to visit the ashram, to see what is happening here? Just remember one thing: be careful, because people who come here get caught. And be careful also whom you send. All the information that you have about the ashram you depend on getting from your police departments. How can they understand? What can they understand? All the information that you have you depend on getting from your government machinery. What can they understand?So don’t appoint a commission with some senile, retired judge – that won’t help. Remember that what is happening here is something so scientific that only people who know something about modern developments in humanistic psychology, who know something about encounter therapy, gestalt, psychodrama, primal therapy, who know something about psychoanalysis, psychosynthesis, who know something about est, Arica, who know something about Vipassana, Zazen, Sufi whirling – only they will be able to understand what is happening here.This place has great intellect, great intelligence, great talent. We have hundreds of DLitt’s, PhD’s, DPhil’s, and thousands who have MA’s, MSc’s and other qualifications. No other Indian university can claim as much talent as we have here. Even PhD’s are cleaning toilets!So send some educated people, not your MP’s – they won’t understand a thing – and then decide. You are also invited, Mr. Advani.And what kind of democracy is this? You came to power in the name of democracy. Even Indira did not dare to interfere with my work. And you are democrats? – nothing but Hindu chauvinists!India is a vast continent. Do you think Charvaka and his materialism is not Indian? Do you think Buddha, who denies God, who denies the soul, who denies the world, who is a nihilist – an utter nihilist, a nihilist par excellence – was he not a Hindu? Do you think Tilopa and Saraha were not Indians, great tantrikas?Who do you think is Indian? Just Mahatma Gandhi and Mahatma Morarji Desai – these two persons are Indian? Then you don’t even know much about Mahatma Gandhi. The whole of his life he repressed sex and he found in his old age that he had been on a wrong path. And then he started – he had to start – Tantra experiments. What about that? In his last years of life he was sleeping with a naked young girl. His whole life of repression had failed because even when he was seventy he was suffering from wet dreams and sexual fantasies. Then, as an ultimate resort, as an ultimate shelter, he started looking into Tantra. He died a tantrika. What about that? And you call him the Father of the Nation? Stop calling him Father of the Nation; he does not represent the real image of India. What do you think about him – at the age of seventy, sleeping with a young girl, an eighteen-year-old girl, naked? And you call him Father of the Nation?And one thing more. These are the people, Advani and company, who created the climate in which this man, Mahatma Gandhi, was murdered – these Hindu chauvinists. But what kind of hypocrisy is this? Now they pay tribute and call him Father of the Nation – and these are the murderers! They created the climate in the country to murder that man and now they worship him. In his name now they are in power.India has many currents. And it is beautiful. It is not a monolith, that’s why it is beautiful. It is a rainbow, it has all the colors: Buddhists have a different ideology, Jainas have a totally different ideology, and Hindus have many ideologies. Hinduism is not a narrow religion. In Hinduism there is nothing like a pope or a church; it is not an organized religion at all. And that is the beauty of it: it allows all kinds of people to have all kinds of ways; it says all ways lead to God. It is the most tolerant religion in the world. But the Hindu chauvinist cannot tolerate; he starts trying to make Hinduism also as narrow as he is narrow. These are the ideas in their minds. These ideas are creating trouble for them.All kinds of people come to me. You will find scientists here, you will find psychologists here – in hundreds. You will find psychotherapists here, you will find poets, painters, artists, musicians, actors. You will find all kinds of talented people here – except the politicians.Why is the politician so afraid to come here? There is a reason: the politician is the least religious person in the world, the most anti-religious person in the world. Politics and religion are polar opposites. Politics is ambition, religion is non-ambition. Politics is an ego trip, religion is the dissolution of the ego. Politics is struggle, a cut-throat competition; it is violent – basically, essentially. Religion is love – no competition, no comparison. Hence you will not find politicians here.And because I call a spade a spade, they are afraid of me, they can’t come face to face with me. Mr. Advani, I invite you and your colleagues to come here and encounter me, encounter my people. It will give you some insight into what is happening here.It is one of the greatest experiments ever done: how to expand human consciousness without drugs. And, let me tell you, politics is a drug. Politicians are alcoholics. Politics is a kind of neurosis. You can go to the parliament and sitting there for one day just watch and you will see: you will not see such madness even in a madhouse. And these people are going to decide who represents India?India is vast, let me say it again: nobody can represent the whole of India – nobody has that authority to represent the whole of India. It is not a tiny, small place; not one tradition, not one religion, not one language either. And these Hindu chauvinists are trying to force one language on the country. Behind Hindi there is nothing but Hindu chauvinism. They are trying to force one language, Hindi, on the whole country – which is nonsense; it cannot be done, it should not be done. And remember, my own mother tongue is Hindi, and I love it. It is a beautiful language. But that is another matter. This country has many beautiful languages. No language should be forced on the country; that will be violent, undemocratic. But that’s what they are trying to do – directly, indirectly. And let me warn the country: if these people persist in trying to force Hindi on the whole of the country, that will be the reason one day or other that India becomes split. South India is bound to go on its own way against the North, because the North is becoming too Hindu chauvinistic.If this country is going to be destroyed one day, the reason will be these people who are in power today. India cannot have one language. And if it can have one language, that language has to be neutral; either it will be English or Esperanto, but not Hindi, not Gujarati, not Marathi, not Bengali, not Tamil. It will have to be a neutral language. English is neutral; it is nobody’s mother tongue in India. And English is international too, so it is perfectly good. I support a two-language formula: English as the national language, because it is also international and the second language, the mother tongue. Each child should be taught two languages. Forget all about Hindi, and forget all about creating one monolith in this country of variety, of multiplicity.And they are trying to do the same thing with religion too, in the same way. They want to force me not to do what I am doing here because my approach is non-political. I have no vested interest in anything – in any language, in any province, in any religion, in any tradition. My approach is that the whole past is ours – and not only the Indian past, the whole past of humanity is ours. That’s why I have chosen to speak on Chinese masters, Japanese masters, Greek masters, Hebrew masters. I am going to speak on all the masters of the world so that listening to all these different songs, you can become universal.They are afraid of all this. They would like me only to talk on the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is beautiful and I have talked on it, but I am not going to talk only on this. I don’t belong to any tradition, to any past. I claim the whole past as mine, and the whole future too.It happens sometimes that a politician wants to come, but then he sends “feelers,” he sends people, and those people come and they want me to invite the politician. Why should I invite? All the people come here; whosoever wants to come here can come here. We are not here to pay special respect to anybody – to politicians…certainly not. They send messages to me that “X is ready to come to inaugurate the ashram,” that “Y is ready to lay the foundation for the new commune.”I will not allow any politician to lay the foundation of my commune; it will be sacrilegious. I will not allow any politician to come and inaugurate my ashram. Politicians – what have they to do with religion? What do they know about religion? They have the dirtiest vibe possible.But there were good days also in the past, and great people also. Listen to this anecdote.The Emperor came to visit the Zen Master Joshu, who was meditating in his room.“Tell him to come in and make his bows,” the master said to his horrified attendant. The Emperor entered and made his obeisance.When Joshu was later asked about his rude behavior, he explained, “You just don’t understand. If a visitor of low class comes, I go to the temple gate to greet him. For a middle class guest I get up from my seat. A great emperor cannot be treated like that.”The Emperor, of course, had been delighted with his reception.But those were great days: an emperor was delighted! But these poor politicians, they send messages that they should be received at the gate, garlanded, they should be treated as VVIP’s. What nonsense! If I even allow you entry, that is enough respect for you. If Sant does not prevent you at the gate, you should feel fortunate enough.In the new commune, I am going to put a board on the gate: Politicians and dogs are not allowed.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Master Lu-tsu said: Nothing is possible without contemplation. Perceiving brings one to the goal.What has to be reversed by reflection is the self-conscious heart, which has to direct itself towards that point where the formative spirit is not yet manifest. Within our six-foot body we must strive for the form which existed before the laying down of heaven and earth. If today people sit and meditate only one or two hours, looking only at their egos, and call this reflection, how can anything come out of it?One should look at the tip of one’s nose. But this does not mean that one should fasten one’s thoughts to the tip of the nose. Neither that, while the eyes are looking at the tip of the nose, the thoughts should be concentrated on the yellow middle. Wherever the eye looks, the heart is directed also. How can it be directed at the same time upward and downward? All that means confusing the finger with which one points to the moon with the moon itself.What then is really meant by this? The expression “tip of the nose” is cleverly chosen. The nose must serve the eyes as a guideline. If one is not guided by the nose, either one opens wide the eyes and looks into the distance, so that the nose is not seen, or the lids shut too much, so that the eyes close, and again the nose is not seen. But when the eyes are opened too wide, one makes the mistake of directing them outward, whereby one is easily distracted. If they are closed too much, one makes the mistake of letting them turn inward, whereby one easily sinks into a dreamy reverie. Only when the eyelids are lowered properly halfway is the tip of the nose seen in just the right way. Therefore, it is taken as a guideline. The main thing is to lower the eyelids in the right way, and then to allow the light to stream in of itself; without effort, wanting the light to stream in concentratedly. Looking at the tip of the nose serves only as the beginning of the inner concentration, so that the eyes are brought into the right direction for looking, and then are held to as guideline: after that, one can let it be. This is the way a mason hangs up a plumb line. As soon as he has hung it up, he guides his work by it without continually bothering himself to look at the plumb line.One looks with both eyes at the tip of the nose, sits upright and in a comfortable position, and holds the heart to the center in the midst of conditions. It does not necessarily mean the middle of the head. It is only a matter of fixing one’s thinking on the point which lies exactly between the two eyes. Then all is well. The light is something extremely mobile. When one fixes a thought on the midpoint between the two eyes, the light streams in of its own accord. It is not necessary to direct the attention especially to the central castle. In these few words the most important thing is contained.“The center in the midst of conditions” is a very subtle expression. The center is omnipresent; everything is contained in it; it is connected with the release of the whole process of creation.Fixating contemplation is indispensable; it ensures the making fast of the enlightenment. Only one must not stay sitting rigidly if worldly thoughts come up, but one must examine where the thought is, where it began, and where it fades out. Nothing is gained by pushing reflection further. One must be content to see where the thought arose, and not seek beyond the point of origin; for to find the heart-consciousness, to get behind consciousness with conscious-ness – that cannot be done. Together we want to bring the states of the heart to rest, that is true contemplation. What contradicts it is false contemplation. That leads to no goal. When the flight of the thoughts keeps extending further, one should stop and begin contemplating. Let one con-template and then start fixating again. That is the double method of making fast the enlightenment. It means the circulation of the light. The circulation is fixation. The light is contemplation. Fixation without contemplation is circulation without light. Contemplation without fixation is light without circulation! Take note of that!A blind man visited his friends. It was dark when he left, and they gave him a lantern.“Thank you, but I don’t need it. Light or dark, it is all the same to me.”“Yes, but carry it anyway so people won’t bump into you.”Off he went, and soon someone collided with him and shouted, “Why don’t you look where you’re going?”“Why don’t you see my lantern!”“Sorry, brother,” said the other, “your candle went out.”The scriptures in the hands of people who don’t know what meditation is, are just like a lantern in the hands of a blind man – utterly useless – and the blind man cannot know whether the lantern is still lit or not. He will simply be carrying an unnecessary weight – in fact, not helpful at all; on the contrary, it can be a hindrance. If the blind man had been moving without the lantern he would have been more careful, more cautious. Because of the lantern in his hand, he must have been walking as if he had eyes, he must have put all caution aside.That’s what has happened to humanity at large: people have the Bible, the Koran, the Gita – these are lamps of immense beauty and light, but your eyes are blind. And the Gita is five thousand years old – the light went out long long ago. When Krishna died the light went out. So is the case with the Bible and the Koran and all the other holy scriptures of the world: when the master dies, the light goes out.But people go on carrying the scriptures, believing the scriptures, hoping that their life will remain full of light because they are carrying a message from a great master. That message is nothing more than words; it is an unnecessary burden. If all the scriptures of the world disappear, man may become more cautious, may become more alert, may start looking for the source of light on his own. Because there will be nothing to lean on, he will have to learn to stand on his own feet.Lung-t’an was once visited by Te-shan, who, seeking further and further elucidation, remained until it grew late. Lung-t’an finally said, “The night deepens. Why don’t you retire?”Te-shan, taking his leave, raised the bamboo blind and went out. Seeing the intense darkness without, he returned and said, “It is dark outside.”Lung-t’an then lit a lantern and offered it to Te-shan. Just as Te-shan was about to take it, Lung-t’an abruptly blew it out. With this, Te-shan suddenly attained awakening, whereupon he bowed.Lung-t’an said, “What kind of truth did you see?”Te-shan said, “Never after today shall I doubt the utterances of all the old masters under heaven.”The next day Lung-t’an went before the disciples and said, “Within this group there is a man whose canine teeth are like sword trees, whose mouth resembles a bloody plate, and who won’t turn his head even when given a blow with a stick. One day he will establish my way on the top of a solitary mountain peak.”Te-shan then took out his sutra commentaries and in front of the meditation hall, raised a torch and said, “Endless deep analysis is like placing a single hair in the emptiness of space; worldly power is like throwing one drop of water into an immense gorge.”So saying, he took his commentaries and burned them.Now, if you don’t have eyes even light is useless; a lantern in your hands is nothing, utterly nothing. But if you have eyes, even the blowing out of a candle can become an experience of enlightenment. The question is of eyes.This man Lung-t’an was visited by Te-shan. Lung-t’an is the Master, Te-shan is his disciple. Seeing the darkness outside, the disciple said to the master, “It is too dark.”The master lit a candle and gave it to the disciple, and as he was going to take it, he blew it out. Suddenly, all became dark again, more dark than it was before. And this abrupt blowing-out of the candle must have been a shock – unexpected. For a moment the disciple must have fallen into the interval between two thoughts. For a moment thinking disappeared and there was contemplation. For a moment there was utter silence. In that silence he could see the point.The next day he burned all his scriptures. Now they were no longer needed; now he knew the truth through his own experience.A little bit of experience is more valuable than mountains of knowledge. Just two small eyes are more valuable than the sun and the moon and all the stars. The whole point is that religion is an experience. It is not speculation, it is not continuous analysis – it is insight.Now the sutras. These sutras are of immense value because they give you the technique in the simplest terms possible. And the method is really simple – unless you are determined to make it complex.The mind always turns simple things into complexities – beware of that – because the mind cannot exist with the simple; it is not needed. If things are really simple, what is the need of the mind? The mind is needed only when things are complex. Then you have to depend on the mind because then the mind will find the way out of the riddle. But if there is no riddle, the mind is utterly useless; you can discard it. So the investment of the mind is in complexity. Remember it.These sutras are very simple. Truth is always simple, utterly simple.Master Lu-tsu said:Nothing is possible without contemplation.What is contemplation? – a moment of no-thought.The English word contemplation does not give the right idea of dhyana. In English there is no word which can translate the word dhyana.There are three words available. One is concentration, which is very far-off, because concentration means effort, tension – a forced state, not a flowing spontaneous state – and dhyana is a flowing spontaneity. There is no strain in it, so the word concentration cannot be its translation.Then the other word is contemplation. But in English, contemplation gives the idea of thinking. When you say somebody is contemplating, you mean thinking about something.Or the third word is meditation. But that too means thinking: to meditate upon something. Of these three words no word carries the meaning of dhyana. Dhyana means a state of no-thought, a state of silence, a state of being conscious but without any content. The mirror is there but reflecting nothing, nothing whatsoever. Just like the mirror, the consciousness is there, but nothing is occupying it. That unoccupied awareness is dhyana.Taoists use the word contemplation to translate it. It is only because some word has to be used. So remember the meaning – it is not the meaning in the dictionaries. If you look into the dictionaries you will have a totally false idea of contemplation. In fact that is what The Secret of the Golden Flower calls “false contemplation.” False contemplation means thinking about something. It may be God – that’s what Christians mean by contemplation: thinking about God, thinking about holy things, transcendental things. But things are things; whether they are holy or unholy makes no difference. And thinking is thinking; whether you think about sex or samadhi makes no difference.A state of no-thought, an interval…and it is always happening, but you are not alert about it, otherwise there is no problem in it. One thought comes, then another comes, and between these two thoughts there is always a small gap. And that gap is the door to the divine, that gap is contemplation. If you look into that gap deeply, it starts becoming bigger and bigger.The mind is like a road full of traffic: one car passes by, then another car passes by, and you become so concerned with the cars that you don’t see the gap that is always there between two cars. Otherwise they would collide. They don’t collide; something is there between them that keeps them separate. Your thoughts don’t collide, they don’t run over each other, into each other. They don’t even overlap in any way. Each thought has its own boundary, each thought is definable. But the procession of thoughts is so fast, so speedy, that you cannot see the gap unless you are really waiting for it, searching for it.Contemplation means changing the gestalt. Ordinarily we look at thoughts: one thought, another thought, another thought. When you change the gestalt you look: one interval, another interval, another interval. Your emphasis is no longer on the thoughts but on the interval.For example, you are sitting here. I can look at you in two ways: either one person, another person, another person – my emphasis is on persons, I can count how many people there are – or I can forget about the persons and I can count the gaps between the persons, how many gaps are there. This is the change of gestalt. If you count the gaps you will be surprised: persons become vague, you don’t see them clearly because you are looking into the gaps, you are counting the gaps.Some day, standing by the side of the road, just count how many gaps pass by and you will be surprised that you don’t see the color of the cars, you don’t see the make of the cars, you don’t see the drivers and the passengers in the cars, but you do see gaps. One gap gone, another gap gone – you go on counting the gaps. Your gestalt is different.Contemplation is the change of gestalt: not jumping from one thought to another thought, but jumping from one gap to another gap. Slowly slowly you become very very aware of the gaps. And that is one of the greatest secrets of life, because it is through those gaps that you will fall into your own being, into your own center.Master Lu-tsu said: Nothing is possible without contemplation. Perceiving brings one to the goal.Perceiving, just perceiving…what in India we call darshan. Seeing brings one to the goal, not going anywhere. You need not go anywhere – just seeing! Once you start looking into the intervals, into the gaps, you will be able to see who you are. And you are the goal, you are the source and the goal, both – the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega. You contain all that you have ever longed for, you have all that you have ever desired. You need not be a beggar. If you choose to look into the gaps you will be an emperor, if you continue to look into the thoughts you will remain a beggar.Perceiving brings one to the goal.Not even a single step has to be taken beyond yourself because God is already within you, God is already the case. It is your innermost core. God is not there above, somewhere in the sky; God is within you, somewhere where thoughts no more disturb you, where silence prevails, where utter unoccupied consciousness is present, reflecting nothing.Then you experience your own taste for the first time, then you are full of the fragrance of your own being: the golden flower blooms.What has to be reversed by reflection is the selfconscious heart, which has to direct itself towards that point where the formative spirit is not yet manifest.The thought is the manifest, the no-thought is the unmanifest. If your gestalt consists only of thoughts you will not know anything more than the ego. The ego is called “the self-conscious heart.” You remain nothing but a bundle of thoughts. That bundle of thoughts gives you a consciousness of the self, “I am.”Descartes, the father of modern Western philosophy, says, “I think, therefore I am.” His own meaning is very different because he is not a meditator, but the statement is beautiful; in a totally different context it is beautiful. I give it a different meaning. Yes, I am – only if I think. If thinking disappears, the I also disappears. “I think, therefore I am” – this I-amness, this self-conscious heart is nothing but a continuum of thoughts. It is not really an entity, it is a false entity, an illusion. It is just like taking a torch in your hand and if you start revolving the torch in your hand you will see a fire circle which is not there. But the torch is moving so fast that it creates an illusory circle of fire, it creates the illusion of a fire circle. It is not there. Thoughts are moving so fast that they create the idea of I.Lu-tsu says one has to move from the self-conscious heart to the unself-conscious heart: one has to move from ego to egolessness, one has to move from self to no-self. The self is the manifest part – tiny, very small, gross. The unself is the unmanifest part – infinite, eternal. The self is a temporal phenomenon, born one day, will have to die one day. The unself, what Buddha calls anatta, no-self, is part of eternity – never born and never going to die – it abides forever.Within our six-foot body we must strive for the form which existed before the laying down of heaven and earth.And within your six-foot body you have that original quality still alive, vibrating – that original quality that was there before heaven and earth were made. Zen people call it “the original face”: when nothing was born– not even earth, not heaven – all was unmanifest; when all was silence, no sound was born; when there was no form and all was formless, all was in seed.You have that original silence in you. Hindus call it anahat nad. Buddhists have a special expression for it, “The sound of one hand clapping.” It is within you, it is your reality. To taste it is to become immortal, to taste it is to be golden. Then dust is transformed into the divine.The goal of all alchemy is to transform the lower metal into gold.If today people sit and meditate only one or two hours, looking only at their egos, and call this reflection, how can anything come out of it?One can sit in meditation and can only look at one’s ego. That’s what people call contemplation: they look into their thoughts, they don’t change the gestalt. All that happens to them is: ordinarily they are occupied with so many things they cannot look into their thoughts; when they sit specially for meditation they forget the world, for the moment, and the thoughts become more clear-cut, they are more alert of their thoughts.This is the state of a philosopher, this is how philosophers have been thinking, speculating, philosophizing. This is not true contemplation. And this will never take you beyond the ego, beyond death, beyond time. And that is where one’s goal lies.Let me repeat: if you want to meditate you will have to change the gestalt. Just closing your eyes and looking into the ego won’t help.The great English philosopher, David Hume, wrote, “Listening to and reading again and again the great maxim and the advice of all the great masters, ‘Know thyself, meditate,’ I also tried to meditate. I found nothing inside except thoughts, memories, imagination, dreams. But I have found nothing else.”He is right because he does not know what meditation is. He is a philosopher, and one of the most talented philosophers of the world – very very logical, consistent – but just a philosopher, not a meditator. He must have tried if he says so, and he must have come across many thoughts wandering around inside. And then he said, “But I don’t see any self, I don’t see any silence, I don’t see any God. It is all futile.”He missed because he was not aware that first you have to change the gestalt. You have not to look at the thoughts, you have to look in the gaps, for the gaps; you have to search for the gaps and you have to jump into the gaps. If he had jumped into the gaps he would have seen thoughts disappear, dreams disappear, memories disappear – all is left behind. Slowly slowly it becomes a very very distant noise, and then a moment comes: it simply disappears and you have gone beyond, you have reached the further shore.One should look at the tip of one’s nose.Now the practical point of the whole sutra – very simple, but try to understand it correctly, because mind wants to distort even simple things. Mind is a distorting mechanism.One should look at the tip of one’s nose.Why? – because this helps, it brings you in line with the third eye. When both your eyes are fixed on the tip of the nose it does many things. The basic is that your third eye is exactly in line with the tip of the nose – just a few inches above, but in the same line. And once you are in the line of the third eye, the attraction of the third eye, the pull, the magnetism of the third eye is so great that if you have fallen in line with it you will be pulled even against yourself. You just have to be exactly in line with it so that the attraction, the gravitation of the third eye starts functioning. Once you are exactly in line with it there will be no need to make any effort. Suddenly you will find, the gestalt has changed, because the two eyes create the duality of the world and thought, and the single eye between the two eyes creates the gaps. This is a simple method of changing the gestalt.One should look at the tip of one’s nose. But this does not mean that one should fasten one’s thoughts to the tip of the nose.That’s how the mind can distort it. The mind can say, “Okay, now look at the tip of the nose. Think of the tip of the nose, concentrate on it.” If you concentrate too much on the tip of the nose you will miss the point, because you have to be there at the tip of the nose but very relaxed so that the third eye can pull you. If you are too concentrated on the tip of the nose – rooted, focused, fixed there – your third eye will not be able to pull you in, because your third eye has never functioned before. Its pull cannot be very great in the beginning. Slowly slowly it grows more and more. Once it starts functioning and the dust that has gathered around it disappears with use and the mechanism is humming well, then even if you are fixed on the tip of the nose you will be pulled in…but not in the beginning. You have to be very very light, not a burden, without any stress and strain. You have to be simply there, present, in a kind of let-go.Neither that, while the eyes are looking at the tip of the nose, the thoughts should be concentrated on the yellow middle.So don’t concentrate on the tip of the nose or – the second trick the mind can play…. The master is simply trying to make you alert of all the possibilities, of all the games that the mind is capable of. First it will say, “Okay, so the master says, ‘Concentrate on the tip of the nose.’” He is not saying, “Concentrate on the tip of the nose,” he is simply saying, “Look. Just a very light, effortless look.” Or the mind can say, “Okay, if you are just looking at the tip of the nose, then concentrate on the third eye.”Mind is always in favor of concentration because mind feeds on concentration, lives on concentration. Hence in your schools, colleges, universities, concentration is taught not meditation, because they are all factories for creating the mind, they manufacture the mind.Wherever the eye looks, the heart is directed also. How can it be directed at the same time upward and downward?And then the mind can say, “Look, this is impossible, the demand is illogical. How can you look in two directions simultaneously, at the tip of the nose and at the third eye? It is not possible, it cannot be done. Don’t be foolish!”Now the third game of the mind – of condemning something as illogical. First it creates a bogus idea and then it starts destroying it. And when it destroys, it has great joy – a very masochistic, sadistic joy. It says, “Look, this is what he means. Absurdity! First look at the tip of the nose and then look at the third eye – how can you do both, look upward and downward? It is impossible.”All that means confusing the finger with which one points to the moon with the moon itself.What then is really meant by this? The expression “tip of the nose” is cleverly chosen. The nose must serve the eyes as a guideline.That’s all – just as a guideline: so you are in the field, in the force field of the third eye, so that you are very close to the magnetic energy of the third eye. It can’t work in any other way. You have just to be present in the magnetic force, in the field of it, and then it takes you in. You need not go in, you need not make any effort to go in; it happens of its own accord.If one is not guided by the nose, either one opens wide the eyes and looks into the distance, so that the nose is not seen, or the lids shut too much, so that the eyes close, and again the nose is not seen. But when the eyes are opened too wide, one makes the mistake of directing them outward, whereby one is easily distracted.And another function of looking very lightly at the tip of the nose is this: that it doesn’t allow you to open your eyes wide. If you open your eyes wide the whole world becomes available, and there are a thousand and one distractions. A beautiful woman passes by and you start following – at least in the mind. Or somebody is fighting; you are not concerned, but you start thinking, “What is going to happen?” Or somebody is crying and you become curious – and a thousand and one things are continuously moving around you. If the eyes are wide open, you become masculine energy, yang.If the eyes are completely closed you fall into a kind of reverie, you start dreaming; you become feminine energy, yin. To avoid both just look at the tip of the nose – a simple device, but the result is almost magical.And this is not only so with the Taoists; Buddhists know it, Hindus know it. Down the ages all the meditators have somehow stumbled upon the fact that if your eyes are just half open, in a very miraculous way you escape two pitfalls. One is being distracted by the outside world; another is being distracted by the inside dream world; you remain exactly on the boundary of the inner and the outer. And that’s the point: to be on the boundary of the inner and the outer means you are neither male nor female in that moment; your vision is free of duality, your vision has transcended the division in you. Only when you are beyond the division in you do you fall into the line of the magnetic field of the third eye.If they are closed too much, one makes the mistake of letting them turn inward, whereby one easily sinks into a dreamy reverie. Only when the eyelids are lowered properly halfway is the tip of the nose seen in just the right way. Therefore it is taken as a guideline. The main thing is to lower the eyelids in the right way, and then to allow the light to stream in of itself…That is very important to remember: you are not to pull the light in, you are not to force the light in. If the window is open, the light comes, on its own accord; if the door is open, the light floods in. You need not bring it in, you need not push it in, you need not drag it in. And how can you drag light in? How can you push light in? All that is needed is that you should be open and vulnerable to it.And that’s exactly what happens when you are looking at the tip of the nose: just looking without any concentration, just looking without any heaviness in it, without any strain in it, suddenly the window of the third eye opens and the light starts streaming in. The light that has always been going out starts coming in too, and the circle is complete. And this circle makes a man perfect. And this circle makes a man utterly restful, relaxed.This circle makes a man whole and holy – he is no more divided. Otherwise everybody is schizophrenic, more or less. Only this man who has been able to create the circle of light and the circulation of the light, is beyond schizophrenia, is really healthy, is really non-neurotic. Otherwise the difference between people is not much. The neurotic and the so-called non-neurotic differ only in degree. In fact, the patient and the psychoanalyst are not different kinds of people, they are the same – one neurotic trying to help another neurotic. And sometimes it happens: the one who is helping may be more neurotic than the one he is trying to help.More psychoanalysts go mad than any other profession in the world. More psychoanalysts commit suicide than any other profession in the world. Why? In a way it seems reasonable, logical: continuously dealing with neurosis, all kinds of madnesses – and they themselves are not whole – naturally, they are going to be affected. They are feeding themselves with these neuroses. When a psychoanalyst is listening to the patient and all his nonsense and rubbish, unconsciously he is collecting it in himself. The patient is dumping all his nonsense on the psychoanalyst. In fact, he pays for that. Slowly, slowly the psychoanalyst has so much neurosis dumped in him that it is going to explode. It is natural.If I were going to decide about who should be the psychoanalyst, then this process of making light circulate would be the basic requirement, the fundamental requirement for a psychoanalyst: unless a person is capable of circulating his light, he will not be allowed to treat anybody. And if a person is capable of circulating the light in himself he will never be affected by any kind of neurosis; he can listen, he can help, he will remain untouched. His circulation of light will keep him clean, purified. He will be a holy person. That is the difference between a guru and a psychoanalyst.Only a guru can really be a psychoanalyst, only a guru can really be a therapist. Only a person who has come to his wholeness can be of real help to others who are on the way, struggling, stumbling in the dark. Otherwise the blind man is leading another blind man – both are going to fall in some well.This book, The Secret of the Golden Flower, must become the most fundamental practice in the future for anybody who wants to become a psychotherapist. You will be surprised: the man, Wilhelm, who translated this book into Western languages for the first time was himself a great psychologist; that’s how he became interested in this book. But after he translated it, he went mad; he became very disturbed. His whole psychoanalytic training and this book created such a contradiction in him, created such a riddle in him, that he became more divided. The translation of this book drowned him in a kind of madness. He became so disoriented because his whole training, his whole understanding, was disturbed.Remember it. The secret is not very difficult. That is the difficulty of it: it is so simple that you only have to be on guard so that your mind does not make it difficult, does not give it twists and turns and contortions and distortions.Therefore it is taken as a guideline. The main thing is to lower the eyelids in the right way, and then to allow the light to stream in of itself; without effort, wanting the light to stream in concentratedly.There is no need to bring the light in concentratedly, it comes of its own accord. And when it comes of its own accord it is beautiful. If you start trying to bring it in you will be a failure, your effort is doomed to fail. And the more you fail the harder you will try, and the more you try the more your failure will be guaranteed. Don’t try to bring it in. Just leave yourself in the right situation where it becomes available.For example, if the moon is there in the night, just come to the window and stand at the window, and the moon starts showering its nectar on you. You need not do anything else. Just be in a place where the moon is already streaming; just make yourself available in the right field and things start happening – things which have immense value.Looking at the tip of the nose serves only as the beginning of the inner concentration, so that the eyes are brought into the right direction for looking, and then are held to the guideline: after that, one can let it be. This is the way a mason hangs up a plumb line. As soon as he has hung it up, he guides his work by it without continually bothering himself to look at the plumb line.One looks with both eyes at the tip of the nose…Remember, you have to look with both eyes at the tip of the nose so that at the tip of the nose both of your eyes lose their duality, so that on the tip of the nose, the light that is streaming out from your eyes becomes one, falls on a single point. Where your two eyes meet, that is the place from where the window opens. And then all is well. Then let it be. Then you simply enjoy, then you simply celebrate, delight, rejoice. Then nothing has to be done.One looks with both eyes at the tip of the nose, sits upright…It is helpful to sit upright. When your spine is straight, the energy from your sex center also becomes available to the third eye – just simple devices, nothing complex about them. Just that when your two eyes meet at the tip of the nose, you are available to the third eye; make your sex energy also available to the third eye, then the effect will be double. The effect will be forceful, because your sex center has all the energy that you have. When the spine is erect, straight, the sex center is also available to the third eye. It is better to attack the third eye from both dimensions, to try to penetrate the third eye from both directions.One…sits upright and in a comfortable position…The master is making things very clear: upright, certainly, but don’t make it uncomfortable, otherwise again you will be distracted by your discomfort. That is the meaning of a yoga posture. The Sanskrit word asana means a comfortable posture. Comfort is the basic quality of it. If it is not comfortable then your mind will be distracted by the discomfort. It has to be comfortable.If you cannot sit on the floor like the Eastern people can – because they have been sitting for centuries…. If a Western seeker cannot sit on the floor straight, comfortably, and has to force himself and it becomes uncomfortable and painful, then it is better to sit straight on a chair. But let the back of the chair be straight.You must have seen pictures and statues of ancient Egyptian kings and queens: their chairs have very straight backs. Then sit like that. That also is a yoga posture. Those ancient Egyptians knew the secrets.Anyway, two things: your spine should be straight and your posture should be comfortable. If both are not possible…sometimes it is so, both are not possible – if you make your spine straight it becomes uncomfortable, if you become comfortable the spine is no longer straight – then choose comfort. It will not be as good but the next best thing is to choose comfort. Then forget about the spine and its straightness, because if the mind is distracted, nothing is going to happen. If it is possible to have both then it is very beautiful.Sit in a comfortable position. One sits upright and in a comfortable position, and holds the heart to the center in the midst of conditions.And don’t escape from the world. Live in the world, in the conditions of it. The noise of the traffic is there, and the airplane passes by, and the trains are shuttling and all kinds of things are there – all these situations, the world – but you sit silently in the world. Because escaping to a Himalayan cave is always dangerous – dangerous for the single reason that the silence of the Himalayas is contagious and you will feel that you have become silent. And the coolness of the air is contagious, and you will think that you have cooled down. It will be borrowed, and whenever you come back to the marketplace all will be gone. And then you will know that all those years in the Himalayas were a wastage, a sheer wastage: you were simply befooling yourself.It is better to be in the world and attain to centering, because then it cannot be taken away from you. So wherever you are, you have to become centered in those conditions.It does not necessarily mean the middle of the head.And by centering it is not meant that you have to be centered in the middle of the head.It is only a matter of fixing one’s thinking on the point which lies exactly between the two eyes.And remember, not concentrating but just remaining alert, just a slight alertness: look at the tip of the nose and remain slightly alert to the third eye. In fact, the moment you look at the tip of the nose you will become alert to the third eye, because that is the other pole of the nose. One pole is the tip, the outer pole – one end; the other end of the nose is joined with the third eye. The moment you become aware of the tip you will suddenly become aware of the other end too. But just remain aware, effortlessly aware.It is only a matter of fixing one’s thinking on the point which lies exactly between the two eyes. Then all is well.A tremendous statement:Then all is well.You have started arriving home. You are on the threshold of a revolution.The light is something extremely mobile.Light is always moving, light is movement. And light is the greatest movement in the world. In a single second, the speed of light is one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles. Nothing moves at a greater speed than light. Light is pure speed, it is another name for speed. Light is never dormant, it is always dynamic, it is always moving, always flowing.The light is something extremely mobile. When one fixes the thought on the midpoint between the two eyes, the light streams in of its own accord.You need not be worried: just open the window and wait. Light is such a moving phenomenon that if the window is open it is going to move in. In fact, it has been knocking on the window for many many lives, but the window has not opened, so it cannot force it open. It is just like in the morning the sun has risen and you are fast asleep, and the rays come on the window and they knock on the window – but their knock is silent, they don’t make any noise, and they wait there. The moment you wake up and you open the window, the light streams in. And with light comes life, and with light comes delight.When one fixes the thought on the midpoint between the two eyes, the light streams in of its own accord.Remember the words…of its own accord.You are not a doer, you are just in a kind of let-go: you are surrendered to light.It is not necessary to direct the attention especially to the central castle. In these few words the most important thing is contained.The very secret of transforming your whole being, the very secret of the kingdom of God, the very secret of nirvana….“The center in the midst of conditions” is a very subtle expression. The center is omnipresent; everything is contained in it; it is connected with the release of the whole process of creation.And when you have reached to the third-eye point and you are centered there and the light is flooding in, you have reached to the point from where the whole creation has arisen – you have reached the formless, the unmanifest – call it God if you will. This is the point, this is the space, from where all has arisen, this is the very seed of the whole existence. It is omnipotent, it is omnipresent, it is eternal.Now you will not know any death. Now you will not know any identity with any kind of body – young, old, beautiful, ugly. Now you will not know any kind of disease – not that diseases will not happen to the body, but they will not happen to you anymore because you are no more identified.Ramana Maharshi died of cancer. The body was in great agony but he was smiling. The doctors were puzzled, they could not believe it. It was not believable. The body was in such agony and he was in such great ecstasy. How was it possible? And they asked again and again, “How is it possible?” And he would say again and again, “There is nothing strange about it. I am not the body. So whatsoever is happening in the body, it is just as you are witnessing my body, I am also witnessing my body. You are not feeling any pain so why should I? You are a witness, I am a witness. The body is just an object – an object in the middle of both of us. You are seeing from the outside that it is in agony, I am seeing from the inside that it is in agony. If you are not affected just by seeing it, why should I be?”In fact, the doctors were affected. They were feeling very sympathetic. They were sad, they were feeling helpless; they would have liked to save this…one of the most beautiful men that has ever walked on earth, but they could not. They were crying, but Ramana was not affected at all.There is a transcendence point within you from where suddenly you become disconnected from all that is manifest and you become connected with the unmanifest. To be connected with the unmanifest is to be free – free from all misery, all limitation, all bondage.Fixating contemplation is indispensable…And this is something which you cannot avoid – it is indispensable. If you want to reach a state of beatitude you will have to go through this fixating – this process of contemplation, meditation, or dhyana.…it ensures the making fast of the enlightenment. Only one must not stay sitting rigidly if worldly thoughts come up…Now the second, very important advice from the Master:…one must not stay sitting rigidly if worldly thoughts come up, but one must examine where the thought is, where it began, and where it fades out.This is not going to happen in the first try. You will be looking at the tip of the nose and thoughts will come. They have been coming for so many lives, they cannot leave you alone so easily. They have become part of you, they have become almost built-in. You are living almost a programmed life.Have you ever watched what you go on doing? Then tomorrow morning do one thing: the moment you wake up in the morning, simply watch what you do – how you get out of bed, how you move, what thoughts you have in the mind…. Just watch. And for one week, you watch: you will be surprised – you do exactly the same thing every morning – the same gestures, the same face, and almost the same kind of thoughts. You have become a programmed phenomenon, and you have been doing this your whole life – and maybe for many lives, who knows?When you become angry, watch – it is always the same process. You move through the same spaces. When you are happy, watch; when you fall in love, watch; and when you fall out of love, watch. It is almost the same process. And you go on doing the same stupid things again and again, and you go on making the same stupid statements again and again. You are not living a conscious life. Ninety-nine percent of you is programmed – programmed by others, programmed by society or programmed by yourself, but it is programmed.So it is not so easy, when you sit for the first time, looking at the tip of the nose, thoughts will say, “Now we should not go to this man. Look at the poor fellow – how deeply he is meditating! And he is looking at the tip of the nose…. This is not the time to go to him.” They will not bother. They will go on rushing. They will not be prevented by your looking at the tip of the nose. In fact, they may come even more forcibly, seeing that “This man is trying to get out of our grip.”This happens: when people sit silently in meditation more thoughts come than they do ordinarily, than they usually come – unusual explosions. Millions of thoughts rush in, because they have some investment in you – and you are trying to get out of their power? They will give you a hard time.So thoughts are bound to come. What are you going to do with thoughts? You cannot just go on sitting visibly there, you will have to do something. Fighting is not going to help because if you start fighting you will forget to look at the tip of the nose, the awareness of the third eye, the circulation of the light; you will forget all and you will be lost in the jungle of thoughts. If you start chasing thoughts you are lost, if you follow them you are lost, if you fight them you are lost. Then what is to be done?And this is the secret. Buddha has also used the same secret. In fact, the secrets are almost the same because man is the same – the lock is the same, the key has to be the same. This is the secret: Buddha calls it sammasati, right remembrance. Just remember: this thought has come, see where it is – with no antagonism, with no justification, with no condemnation. Just be objective as a scientist is objective. See where it is, from where it is coming from, where it is going? See the coming of it, see the staying of it, see the going of it. And thoughts are very mobile; they don’t stay long. You have simply to watch the arising of the thought, the staying of the thought, and the going of the thought. Don’t try to fight, don’t try to follow – just be a silent observer – and you will be surprised: the more observation becomes settled, less and less thoughts come. When observation is perfect, thoughts disappear, there is only a gap left, an interval left.But remember one more point: the mind can again play a trick.Nothing is gained by pushing reflection further.But don’t try to push the reflection further.That’s what Freudian psychoanalysis does, the free association of thoughts: one thought comes, and then you wait for another thought, and then another, and the whole chain…. That’s what all kinds of psychoanalysis do: you start moving backwards into the past but one thought is connected with another, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. There is no end to it. If you go into it you will be moving into an eternal journey – that will be a sheer wastage. Mind can do that, so beware of it.Nothing is gained by pushing reflection further. One must be content to see where the thought arose, and not seek beyond the point of origin; for to find the heart-consciousness, to get behind consciousness with consciousness itself – that cannot be done.You cannot go with consciousness beyond consciousness, so don’t try the futile, the unnecessary; otherwise one thing will lead you to another and so on and so forth, and you will completely forget what you were trying to do there. The tip of the nose will disappear, the third eye will be forgotten, the circulation of the light will be miles away from you.So only this much – the single thought. Don’t go into the chain. The single thought arises: watch where it is, where it is coming from and when it disappears, watch – it has disappeared. Take note.Buddhists say when a thought arises say, “Thought, thought,” so that you become alert. Just as when a thief comes into the house you say, “Thief! thief!” and everybody becomes alert, simply say, “Thought, thought,” and you will become alert, watchful. A thief has entered: now watch what the thief is doing.The moment you become aware, the thought will stop; it will look at you and be a little surprised because you have never done this before. It will feel a little unwelcome. “And what has happened to this man? He has always been such a good host, and now he says, ‘Thief! thief! Thought, thought.’ What has happened to this man?” The thought will be puzzled, will not be able to comprehend what is happening. “Is this man going mad, looking at the tip of the nose and saying ‘Thought, thought’?”The very awareness will stop the movement of the thought for a time. It will be stuck there. And go on watching. Don’t condemn, don’t throw it out, don’t fight, because either condemnation or justification, both will make you identified with the thought. Simply be there, alert, looking at the thought. Then it starts disappearing. Just as it came, it disappears. It came out of imagination, it disappears into imagination. Once it disappears, you come back to contemplation. You need not go to the very origin of it because there is none; then you will have to go to the very origin of existence.That’s why psychoanalysis has no end, it is never finished. There is not a single person in the world who is totally psychoanalyzed. Nobody can be totally psychoanalyzed. One year, two years, three years, four, five, six, seven – you can find people who have been going into psychoanalysis for seven years. Then what do you think – do they stop because the psychoanalysis is complete? No. They are bored with the psychoanalyst, the psychoanalyst is bored with them. And everything has to be finished somewhere. One has to put a full point. How long can one go on?But no psychoanalysis is ever complete – it cannot be. It is an infinite onion: you can go on peeling it and peeling it and peeling it, and you will never come to the end of it. But it helps. It makes you more adjusted to yourself and to society. It does not transform you, it makes you normally abnormal, that’s all. It helps you to be adjusted to the neurotic society in which you are. It makes you not a transformed, luminous being, but an ordinary person who is accepting of all that life brings, good and bad, and who starts dragging himself as everybody else is dragging. It teaches you a kind of sad acceptance of life. It is not true acceptance either, because true acceptance always brings celebration.Sigmund Freud has said that man cannot be happy, at most he can be comfortable. Life can be made more comfortable, that’s all, but happiness is impossible.It is not impossible. It is impossible through psychoanalysis. Because there have been happy people, we have seen them. A Buddha, a Lao Tzu, a Krishna – we have seen these dancing people. Freud is not happy – that is true – and he cannot be happy. Unless he drops psychoanalysis and moves into some meditative process, he will not be happy. It will take a few more lives for him to learn meditation.In fact, he was very afraid of meditation. And not just Sigmund Freud, but even a man like Carl Gustav Jung was afraid. Carl Gustav Jung has written a commentary on this book, The Secret of the Golden Flower; but it is only intellectual. It has no existential value. He had no experience of meditation himself – how can it have any existential value? And he was a very egoistic person, and the egoistic person finds it very difficult to enter into meditation because on the very door, you have to drop your ego.Jung came to India while Ramana Maharshi was alive, and many people suggested to him, “Since you have come to India and you are so interested in the inner mysteries of life, why don’t you go to Ramana? You write commentaries on The Secret of the Golden Flower and here is a golden flower in full bloom – why don’t you go to Ramana?” But he never went. He traveled in India, met many people, but never went to see Ramana. Why? What was the fear? He was afraid to encounter this man, afraid to face this mirror.Have you ever looked at Jung’s picture? Even in the picture the ego is so apparent. Freud doesn’t seem as egoistic as Jung. Maybe it was his ego that took him away from his master, Sigmund Freud – that made him betray Freud. Just look at his picture, his eyes: very cunning, calculating, as if ready to jump on anybody; tremendously egoistic, but very clever, intelligent, intellectually skillful.Remember, psychoanalysis or analytical psychology or other brands of the same game cannot lead you to happiness. They can lead you only to a lukewarm life of adjustment. They cannot help you to become aflame with celebration; this is beyond their capacity. And the reason? The reason is that they go on analyzing the thought. Analysis is not needed.Hence The Secret…says:Together we want to bring the states of the heart to rest, that is true contemplation.We want to bring the whole being into a kind of absolute rest. Analysis is not going to help, because analysis will create a turmoil, a restlessness.What contradicts it is false contemplation.Analysis is a false contemplation.That leads to no goal. When the flight of the thoughts keeps extending further, one should stop and begin contemplating.So these two things have to be remembered, these are two wings. One, when there is an interval, no thought is coming: contemplate. When a thought comes then just look at these three things: where the thought is, where it has come from, where it is going. For a moment stop looking into the gap, look at the thought, watch the thought, say goodbye to it; when it leaves, again immediately move back to contemplation.Again, just as an example: if you are looking at the gaps between the cars passing on the roads, when the car comes what will you do? You will have to watch the car too, but you don’t become concerned about the car. You don’t become concerned about the make, the vintage, the year, the color, the driver, the passenger. You don’t become concerned about all that analysis – you simply take note of the car: the car has come, the car is there in front of you, the car has gone, and again you become interested in the gap. Your whole interest is in the gap. But the car comes, so for a moment you have to pay attention to it. Then it is gone, you again start falling into rest, into contemplation, into the interval.When the flight of the thoughts keeps extending further, one should stop and begin contemplating. Let one contemplate and then start fixating again.So whenever the thought comes, fixate. Whenever the thought goes, contemplate.That is the double method of making fast the enlightenment. It means the circulation of the light. The circulation is fixation. The light is contemplation.Whenever you contemplate you will see light flooding in, and whenever you fixate you will create the circulation, you will make the circulation possible. Both are needed.The light is contemplation. Fixation without contemplation is circulation without light.That’s what has happened. That calamity has happened to hatha yoga: they fixate, they concentrate, but they have forgotten light. They have completely forgotten about the guest, they only go on preparing the house. They have become so engrossed in preparing the house that they have forgotten the purpose for which they are preparing the house, for whom. The hatha yogi continuously prepares his body, purifies his body, does yoga postures, breathing exercises, and goes on doing, ad nauseam. He has completely forgotten what he is doing it for. And the light is standing there but he won’t allow it, because the light can come in only when he is completely in a let-go.Fixation without contemplation is circulation without light.This is the calamity that happens to the so-called yogis. The other kind of calamity happens to psychoanalysts, philosophers.Contemplation without fixation is light without circulation!They think about the light, but they have not made the preparation for it to flood in; they only think of light. They think of the guest: they imagine a thousand and one things about the guest, but their house is not ready. Both miss.The Master says:Take note of that!Otherwise you can also miss. Prepare and then wait. Get ready. Looking at the tip of the nose, alert to the third eye, an erect spine, a comfortable posture – that’s all that you have to do – more than that is not needed. There is no need to go on for years doing yoga postures, year in, year out. That is stupid. And that’s why you will find the so-called yogis looking so stupid, unintelligent. Maybe their bodies are strong and they will live long, but what is the point of it?Without light, life is going to remain unintelligent and dark. Whether you live long or short makes no difference. The real point is to live in light even for a single moment, and then it is enough – that single moment is eternity.And there are philosophers who go on thinking about the light – what it is, how to define it, and which definition is the best and they constantly create many theories, dogmas, great systems of thought – but they are not ready for it…and the light is just waiting at the door.Take note of that!Don’t fall into either of these two fallacies. If you can remain alert, it is a very simple process and immensely transforming. In a single moment, a man who understands rightly can enter into a separate kind of reality.God is not far away, God is within you.Enough for today.

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

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-12/

The first question:Osho,Is it fair to put politicians with the dogs?I am sorry, I apologize – because dogs are so innocent. It is not fair at all.The second question:Osho,What is neurosis and what is the cure for it?Neurosis has never been so epidemic in the past as it is now. It is almost becoming a normal state of human mind. It has to be understood.The past was spiritually more healthy, and the reason was that mind was not fed so many things simultaneously – the mind was not overloaded. The modern mind is overloaded, and that which remains unassimilated creates neurosis. It is as if you go on eating and stuffing your body: that which is not digested by the body will prove to be poisonous. And what you eat is less important than what you hear and see. From your eyes, from your ears, from all your senses, you go on receiving a thousand and one things each moment, and there is no extra assimilation time, as if one were constantly sitting at the dining table, eating, eating – twenty-four hours a day. This is the situation of the modern mind: it is overloaded, so many things are burdening it; it is not any surprise that it breaks down. There is a limit to every mechanism. And mind is one of the most subtle and delicate of mechanisms.A really healthy person is one who takes fifty percent of his time to assimilate his experiences. Fifty percent action, fifty percent inaction – that is the right balance. Fifty percent thinking, fifty percent meditation – that is the cure. Meditation is nothing but a time when you can relax utterly into yourself, when you close all your doors, all your senses, to the outside stimulus. You disappear from the world. You forget the world, as if it exists no more – no newspapers, no radio, no television, no people. You are alone in your innermost being, relaxed, at home.In these moments, all that has become accumulated is assimilated: that which is of worth is assimilated, that which is worthless is thrown out. Meditation functions like a double-edged sword: on the one hand it assimilates all that is nourishing, and it rejects and throws out all that is junk. But meditation has disappeared from the world.In the old days, people were naturally meditative. Life was uncomplicated and people had enough time just to sit and do nothing, or look at the stars or watch the trees or listen to the birds. People had intervals of deep passivity. In those moments you become more and more healthy and whole.Neurosis means you are carrying such a load in the mind that you are dying under it. You cannot move – there is no question of your consciousness flying. You cannot even creep – the burden is too much…and the burden goes on increasing every moment. One cracks up. It is very natural.A few things to be understood. Neurosis is the mouse endlessly trying the dead end, not learning. Yes, not learning is neurosis – that is the first definition. You go on trying the dead end. You have been angry – how many times have you been angry? And how many times have you repented being angry? Still, let there be a stimulus and your reaction will again be the same – you have not learned a thing. You have been greedy and greed has created more and more misery. You know it – greed has never given anybody blissfulness – but you are still greedy, you still go on being greedy. You don’t learn. Nonlearning creates neurosis, is neurosis.Learning means assimilation. You try one thing and then you find that it doesn’t work: you drop it, you move in another direction, you try another alternative. This is wise, this is intelligent. Just knocking your head against a wall where you know perfectly well there is no door is neurosis.People are getting more and more neurotic because they go on trying the dead end, they go on trying that which doesn’t work. The man who is capable of learning never becomes neurotic – cannot become. He immediately sees the point that this is a wall. He drops the whole idea. He starts moving into other dimensions – there are other alternatives available. He has learned something.It is said of Edison that he was trying one experiment in which he failed seven hundred times. His colleagues became desperate. Three years were wasted and he went on trying new alternatives again and again. And every morning he came with great enthusiasm – the same enthusiasm that he had come with on the first day – and three years were wasted.One day his colleagues gathered together and they said to him, “We don’t see the point. We have failed seven hundred times. It is time to drop the experimentation.”Edison is reported to have said, “What are you saying – failed? We have learned that seven hundred alternatives were wrong alternatives. It has been a great experience! Today we are not going to try the same experiment, I have found another one. We are coming closer to the truth. How many false alternatives can there be? – there must be a limit. If there are one thousand false alternatives, then seven hundred have already been dropped and only three hundred are left, and then we will be reaching the right point.”This is learning: trying one experiment, seeing that it doesn’t work; trying an alternative, seeing that it doesn’t work, the wise man drops it. The fool clings to it. The fool calls it consistency. The fool says, “I did it yesterday and I am going to do it today too. And I will do it tomorrow too.” He is stubborn, pig-headed. He says, “How can I leave it? I have invested so much in it, I cannot change it.” Then he goes on insisting on it and his whole life is wasted. And as death comes closer, he is desperate, he is hopeless. He knows perfectly well deep down in his guts that he is going to fail. He has failed so many times and he is still trying the same thing without learning anything at all. This creates neurosis.The man who is capable of learning will never become neurotic. A disciple will never become neurotic. A disciple means one who is capable of learning. Never become knowledgeable; always be in the process of learning. Knowledgeability drives people neurotic. It is not just accidental that professors, philosophers, psychiatrists, scholars, easily go mad: they have learned and they have reached the conclusion that there is no more to learn. The moment you decide that there is no more to learn, you have stopped growing. To stop growing is neurosis – that is the second definition.The world was very different in the past, obviously. About six weeks’ worth of sensory stimuli six hundred years ago is what we now get in a day. Six weeks’ worth of stimulation, information, we are getting in a single day – about forty times the pressure to learn and adapt. Modern man has to be capable of learning more than man has ever been before, because there is more to learn now. Modern man has to become capable of adapting to new situations every day because the world is changing so fast. It is a great challenge.A great challenge, if accepted, will help tremendously in the expansion of consciousness. Either modern man is going to be utterly neurotic or modern man is going to be transformed by the very pressure. It depends on how you take it. One thing is certain: there is no way of going back. The sensory stimuli will go on increasing more and more. You will be getting more and more information and life will be changing, with faster and faster rhythms, and you will have to be capable to learn, to adapt, to new things.In the past man lived in an almost static world. Everything was static: you would leave the world exactly as your father had left it to you. You would not have changed anything at all. Nothing was changed. There was no question of learning too much, a little bit of learning was enough. And then you had spaces in your mind, empty spaces, which helped people to remain sane. Now there is no more empty space…unless you create it deliberately.Meditation is needed more today than ever before. Meditation is needed so much that it is almost a question of life and death. In the past it was a luxury; few people – a Buddha, a Mahavira, a Krishna – were interested in it. Other people were naturally silent, naturally happy, sane. There was no need for them to think of meditation; in an unconscious way they were meditating. Life was moving so silently, moving so slowly, that even the most stupid people were capable of adapting to it. Now the change is so tremendously fast, with such speed that even the most intelligent people feel incapable of adapting to it. Every day life is different, and you have to learn again – you have to learn and learn again and again. You can never stop learning now; it has to be a life-long process. To the very point of death you will have to remain a learner, only then can you remain sane, can you avoid neurosis. And the pressure is great – forty times greater. How to relax this pressure? You will have to go deliberately into meditative moments.If a person is not meditating at least one hour a day, then neurosis will not be accidental; he will create it himself. For one hour he should disappear from the world into his own being. For one hour he should be so alone that nothing penetrates him – no memory, no thought, no imagination; for one hour no content in his consciousness, and that will rejuvenate him and that will refresh him. That will release new sources of energy in him and he will be back in the world, younger, fresher, more able to learn, with more wonder in his eyes, with more awe in his heart – again a child.This pressure to learn and the old habit of not learning is driving people crazy. The modern mind is really super-loaded and no time is given to digest it and assimilate it into one’s own being. That is where meditation comes in and becomes more significant than ever: without a time given for the mind to rest in meditation, we repress all of the messages that are pouring in continuously. We refuse to learn. We say we do not have time. Then the messages begin to accumulate.If you don’t have time enough to listen to the messages that your mind is receiving continuously, they start accumulating just like files accumulating on your table – piles of letters accumulating on your table because you have not time enough to read and answer them. Exactly like that your mind becomes cluttered: so many files waiting to be looked into, so many letters to be read, to be answered, so many challenges to be taken, to be faced.I have heard….Mulla Nasruddin was saying one day, “If something wrong happens today, I will not have time for at least three months to look into it. So many wrong things have already happened which are waiting there. If something wrong happens today,” he said, “I will not have time to look into it for three months at least.”A queue – you can see that queue inside yourself – and the queue goes on growing. And the bigger the queue, the less and less space you have; the bigger the queue, the more and more noise inside, because everything that you have accumulated demands your attention.This usually starts at about the age of five, when real learning virtually stops, and lasts until death. In the old days it was okay. Five or seven years were enough to learn all that you would need in your life – that would do: seven years’ learning would do for seventy years of life. But now that is not possible. You cannot stop learning because new things are always happening and you cannot face those new things with old ideas. You cannot depend on your parents and their knowledge, you cannot even depend on your teachers in the school and the university, because what they are talking about is already out of date. Much more has happened; much water has gone down the Ganges.This was my experience: when I was a student I was surprised at my professors’ knowledge because it was thirty years old. It was when they were young that they had gathered it from their teachers. Since then they had not looked at what has happened. That knowledge was absolutely useless.I was constantly in conflict with my professors. I was thrown out of many colleges, expelled, because the professors said that they could not cope with me. And I was not creating any trouble. I was simply making them aware that what they were saying was out of date. But that hurts the ego. They had learned it in their own university days and they were thinking that the world had stopped then and there.Now students cannot depend on teachers and children cannot depend on their parents, hence a great rebellion is on the way all over the world. It has nothing to do with anything else. Students cannot respect their teachers anymore. Unless those teachers continuously learn, they cannot be respected. For what? – there is no reason. And children cannot respect their parents because the approach of their parents looks very primitive. Small children are becoming aware that what their parents say is out of date. Parents will have to continuously learn if they want to help their children to grow, and teachers will have to continuously learn. Now no one can stop learning. And this speed is going to grow continuously.So one thing: learning has not to be stopped, otherwise you will go neurotic, because to stop learning means you are accumulating information which you have not assimilated, digested, which has not become your blood and your bones and your marrow. It will hang around you with a great insistence, to be taken in.Secondly: you will need time to relax – this pressure is too much. You will need some time to disappear from this pressure. Sleep cannot help you anymore because sleep itself is becoming overburdened. Your day is so overloaded that when you go to sleep only the body falls limp on the bed, but the mind continues to sort things out. That’s what you call dreaming: it is nothing but a desperate effort of the mind to sort things out…because you won’t give any time to it.You have to relax consciously into meditation. A few minutes of deep meditation will keep you non-neurotic. In meditation the mind unclutters: experiences are digested and the overload disappears, leaving the mind fresh and young and clear and clean.In the past, the input volume was one-tenth of one’s time and the meditative time was nine-tenths. Now just the reverse is the case: nine-tenths input volume time and one-tenth meditative time. Very rarely do you relax, very rarely do you just sit silently, doing nothing. Even that one- tenth time of unconscious meditation is disappearing. Once that happens, man will be utterly mad. And that is happening.What do I mean by unconscious meditative time? You simply go into the garden, you play around with your children – that is unconscious meditative time. Or you swim in the swimming pool – that is unconscious meditative time. Or you mow your lawn, or you listen to the birds – that is unconscious meditative time. That too is disappearing because whenever people have time, they are sitting before their TV's, glued to their seats.Now, tremendously dangerous information is being put into your mind by the TV; you will not be able to digest it. Or you are reading newspapers – all kinds of nonsense is being fed to you. Whenever you have time you put the radio or the TV on. Or someday you are feeling very good and you want to relax and you go to the movie. What kind of relaxation is this? The movie will not allow you relaxation because continuously information is thrown into you.Relaxation means no information is thrown into you. Listening to a cuckoo will do, because no information is fed to you. Listening to music will do, because no information is thrown into you. Music has no language; it is pure sound. It does not give any message; it simply delights you. Dancing will be good, music will be good, working in the garden will be good, playing with children will be good, or just sitting doing nothing will be good. This is the cure. And if you do it consciously, the impact will be greater. Create a balance.Neurosis is an unbalanced state of mind: too much activity and no inactivity at all, too much masculine and no feminine at all, too much yang and too little of yin. And you have to be fifty-fifty, you have to keep a deep balance. A symmetry is needed inside you. You have to be an ardhanarishwar – half man, half woman – then you will never go neurotic.And that is the whole process of the book, The Secret of the Golden Flower: it will make you disappear as man, as woman; it will make you one whole, one unity; it will give you individuation.The individual is neither male nor female, it is simple unity. Strive to achieve it between time spent doing, versus time spent not doing. This is wholeness, this is what Buddha called his middle way, majjhim nikai. Just be exactly in the middle. And remember, you can become unbalanced to the other extreme too: you can become too inactive. That will be dangerous also. That has its own pitfalls and dangers. If you become too inactive, your life loses dance, your life loses joy, you start becoming dead.So I am not saying become inactive, I am saying let there be a balance between action and inaction. Let them balance each other and you be just in the middle. Let them be two wings of your being. No wing should be bigger than the other.In the West, action has become too big, inaction has disappeared. In the East, inaction became too big and action disappeared. The West knows affluence, richness on the outside and poverty inside; the East knows richness, affluence inside and poverty on the outside. Both are in misery because both have chosen extremes.My approach is neither Eastern nor Western, my approach is neither male nor female, my approach is neither of action nor inaction. My approach is that of utter balance, symmetry in you. Hence I say to my sannyasins: Don’t leave the world; be in the world and yet be not of it. This is what Taoists call wu wei wu, action through inaction. The meeting of yin and yang, anima and animus – it brings enlightenment. Imbalance is neurosis, balance is enlightenment.The third question:Osho,Are all women really soft, feminine and loving?I have not said that – that all women are really soft, feminine and loving. Neither are all men aggressive, violent, ambitious, hard, because deep down in you the consciousness is neither. The anima and the animus, the male and the female exist in your body chemistry. You can be a man physically, but you may have chosen, deep inside, the feminine part. A woman may be a woman physically but she may have chosen the masculine part. Both parts are available. Then the body remains feminine but the woman will become masculine. That is what is happening to women connected with the Women’s Liberation movement: they are dropping their feminineness, they are becoming as aggressive as man. They are trying to compete with all kinds of foolishnesses that man has: they want to have all those foolishnesses themselves, too. They cannot be left behind.The idea of being equal is creating a foolish idea of being similar. To be equal does not mean to be similar. Equality is a totally different dimension. Similarity is different.Yes, a woman can choose her masculine part too much – can become identified with it – then her softness will disappear. A man can choose his feminineness, then his hardness will disappear. The body will remain sexually male or female, but the quality surrounding the body, the vibe, will have to be that which you have chosen inside. A man can choose to be a woman inside, a woman can choose to be a man inside. And it is not a choice that you make once and forever, you can change it every moment. There are moments when a woman is very soft and there are moments when she can be very hard, very cruel. There are moments when a man is very hard, aggressive, but there are moments when he can be very soft. Even a Genghis Khan is very soft to his children. To his wife he is very soft.I have heard….The plain and strongly-built daughter of a Field Marshal was engaged to be married to a young officer on her father’s staff. “Couldn’t you do something for Frank now that he has asked me to marry him?” she asked her father one day.“There’s not much I can do really,” replied the Field Marshal, “except get him a medal for gallantry.”Or, listen to this….He was undersized, meek, diffident and subdued, and he had applied for a job as a nightwatchman.“Yes,” said the manager, dubiously, “but the fact is we want someone who is restless and uneasy, especially at night – someone who thinks the worst of everybody, someone who sleeps with one eye open. The kind of person in short, who when roused, is the devil himself.”“Alright,” said the meek lad as he walked away, “I’ll send my wife.”It depends on what you choose inside you. It is a choice. The body is not your choice, but the vibe that will surround your body is a choice. And if you consciously choose, you will have great freedom in your being, because you will know who you are and what you are doing with your body.The body is tremendously potential – much can happen through it – but people take it for granted. It is as if a beautiful guitar has been given to you as a present and you just keep it, not knowing the potential of it. You can play on the guitar, you can learn to play on the guitar and great music will be born. And then it depends on you what kind of music it will be. You can create a music which is sad, you can create a music which is celebrating, you can create music which is violent, you can create a music which is soothing, loving, silent – there are kinds of music.The classical music has a different quality: it soothes, it brings you to a silence, rest. The modern pop music makes you restless, sexual; it drives you into a kind of frenzy. The instruments are the same, so is the body. A really wise person chooses to play the kind of music he wants to play on the body. You can make your body like a Buddha or you can become a Mohammed Ali. It depends on you. Look at Buddha’s body: how soft – although he is a man, how feminine – although he is a man. He has chosen grace.It depends on you. It is your choice. You are not confined by your chemistry. You can be confined only if you remain unconscious in your chemistry, otherwise your chemistry has infinite potential: it can be put to a thousand and one uses. And to learn how to use one’s body, how to behave with one’s body, how to relate with one’s body, is a great art. Millions of people just take their body for granted; they never search for its possibilities. Their body remains a seed, it never becomes a golden flower.The fourth question:Your discourse on politics, and the poison it is, was extraordinary! I have lived in many communities, all sincere and well-meaning, yet everywhere I was appalled at the unconscious political ambition and intrigues which are underlying and dormant but come up in spite of the good intentions.How are you handling it here? Are you allowing it free play so that people can work it out of their systems or are you nipping it in the bud and weeding out those that show the slightest tendencies?My humble experience is that some people can never, never get anything going without politics – without getting themselves higher and higher in the power game. They are all over – perhaps even here – spreading their poison.I don’t believe in repressing anything, not even the poisonous politics, because repressed it remains in your system – sooner or later it will take you over. And the longer it has been repressed, the more dangerous it becomes, because the deeper it goes into your unconscious, the deeper it goes into your very source of being. And if you are poisoned at your very source, at the very center, then it becomes really difficult to uproot it.My approach about everything is to bring it to the surface. So I never nip anything in the bud, I help it to become a flower. And after the flowering, the flower starts withering of its own accord. That’s the natural way.So in my commune, nothing is prevented. Ambitions are allowed, accepted, as a part of human beings – their ignorance, their unawareness. But I make my people aware that these are games, so play them but play consciously, become more and more alert, and never let them become serious. If they don’t become serious, there is no need to be afraid of them. The problem is, when a game becomes so serious then you forget completely that it is a game.That’s where the politician is lost: he thinks he is doing something very serious. He is doing something very silly, but he thinks he is doing something very serious. All that is needed is to make him aware that this is a game; if you want to play it, play, but don’t become so serious about it. Keep a little bit of humor. A sense of humor is one of the greatest keys to transform human personalities.Yes, you are right – here also! – because these people come from the world and they bring all kinds of infections from the world. They are not coming here fresh, they have been already conditioned. Ambition has already been put into them. Their parents, the society, church, school, college, university – everywhere they have been poisoned, they bring all that poison here. You cannot nip it in the bud; otherwise they will become split and hypocritical. Then on the surface they will show humility, humbleness, and deep down they will think, “There is nobody more humble than me” – and politics has come in. Deep down they will think, “I am the greatest egoless person in the world” – but the greatest. Now a new kind of ambition has entered. It is the same ambition, now the direction is new. And it is more subtle and of course, more dangerous too. And because it is “pious” now, it is in the name of religion. So even the poison no longer looks like poison, it is labeled nectar. It is religious poison, pious poison.It is more difficult to get rid of the pious poison, so I don’t repress anything and I don’t help any kind of repression. I help people to bring whatsoever they have in them to the surface. I help them to be aware of it, to watch it, to see the foolishness of it, to see the stupidity of it – not because I say it is stupid, because if I say something and you only believe, you will repress. I help you – my function here is to help you become aware on your own. The day you see the stupidity of it, it will drop of its own accord.So I have created all kinds of games here. Yes, there is a hierarchy too, so people who want to play, they can play the game of hierarchy. But sooner or later – because the whole effort is to make them conscious – they become aware that this is a game. And the moment they see it is a game, they are out of it. Seeing something as a game makes you laugh at it – a hearty laugh at your own self. And when a man can laugh at his own stupidities he is becoming wise. Laughter has to come out of awareness.Ambitious people also laugh. Just the other day I was reading that when Jimmy Carter came to power he was laughing so beautifully that you could have counted his teeth. And some people have counted – eleven teeth were showing. Now only seven are showing. Now the smile is disappearing because his prestige is falling every day: people’s expectations are not fulfilled, what he has promised he cannot deliver. Only seven! Soon you will see five, three, two. By the time he goes, the smile will have disappeared completely. You will not see a single tooth. This is not real laughter. Even this laughter is political, managed, practiced, cultivated.There is a different kind of laughter that comes to you when you see all kinds of foolishnesses that you have been in – and how seriously – when you see the whole ridiculousness of your life pattern, your whole gestalt and its stupidity. But not because I say or Buddha says or Master Lu-tsu says…. It is not a question of belief, it is not a question of somebody else’s knowledge and you borrow it – borrowed knowledge never helps. It has to arise in you.My effort here is to make you aware of all that is hidden in you. All that you have been doing unconsciously has to be done consciously, that’s all. And sometimes miracles happen.Once a professor came to me. His problem…and it was really a problem, because to be a professor and have such a problem is really difficult. His problem was that he walked like a woman. So whenever he passed by, students would come and laugh and giggle and he felt really bad – what to do about it? And he had been to the doctors and the psychoanalysts and they could not help. They said, “What can we do?” From his very childhood he had been walking that way. And he tried not to walk like that, and the more he tried, the more he failed.There is a certain law – hypnotists call it the law of reverse effect: you try hard to do something and just the opposite happens.So he was trying hard. His whole effort, his whole mind was concerned with not walking like a woman, but he was walking like a woman more and more. I told him, “Just do one thing – because it is a miracle that you can walk like a woman, it is really a miracle.”He said, “What are you saying?”I said, “It is a miracle! A woman can walk that way because of a different musculature. Because of the womb she walks in a certain way; no man can walk like that. You are unique!”He said, “What are you saying? And everybody is laughing at me.”I said, “You are really unique. You have done something miraculous. It is magical. You forget all about it. My suggestion is that you start walking consciously like a woman, make it a point to walk like a woman.”He said, “What are you suggesting? I have tried my whole life not to walk like a woman, then too I walk like a woman. And if I start walking like a woman, what will happen?”I said, “You just try in front of me.” And at least twenty, thirty people were sitting there.He said, “Here?”I said “Here. You try.”He tried and he failed! He could not walk…he could not walk like a woman. And he looked very surprised. He said, “What happened?”I said, “You have to understand the law of reverse effect. Now go to the university, anywhere, and consciously try to walk like a woman – because it is very difficult to walk like a woman unless you are a woman.”And since then he has not walked like a woman. He became conscious of it. It was an unconscious mechanism. Unconsciousness was the root cause of it. Just become conscious, and it disappears.Man’s problems are rooted in the unconscious. And what do you go on doing? You go on repressing those problems into the unconscious. Where else will you repress them? There is nowhere else to repress them. Whenever you repress something, you repress it into the unconscious; that’s how the unconscious is created.I don’t have an unconscious because I never repress anything. The unconscious is created by repressions. The child does not have an unconscious – by and by he will have. And the old man has more of the unconscious than the conscious because he has been repressing his whole life. The unconscious functions like a basement: whatsoever is useless, you throw into the basement, it accumulates there – it becomes a junkyard! That is what your unconscious is. And from the unconscious, things arise and take possession of you.All the ghosts that take possession of you come from the unconscious not from the graveyards. Your unconscious is the graveyard where those ghosts are born. And whenever they can find an opportunity, an occasion to sneak up and possess you, they will possess you – and they possess with revenge, with a vengeance. Now, to repress it is to help the unconscious more. That is the law of reverse effect. Your unconscious will become more and more powerful. You are feeding it and nourishing it.My whole approach is that consciousness is liberation, awareness is the solution. Just become more conscious of whatsoever you are doing.Once it happened….A thief came to a great master, Nagarjuna. He had come for a certain reason. Nagarjuna used to live naked – one of the great Indian mystics and one of the greatest alchemists. He would have been the right person to comment on The Secret of the Golden Flower. C.G. Jung was not the right person to comment on it.He came into a great capital. The queen was a follower of Nagarjuna. She came with a golden begging bowl and told Nagarjuna, “Give your wooden begging bowl to me. I will keep it as a treasure. And I have brought this golden begging bowl for you.”She was afraid that maybe Nagarjuna would say, “I don’t touch gold, I am an ascetic.”But Nagarjuna was an enlightened person. He said, “Okay.” So he took the golden begging bowl studded with valuable diamonds.A thief saw Nagarjuna moving with the golden begging bowl, naked, and all those diamonds shining in the sun. He said, “Look! How long can this man have this? Somebody is going to take it from him. Why not me? This naked man cannot keep it long. From where did he get it?”So the thief followed Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna was staying outside the capital in the ruins of an old temple where there were no doors, not even windows – nothing – just walls all falling down, just a small shelter. A little bit of roof was still safe. The thief said, “How will he protect his valuable thing? In the night at least he will go to sleep.”So he waited outside by the side of the wall near a window. Nagarjuna wanted to have a little sleep in the afternoon – that was his habit. Seeing the thief following him, he knew perfectly well why he was following. He was not following Nagarjuna, he was following the golden bowl – so why force him to wait there? Anyway he was going to take it. “When I fall asleep,” thought Nagarjuna, “he will take it, so why unnecessarily force him to wait?” He threw the begging bowl out of the window.The thief could not believe what was happening. But this man looked really charismatic – naked, so beautiful, so divine-looking, with such a precious thing with him, and he has thrown it! Now the thief could not leave: he was so attracted by the person, so enchanted, almost hypnotized. He looked in through the window and said, “Sir, can I come in and have a little chit-chat with you?”Nagarjuna said, “That’s why I have thrown the bowl outside – so that you could come in! You would have come in when I had gone to sleep but that would have been meaningless. Come in!”The thief came in and he said, “Looking at you, seeing that you can throw such a valuable thing away so easily – and I know why you have thrown it, you have thrown it away for me – a great desire has arisen in me: Will there be a time, ever, when I will also be so detached, so aloof, so free of possessions as you are?”Nagarjuna said, “The time has come. Accidentally you are already caught. I will give you the secret of how to become transcendental to the world, how to go beyond, how not to possess.”The man said, “But let me first tell you that I am a thief. And I have gone to many saints before, but they all say – because I am a well-known thief – they all say, ‘First you stop stealing, only then can you meditate.’ So let me tell you first. You may not know.”Nagarjuna said, “Then it simply shows that you have never been to a saint up to now. They must have been ex-thieves, otherwise who cares who you are? And why make a condition that first you have to stop stealing? I will give you the meditation – it is very simple. You go on stealing, just do one thing: do it consciously, do it with full awareness. When you are going to steal, move fully aware, alert to what you are doing, and after fifteen days you report to me.”But by the seventh day the thief was back and he said, “You deceived me. For seven days continuously I have not been able to steal. And it was not that I was prevented; I reach the places where great treasures are available, but I cannot do it. If I become aware, I start laughing at my foolishness. What am I doing – stealing things which will be taken away from me? Sooner or later I will have to die. The whole thing looks so childish. If I become aware, I cannot steal; if I steal, I lose my awareness. Both cannot go together.”Nagarjuna said, “Then you decide. Whichever you choose, you can choose. You can drop awareness and steal, or if you want to have awareness, then drop stealing.”And the man said, “I have tasted awareness. It is impossible to drop it. I will drop stealing because awareness is far more valuable, far more significant. I have only tasted a little bit of it, but it gives such joy. And I have been stealing my whole life and I have accumulated many valuable things in my house, but they have never given me any joy. They only give me more and more fear.”Awareness is the only secret key: it transforms. It doesn’t matter what your illness is, awareness is the only medicine: it cures all illnesses. If you are politically minded – and everybody is…. In some way or other everybody is trying to be higher than the other, everybody is trying to be more powerful than the other. Even in relationships politics continue. The husband tries to be more powerful than the wife, the wife tries to be more powerful than the husband, hence the constant conflict, even between parents and children. Everywhere there is conflict. It is all politics, different faces of politics.So when you come to me I cannot expect you to come without politics – that is impossible. If you are without politics, you will not need to come; wherever you are, God will come to you. When you come here I accept all your human weaknesses. I have no condemnation. I don’t tell you to repress; I don’t want to make you feel guilty about anything. If you want to play the game of politics you are allowed to play it, with only one condition: become more and more alert while playing it, have a sense of humor, and then all is well. Sooner or later it will wither away of its own accord.And so is the case with sensuality, sexuality, so is the case with possessiveness – so is the case with everything that man suffers from.The fifth question:Osho, this morning in the lecture, I went so deep that I was sure the body was going to die right then and there. I became very afraid and struggled back to the surface. Now I am afraid it will happen again. What to do?Saguna, you are a fool. You should have allowed it to happen. You missed a great opportunity. If again at any time you start feeling that you are dying in my presence, die immediately! That means your ego was on the verge of disappearing and something tremendously valuable was about to happen. You missed it.But it happens the first time to everybody: one shrinks back in fear, escapes back into his ego, clings, holds. Where can you find a better place to die? If you can die in my presence you will attain to life, eternal life, life abundant. If you can die in satsang, in the presence of the master, you will be resurrected. But that courage has to be there. Gather your courage, and next time it starts happening, let it happen.The sixth question:Osho,Is psychoanalysis really that useless?No, not always. Sometimes it helps too. Meditate on this story.Felix Simons was a nice guy but a social flop. Although he was thirty-five, he had never conquered his childhood habit of bed-wetting. Finally, one of his friends told him, “Look, Felix, you might as well know the truth. We’re all very fond of you, but nobody can stand to come into your house because it smells, and you’re driving your wife up a wall. Why don’t you see a psychiatrist about your problem? Enuresis is not too uncommon and it can be cured. Get it over with once and for all!”Felix was convinced. After six months of treatment, he ran into the same friend.“Well, Felix, did you take my advice?”“Yes,” answered Felix, “I’ve been seeing a psychiatrist three times a week for six months now.”“Well, have you had any results?”“Oh,” beamed Felix, “great results!”“You don’t wet your bed anymore?”“I still do, but now I’m proud of it!”Psychoanalysis helps only in this way: it makes you proud of things you have been guilty about. Religion has created guilt in people. Psychoanalysis has moved to the other extreme: psychoanalysis is a reaction to religious guilt. This has to be understood.Religion has done a great wrong to humanity. It has wounded the human heart by creating guilt. It lives on guilt. The whole religious world – Hindu, Christian, Mohammedan, these are only different names for the same trick: how to create guilt in people. Once you have created guilt in people they are caught in your net, you can exploit them. Guilt is the spider’s net: make people feel guilty and they are in your power. Then you can manipulate them, you can force them to surrender, you can force them to do things for you – for the church, for the priest. They are guilty, they are afraid, they are going to suffer – they want to find a way out.First create guilt, then they are bound to come to you, because they will have to find a way out of guilt. Then tell them to pray, then tell them to do some ritual, some mantra. But first the guilt has to be created.I have heard….Two persons were doing great business. They were partners. The business was simple. One would enter a town in the night and throw coal tar on people’s windows, and after two, three days, the other would come to clean. And he would make it known in the town that he knew how to clean coal tar from the windows. By the time he had cleaned the windows, the other would have prepared another town for him. Then he would go to the other town. They were doing really great business. They were partners.Religion depends on creating guilt: first throw coal tar on people’s hearts and then tell them how to cleanse it…and then they have to pay for it.Psychoanalysis is a reaction. I don’t call it a revolution but only a reaction. It reacted against this whole business and it started doing the opposite: it makes you proud of your things. It says, “This is perfectly normal. If you are wetting your bed this is perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong in it. You should be really proud of it.” It gives support to you as you are.Religion condemns you as you are. Psychoanalysis convinces you that this is the only way you can be and you are perfectly right. You are okay – that is the message of psychoanalysis. Both are wrong. Neither do you need to feel guilty nor do you need to feel perfectly okay. If you feel guilty you will become a victim to the church, to the priest, and they will exploit you. If you start feeling you are perfectly okay, you become dormant, your growth stops.You have to know one thing: that life means evolution, growth, life means going higher and higher – to new plenitudes, to new planes of being. There is no need to feel guilty for what you are, but there is every need to have a tremendous longing to rise higher, because you are a seed, a potential – and you can become God. If you accept yourself as you are and you settle with it, you will remain a seed – you will never become a tree and you will never be able to have a dialogue with the stars. You will not be able to play with the wind and the rain and the sun. You will remain shrunk into a seed. But there is no need to feel guilty! A seed is a seed – there is no need to feel guilty – but the seed has to become a tree. There is really a great need to inquire into one’s potential. Never feel guilty, never feel proud. Just feel tremendously happy that a great opportunity has been given to you to grow.And this whole life is a challenge to growth. That is true religion and that is true psychology too – because a true religion cannot be anything other than a true psychology. I call that psychology “the psychology of the buddhas.” It does not make you feel guilty – it accepts you, it loves you – but it doesn’t make you feel proud to be as you are. It gives you a great challenge to be more than you are. It gives you a divine discontent. It makes you aflame with a desire to go higher and higher – not higher than others, but higher than yourself. Tomorrow should not be just a repetition of today – that is the meaning of divine discontent. Today should not be just a repetition of yesterday, otherwise you have not lived. Today must bring some new gifts to you, some new flowers, some new rays. Some new windows must open today.To feel guilty means to remain possessed by the past, to feel proud means to remain wherever you are, whatsoever you are. To have a divine discontent means to grow, to search, to seek, to explore. And life is nothing but an adventure, a constant adventure into the unknown.So I don’t want you to feel guilty and I don’t want you to feel proud. When you drop both, real life begins.And the last question:Osho,Why is communication so difficult?It is not only difficult, it is impossible. It is really a miracle if sometimes it happens, because two persons are two persons – their past experiences are different, their gestalt is different, their knowledge is different, their personalities are different. They are two worlds. They speak different languages; it may be in the same language, but they speak different languages. They give different meaning to words, different nuances, different shades and different colors.When you are looking at a roseflower and if there are five persons looking at the roseflower, don’t think for a single moment that you are looking at the same roseflower – you cannot! Only five buddhas standing beside the flower will be able to look at the same roseflower – you cannot – because five buddhas means five zeros, five no-minds. Only two no-minds can commune because there is nothing to hinder now, nothing to interpret – it is direct.But when five minds are standing by the side of the roseflower they only believe that they are looking at the same roseflower, because they have different ideas of the rose, different experiences of the rose, different past impacts of the rose. All that is there in their eyes, layer upon layer; this rose is so far away, so distant.For example, one may have loved a woman who was obsessed by roses, but she betrayed him. Now the rose will only remind him of that betrayal and the woman. That is not the others’ experience. The other may have seen a dead man garlanded with a rose garland. The rose will remind him of death – he may feel a little fear. The third may have his own experience about the rose. It will depend. And that’s how it is with each experience.Only two no-minds can communicate; even without words, then communication happens. It is a communion. But minds are bound to clash, conflict.I will tell you a few stories.First:Seated in an elegantly appointed restaurant, Chico Marx was studying the oversized menu when the head waiter approached his table. The waiter folded his hands in front of him and with proper Continental demeanor inquired, “And what is your pleasure, Monsieur?”“Girls,” Chico replied. “What’s yours?”The second story:The young husband and his bride flew to Miami for their honeymoon and for days neither hide nor hair was seen of them. On the morning of the sixth day, they entered the dining room for breakfast. As the waiter approached them for their order, the bride turned to her husband and said coyly, “You know what I’d like, honey, don’t you?”“Yes, I know,” he replied wearily, “but we have got to eat sometime too!”And the third story:The boss had been after his secretary for almost a year. He had been suggesting all kinds of things to her. On this particular evening he was unusually persistent.“Oh, come on!” he said. “Let’s go out and have supper, then go to the theater, then to a nightclub and then we will go up to my apartment.”The blond clipped back, “I would like you to comprehend that I am adamant and didactic in my refusal of your salacious, mendacious and denigrating proposition.”The boss said, “I don’t get it.”The secretary answered, “That’s just what I have been trying to tell you.”Language is the problem – different experiences, different minds, different pasts, different patterns, different habits, different personalities.You ask me why it is difficult to communicate. It is not only difficult, it is almost impossible. If once in a while it happens, feel tremendously fortunate. Yes, once in a while it happens. When you are deeply in love with somebody, it happens. Then language is not needed. Then your very presence, your very vibe communicates. Then, for a moment, in deep love, you slip out of your minds. In deep love, for a moment you become buddhas, you become no-minds.So only in rare moments of love communication happens, otherwise it is always a quarrel, a subtle conflict. You say one thing, the other understands something else. The other says something, you understand something else. If you really want to communicate, become more and more loving – because love is needed, not language. Language is a barrier, love is a bridge. If you really want to communicate, start slipping out of your mind. Become more and more zeros, no-minds, and suddenly you will see miracles happening. It is happening here.The new people who come here are not in tune with me for a few days: I say something, they understand something else. But as they become more and more open to my love, communication starts happening. To those who have really lived long with me and have become intimate, to those with whom the barrier of language has disappeared, just a look in their eyes or just a touch by my hand and there is communication – not only communication, but communion. That’s why just recently I have started a new way of communing with my sannyasins: just to touch them, just to let them feel my energy.The more you become intimate with me, the less and less words will be needed – because you will start hearing me! Then there will be no need of words. I will continue to speak for the new people, I will continue to speak for those who will be coming – more and more will be coming, thousands are on the way – but those who have been here with me long enough or deep enough…. And depth can happen even in a single moment. It is not only a question of time, it is a question of intensity.Sometimes it happens that when a person comes to me for the first time, the first moment of contact and he becomes intimate as if he has been with me for many lives. And not only do I feel that, he also immediately feels that he has come home, that this is the place he has been searching for his whole life, or for many lives. Then communication immediately happens. Then there is no conflict.In fact, the moment there is communion and there is no conflict is the moment of your real initiation. Then what I say is secondary. What I am becomes primary. Then you relate to me directly. Then you are not distracted by my words – because I am not a consistent man. I contradict myself, and I contradict myself deliberately to help you to get rid of your expectation of consistency, to help you to get rid of language. Listening to me contradicting myself again and again, slowly slowly you will see that words are only games; you will not be serious about words. The day that awakening has happened in you, you relate to me directly. Then there is no medium needed, then you are bridged.I am in love, I am love. The moment you are in love and you become love, communion happens. Communion is a function of love, not of language. In fact, language functions as a hindrance, not as a help.Remember it: to be with me is to be with an emptiness, a nobody. I have nothing to offer to you, I have nothing to teach you, I have no philosophy. I am, but I have no philosophy. I am, but I have nothing to offer. I am, but I have nothing to teach. And you have to learn to be with this I-am-ness…and then you will know what communion is.Communion is a phenomenon of love, a flowering of love. It has nothing to do with language, with words – not at all. It is silence.Enough for today.

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

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-13/

Master Lu-tsu said:The decision must be carried out with a collected heart and not seeking success; success will then come of itself. In the first period of release there are chiefly two mistakes: indolence and distraction. But that can be remedied; the heart must not enter into the breathing too completely. Breathing comes from the heart. What comes out of the heart is breath. As soon as the heart stirs there develops breath-energy. Breath-energy is originally transformed activity of the heart. When our ideas go very fast they imperceptibly pass into fantasies which are always accompanied by the drawing of a breath, because this inner and outer breathing hangs together like tone and echo. Daily we draw innumerable breaths and have an equal number of fantasies. And thus the clarity of the spirit ebbs away as wood dries out and ashes die.So, then, should a man have no imaginings in his mind? One cannot be without imaginings. Should one not breathe? One cannot be without breathing. The best way is to make a medicine of the illness. Since heart and breath are mutually dependent, the circulation of the light must be united with the rhythm of breathing. For this, light of the ear is above all necessary. There is a light of the eye and a light of the ear. The light of the eye is the united light of the sun and moon outside. The light of the ear is the united seed of sun and moon within. The seed is thus the light in crystallized form. Both have the same origin and are different only in name. Therefore, understanding (ear) and clarity (eye) are one and the same effective light.In sitting down after lowering the lids, one uses the eyes to establish a plumb-line and then shifts the light downward. But if the transposition downward is not successful, then the heart is directed towards listening to the breathing. One should not be able to hear with the ear the outgoing and intaking of the breath. What one hears is that it has no tone. As soon as it has tone, the breathing is rough and superficial, and does not penetrate into the open. Then the heart must be made quite light and insignificant. The more it is released, the less it becomes; the less it is, the quieter. All at once it becomes so quiet that it stops. Then the true breathing is manifested and the form of the heart comes to consciousness. If the heart is light, the breathing is light, for every movement of the heart affects breath-energy. If breathing is light, the heart is light, for every movement of the breath-energy affects the heart. In order to steady the heart, one begins by taking care of the breath-energy. The heart cannot be influenced directly. Therefore the breath-energy is used as a handle, and this is what is called maintenance of the concentrated breath-energy.Children, do you not understand the nature of movement? Movement can be produced by outside means. It is only another name for mastery. One can make the heart move merely by running. Should one not also be able to bring it to rest by concentrated quietness? The great holy ones who knew how the heart and breath-energy mutually influence one another have thought out an easier procedure in order to help posterity.“The hen can hatch her eggs because her heart is always listening.” That is an important magic spell. The hen can hatch the eggs because of the energy of heat. But the energy of the heat can only warm the shells; it cannot penetrate into the interior. Therefore she conducts this energy inward with her heart. This she does with her hearing. In this way she concentrates her whole heart. When the heart penetrates, the energy penetrates, and the chick receives the energy of the heat and begins to live. Therefore a hen, even when at times she leaves her eggs, always has the attitude of listening with bent ear. Thus the concentration of the spirit is not interrupted. Because the concentration of the spirit suffers no interruption, neither does the energy of heat suffer interruption day or night, and the spirit awakens to life. The awakening of the spirit is accomplished because the heart has first died. When a man can let his heart die, then the primal spirit wakes to life. To kill the heart does not mean to let it dry and wither away, but it means that it has to become undivided and gathered into one.A story….The ancient Zen master, Dogo, had a disciple called Soshin. When Soshin became a novice under Dogo he doubtless expected that the master would instruct him in Zen the way a schoolmaster instructs his pupils. But Dogo said nothing special to him, and indeed, appeared to have no intention of conveying anything unusual to the disciple. Finally Soshin could stand it no longer and reproached his master for not having shown him anything of Zen. “But I have been giving you lessons in Zen ever since you arrived,” said Dogo.“Oh?” said Soshin, “When could that possibly have been?”“When you bring me my morning tea,” said Dogo, “I accept it. When you serve me a meal, I eat it. When you bow to me, I acknowledge it. How else do you expect to learn Zen?”Tao can be shared but cannot be divided. Tao can be shown but cannot be said.The master lives in Tao. The disciple has to imbibe the spirit of it. It is not a teaching, it cannot be a teaching – all teachings are superficial. It has to be deeper than a teaching. It has to be an energy transfer. It has to be heart to heart, soul to soul, body to body. It cannot be verbal. And the disciple has to see, watch, observe, feel, love the energy that is manifesting in the master. Slowly slowly, by and by, just sitting by the side of the master, the disciple learns many secrets, although they are never taught.One of the greatest secrets is that sitting by the master’s side, the disciple starts breathing in the same way the master breathes. There arises a synchronicity, and in that synchronicity the two meet. It happens to lovers too. If you are in deep love with someone, sitting side by side, sitting together with your beloved, you will be surprised if you observe, that suddenly, for no reason at all, not cultivated by you, you are breathing in the same way. When the beloved exhales, you exhale; when the beloved inhales, you inhale. And suddenly you are connected, linked together.Breath is of immense importance. That’s how the mother is connected with the child. And sometimes even, the distance may be of a thousand miles between the child and the mother, but the mother’s heart is immediately affected if the child is in danger. Their breathing is so connected – they breathe alike. And there is an obvious reason for it. The child in the mother’s womb was breathing through the mother for nine months. He had no breath of his own. It was his mother’s breath, and he was simply following the mother’s breathing. The mother was breathing for him, on his behalf; for nine months they lived in a deep synchronicity. Even after the child is born it continues. If there is real love, it can continue for the whole of their lives.Now there have been scientific proofs for it too. In America, in Russia, and in other countries also, many experiments have been done lately with birds, with animals. The child is taken far away and then killed, and they watch the mother with all the sophisticated instruments available. The moment the child is killed – it may be a thousand miles away – immediately the mother’s breath changes – immediately, in the exact moment. Her breath becomes shaken, a trembling arises in her. She feels panic, pain – for no reason, for no apparent reason: something intuitive, something without any medium between the two. They are not visibly connected by anything, but there are some invisible threads too.The disciple has to learn not what the master is teaching but how the master is being. That’s what Dogo means when he says, “But I have been giving you lessons in Zen ever since you arrived. When you bring me my morning tea, I accept it. Have you not watched it – the way I accept it? Have you not fallen in deep harmony with me when I accept the tea from you? When you serve me a meal, I eat it. When you bow to me, I acknowledge it. How else do you expect to learn Zen?”The master is saying: Watch my gestures – the way I walk, the way I sit, the way I breathe, the way I simply sit with you, the way I look at you, the way I respond in a thousand and one small ways. Don’t wait for a doctrine; the master’s presence is the only doctrine there is. The real teaching is not a teaching at all, it is a transfer – a transfer beyond words and beyond scriptures. And the transfer happens through the harmony of the breath.I would also like to say to you that I have also nothing to offer to you as a teaching, as a doctrine, as a philosophy, as a religion. I have nothing to teach at all. I have much to share, but nothing to teach – or, only nothing to teach! But to feel that nothing that I would like to be transferred to you, you will have to fall in rhythm with me. And small things disturb, very small things. And you have to become aware slowly slowly what the disturbances are.In evening darshan sometimes I call a few sannyasins to help me transfer energy to somebody. I have been calling Pradeepa many times, but each time I call her, afterwards I feel nauseous. I was puzzled. What is happening? She is such a beautiful woman, with great love for me. That’s why I call her to help me. But it has been happening each time. Just the last time I felt it so much that I had to look into it, into the whole matter of it. Then I saw the point. She must be eating non-vegetarian food – meat, eggs and other things. That is making her breath ugly, that is making her whole inner harmony disturbed. That’s why she cannot fall in tune with me. And if she cannot fall in tune, it creates a disturbance. She loves me but her love is still unconscious. If she becomes a little more conscious she will see it; she will see that to be with me you will have to change many things in you.To be with me and to move deeper with me, to have a heart-to-heart contact, you will have to drop the unnecessary luggage that you carry. Now there is no need to be a non-vegetarian – it is not for a meditator; otherwise you are creating unnecessary hindrances. It will disturb your softness, it will create a kind of cruelty in you. You may not be aware of it because you are not aware at all, but when you come to me I am just a mirror.Now Pradeepa must be creating a great nauseousness in her own being. She may have become accustomed to it, so she is not aware. But again and again I was feeling nauseous, because when you relate to me with energy it is not one-way: my energy moves into you, your energy moves into me. It can’t be one-way. A circle is created, circulation starts happening. This is just an example. And this is not only for Pradeepa, it is for you all.If you want to be more and more deeply in tune with me, if you want to share the Tao that has happened to me, you will have to be more conscious, more alert to what you are doing, what you are eating, what you are reading, what you are listening to, where you are going, with whom you are mixing. It has to be a total effort. It has to be a twenty-four-hour awareness, because small things gather together and their impact is great.If you have been angry with somebody and you have been fighting with somebody and then you come to see me, naturally you will be far away from me. That’s why Jesus says if you go to the temple to pray and you remember that you have hurt somebody, insulted somebody, that you are angry at somebody or if you have angered somebody, first go and ask to be forgiven, only then come to pray; otherwise you will not be able to relate with God. First go and apologize. First clear things.It happened….When Michelangelo was working in the Sistine Chapel, he was making a painting of Jesus. The painting was almost complete – just the last finishing touches – but he was finding those last finishing touches very difficult. Jesus was not coming out Jesus-like; something was missing in Jesus’ face – that softness, that feminineness was not there, that love quality was not there. He tried and tried for days, and then he remembered that he had quarreled with a friend and he was carrying it in himself. And then he remembered the saying of Jesus, that if you go to pray and you are not feeling good about a friend or a brother, then first go and ask forgiveness.He rushed out of the chapel, went to the friend, asked his forgiveness and told the whole story. “For days together I have been working, but I cannot bring out Jesus’ face as it should be. Something angry remains in it” – because something was angry inside him. And if there is anger and a hurt feeling – and you are going to paint, your hands will paint – your painting will represent you, your painting will basically reflect you. And the day he asked forgiveness and was forgiven, he came into a totally different mood. And just a few minutes’ work and the painting was complete. And it is one of the most beautiful paintings of Jesus. Just a few strokes and the painting came alive and Jesus surfaced, because now Michelangelo’s heart was in tune.Tao can be shared. But then you have to learn the ways of how to share it with the master, and you have to be very watchful about many things. It is simple in a way and yet very complex too – simple, because if you are really open and in harmony, it can happen in a single split moment; complex, because you will have to change your very small habits of which you are not aware at all. You will have to change your total life.That’s why I say I have nothing to offer to you as a teaching; I have some energy to impart to you as a provocation. I am not giving you a system of philosophy, a theology; I am giving you myself. It is a challenge. My effort here is to wake you up. You will have to be open, rhythmic, and you will have to watch small things in your life. And the breath is the most important. You will have to learn how to breathe in satsang, how to breathe in the company of a master, how to breathe when you are in love.The breathing continuously changes with your emotions. When you are angry, your breathing is unrhythmic, asymmetrical. When you are in sexual lust, your breathing is almost insane. When you are calm and quiet, joyful, your breathing has a musical quality to it – your breathing is almost a song. When you are feeling at home in existence, when you have no desires and are feeling contented, suddenly breathing almost stops. When you are in a state of awe, of wonder, breathing stops for a moment. And those are the greatest moments of life, because only in those moments when breathing almost stops are you in utter tune with existence: you are in God and God is in you.Your experience of breathing has to be more and more profound, scrutinized, observed, watched, analyzed. See how your breathing changes with your emotions, and vice versa, how your emotions change with your breathing. For example, when you are afraid, watch the change in your breath, and then one day try to change the breath to the same pattern as when you were afraid. And you will be surprised that if you change your breath to exactly what it was when you were afraid, fear will arise in you – immediately. Watch your breathing when you are deeply in love with somebody; holding his hand, hugging your beloved, watch your breathing. And then one day, just sitting silently under a tree, watch yourself again breathing in the same way. Make the pattern, fall into the same gestalt again – breathe in the same way as if you were hugging your beloved, and you will be surprised: the whole existence becomes your beloved, again there is great love arising in you. They go together. Hence in Yoga, in Tantra, in Tao – in all these three great systems of human consciousness and the science of expansion of human consciousness – breathing is one of the key phenomena. They have all worked on breathing.Buddha’s whole meditation system depends on a certain quality of breath. He says, “Simply watch your breath, without changing it, without in any way changing it. Simply watch.” But you will be surprised: the moment you watch, it changes – you cannot help it. Buddha says, “Don’t change your breath, simply watch it.” But the moment you watch, it changes, because watchfulness has its own rhythm. That’s why Buddha says, “You need not change it. You simply watch.” Watchfulness will bring its own kind of breathing – it comes by itself. And slowly slowly you will be surprised: the more watchful you become, the less you breathe; the breath becomes longer, deeper.For example, if in one minute you were breathing sixteen breaths, now you may breathe six, or four, or three. As you become watchful, the breath goes deeper, becomes longer, and you are taking less and less breaths in the same time period. Then you can do it from the other side too. Breathe slowly, quietly, deep long breaths, and suddenly you will see watchfulness arising in you, as if each emotion has a polarity in your breathing system: it can be triggered by your breathing.But the best way is to watch when you are in love. When you are sitting by the side of your friend, watch your breath, because that loving rhythm of breath is most important. It will transform your whole being.Love is where you feel most sharply the absurdity, the falsity of your position as a separated being. Yet by this very separation, this absurdity, you are able to express what you could not express in any other way. By your very otherness you are able to celebrate identity. Hence, the paradox of love: you are two and yet you feel one; you are one, yet you know you are two. Oneness in twoness: that is the paradox of love – and that has to be the paradox of prayer too, and meditation too. Ultimately you have to feel as one with existence as you feel with your beloved, with your lover, with your friend, with your mother, with your child, in some rare, valuable moments. By your very otherness you are able to celebrate identity.The Vedas say: Tattvamasi, I am that. This is the greatest statement of love: I am that or Thou art that. There is a clear-cut awareness of separation, and yet a deep unity too. The wave is separate from the ocean and yet not separate from the ocean.Watch your loving moments more and more. Be alert. See how your breathing changes, see how your body vibrates. Just hugging your woman or your man, make it an experiment, and you will be surprised: one day, just hugging, melting into each other, sit at least for one hour, and you will be surprised – it will be one of the most psychedelic experiences. For one hour, doing nothing, just hugging each other, falling into each other, merging, melting into each other, slowly slowly the breathing will become one. You will breathe as if you are two bodies but one heart. You will breathe together. And when you breathe together – not by any effort of your own, but just because you are feeling so much love that the breathing follows – those will be the greatest moments, the most precious, not of this world, but of the beyond, the far out. And in those moments you will have the first glimpse of meditative energy. In those moments grammar gives up, language expires.In the attempt to say it, language expires, and by its very death does point at last to what it cannot say. And that has to be, on a profounder level, the relationship with the master. Then only can Tao jump as a flame, from the master to the disciple. You will have to learn the art of breathing.The sutras.Master Lu-tsu said: The decision must be carried out with a collected heart and not seeking success; success will then come of itself.A tremendously significant statement, a key statement:The decision must be carried out with a collected heart…The first thing: a man is born only when he becomes decisive; with decision is the birth of man. Those who live in indecisiveness are not really men yet. And millions live in indecisiveness, they cannot decide about anything. They always lean upon others, somebody else should decide for them. Hence people hang around authorities.Authoritativeness continues in the world for the single reason that millions of people cannot decide for themselves. They have always to be given an order. Once the order is given, they follow it. But this is slavery, this is how they are preventing the birth of their own souls. Decision should arise in your being, because with decisiveness integrity arises. Remember to make a few decisions; decisions will make you individual.What is indecisiveness? It means you are a crowd; many voices in you are contradicting each other and you cannot decide whether to go this way or that. Even in small things people are indecisive: whether to go to see this movie or that and they are indecisive. Indecisiveness has become almost their very style of life. To purchase this or to purchase that? Just watch people when they go shopping, see their indecisiveness. Just sit in any shop and just watch people coming and going – customers – and you will be surprised: people don’t know how to decide. And those who don’t know how to decide will remain vague, cloudy, confused. With decision comes clarity. And if the decision is far-reaching, if the decision has something to do with your foundations, certainly, one is born.Now there are many people who come to me and they say, “We cannot decide whether to take the jump into sannyas or not.” They want me to tell them to take the jump. But then they miss the whole point. If I say to you, “Take the jump and become a sannyasin,” you have missed an opportunity, a great opportunity, of taking a decision – again you have leaned on somebody else – and that is not the way a soul grows. And this is a profound decision, of immense significance, because it is going to change your whole lifestyle, it is going to give you a new vision. You will be moving in a new direction, you will not be the same again. Such far-reaching decisions one should be capable of taking on one’s own. One should risk. Only with risk, with courage, is one born.And whenever you take a decision, remember, if you take it then follow it, otherwise don’t take a decision, because then it is more dangerous – more dangerous than being indecisive. To take a decision and not to follow it will make you very very impotent. Then it would have been better not to have decided. There are people who decide and then never follow their decisions. Slowly slowly they lose all trust and confidence in their being. Slowly slowly they know perfectly well that whatsoever they decide they are not going to do. They become split, they become deceptive – to themselves. When they are taking a decision, even in that moment they know that they are not going to follow it because they know their past and their past experiences. Whenever they did decide, they never followed it.And then very small decisions can be very destructive. Just a small decision – “I will not smoke from today” – just a very ordinary decision, nothing much is involved in it…. Whether you smoke or not doesn’t matter: the existence continues. In twenty years’ time you may have tuberculosis, but that can be cured, or you may die two or three years earlier. So what? – you never really lived.Just the other day I was looking at a cartoon.A man is asking a woman, “Do you believe in life after death?” And the woman says, “This is it!”There is no need to believe in it, this is it. You are living such a dead life, what more can there be after death? It will be just the same. This is what it is!But a small decision, a very trivial decision not to smoke, and then not to follow it is very dangerous. You will lose self-confidence, you will lose trust in your own being. You will become distrustful. It is better not to take such decisions – go on smoking. And if you decide, then you are committed. Then whatsoever happens you have to do it. And if you can do it, you will find a clarity arising in you, a cloud disappearing, something settling, centering, in you. A decision is tremendously significant and meaningful.The decision must be carried out with a collected heart…That’s what Lu-tsu means: if you do decide, then let your whole heart be in it, then make it certain that you are not going back. That’s what I mean when I say again and again to my sannyasins, “Break the bridges.” Because you are not going back – why keep the bridge? Throw the ladder, drown the boat, because you are not going back to the old shore again. If you keep the boat safe, harbored, that means you are still wavering, you are still thinking, “Maybe some day I have to go back.”Just a few months ago, Anup went to the USA, and I told him when he was going, “Break the bridges completely now.” And he said, “Yes, Osho”.And now he comes, and I ask him, “What happened? What about the bridges?” He says, “I could not do that.”What does that mean? He will be here only half-heartedly. He has kept the door open to go back, he has kept every security there, safe. And the problem is if he is not totally here, he will not grow. And this is the vicious circle: if he does not grow, after a few months he will think, “It is good that I had not broken the bridges. Had I listened to Osho and broken the bridges, now I would have been in trouble. Nothing is happening to me here. It is good that I have saved everything there, and I can fly back home any moment.” And he will think he has been doing the most clever, intelligent thing.But in the first place, because he has kept the bridges safe and the doors open to escape back, he will be here only in a lukewarm way, in an indecisive way, in an uncertain way – wavering. And with the wavering you will not be with me. You can be with me only if you have taken a decision with a collected heart. And then growth is possible! Growth is possible only then.So see the point: if you are totally here with me, growth is possible and there will be no need to go back and there will be no need to have bridges. But if you are not totally here with me, then the bridges will be needed. And you will feel very intelligent – that it was good that you didn’t listen to me. “Now look, nothing is happening here, and I have to go back. Had I broken all the bridges then where would I have ended?” This is how the logical mind functions: it creates its own suicidal situations.The decision must be carried out with a collected heart and not seeking success; success will then come of itself.And the most important thing is, if you are seeking success you are already divided. Then your heart is not in the work, your heart is already in the result. If you are divided, you will not succeed. Success happens only to undivided hearts who are not worried about the consequence, the result, who are enjoying tremendously the journey itself and are not concerned about the goal. Only those arrive who are not concerned with the goal at all – because their mind is so undivided each moment of the journey, each step of the journey becomes a goal. Wherever they are, there is the goal. Success comes to those people on the spiritual path who are not concerned about success at all.If you are concerned about success, success is not going to come to you, because your mind will be somewhere in the future and you will not be working in the present – and success can only come if the work is totally done in the present. This moment is going to give birth to the next moment. If this moment has been totally lived, the next moment is bound to be of a deeper totality, of a higher quality of totality. But people go on remaining divided. These problems you have to think about, because these are everybody’s problems.Just a few days ago, Ashoka wrote me a letter saying that he is here but he still keeps Satya Sai Baba’s picture in his room. Now that is his room – he can keep anybody’s picture in it. It is not only a question of the room…. Now he will be in trouble. I told him, “You go to Satya Sai Baba, and there please don’t keep my picture in your room, otherwise there also you will fail. Either be here or be there, but anywhere be with a collected heart, an integrated heart. It is better to be with Satya Sai Baba than to be with me if you are here only half-heartedly.” But I understand his problem: I know he will keep my picture there too, so his failure is destined.One has to choose, one has to decide. On each step in life’s journey there are alternative paths, and one has to choose. And you cannot have all the paths and you cannot walk on all the paths. And I am not saying what is right and wrong. I am saying: whatsoever you choose totally is right for you. Sometimes it has happened that a disciple has become enlightened even with an unenlightened master if his total surrender was there. And thousands of times it happens that you may be with a perfect master and nothing happens.It is more a question of your totality than of the perfection of the master. Even with a wrong person you can be transformed. Not that the wrong person can transform you, but if your total decision is there, your total decision transforms you. That is far more important, otherwise you can be with a buddha and nothing will happen if you are half-half, if you are divided. Any kind of division – in the future, in the present, with the goal and the journey, this way or that, this master or that – any kind of division is dangerous. Then your energy will be wasted and you will throw the responsibility on others.For example, if nothing happens to Ashoka here – and nothing is going to happen in this way – then naturally, he will come to the conclusion that he has been in a wrong place. He will not see the point that he has been a divided person, he will only see that he has been in a wrong place, that “This place was not for me.” But wherever you are, if you are divided, this is going to happen again and again.Gather courage. I know the mind wants to be clever. The mind says, “Why not keep both? Who knows? Keep both alternatives open. If this does not work, then that may work.” But this is not how life functions. You want to have the cake and eat it too. It is impossible.Lu-tsu says, …and not seeking success, because even that will become a division. Be utterly herenow, with no division: …success will then come of itself. And when success comes of itself, it has tremendous beauty. You need not drag it, it opens like a flower; you need not open the flower forcibly. And if you open the flower forcibly you will have killed it. That will not be right. And you will have opened it before its right time, and there may be no fragrance, because the flower has to wait for the right moment to gather fragrance, to create fragrance. And when the fragrance is ready, only then it opens on its own accord, because now it has something to share with the existence.One should enjoy the moment. One should be totally in the moment and forget all. And then one day, suddenly success has come. One day, suddenly the golden flower has opened and you are transported into a separate reality.In the first period of release there are chiefly two mistakes: indolence and distraction.These two mistakes have to be understood: one is the mistake of the feminine mind, the other is the mistake of the masculine mind. The feminine mind can create indolence, laziness, because it is passive. And the masculine mind can create distraction because it is too active. It wants to do this and that – and that too. It wants to rush everywhere, in all directions. The feminine mind is passive; it wants to wait, to let things happen. But that too can be a danger if it becomes lethargy, if it becomes laziness, if it becomes a kind of death.Remember, passivity can be either positive or negative, just as activity can be either positive or negative. The positive passivity means to be alert, awake, yet waiting. The negative passivity means to be asleep, snoring, and calling it waiting.Your lover is coming, any moment he will knock at the door – now you can wait in two ways. The positive waiting will be that the door is open, your eyes are fixed on the gate, your ears are alert. Any sound – the sound of footsteps, a knock on the door, even if a dead leaf flutters in the wind – you will rush to the door. Somebody passes by on the road and you rush to the door – maybe he has come. This is positive waiting. It is beautiful.But if you lock the door and you put the light out, and as you go to sleep, you say, “When he comes he will knock and then I will see him,” and you start snoring, this is the negative kind of passivity, this is indolence. It is perfectly good to wait for God, but your passivity should be alive, vibrant.And the second is distraction: that is the quality of the male mind. The male mind is continuously distracted. That’s why the feminine mind is monogamous and the masculine mind is polygamous, continuously distracted – any woman that passes by and he becomes attracted. He forgets completely that he is already married. He forgets completely the woman to whom he has said, “You are my life and I will live only for you. You are my joy. My love is forever.” In a single moment he forgets all that nonsense. He is distracted very easily.The male mind is too active. Activity is good if it is positive. Positive activity means concentrated activity, undistracted activity – digging a well on one spot continuously. Negative activity means digging a well here for a few moments, then in some other place, then in some other place-destroying the whole ground and nowhere reaching to the water source. That’s what happens to the masculine mind: he loves this woman and that woman and never reaches the reality of love. It remains just a superficial phenomenon. It never becomes intimacy, it never takes depth. It never becomes a real involvement in each other’s being – superficial contact, body-to-body, at the most, sexual. It never reaches the heart, and certainly never the soul, because to reach the heart, to reach the soul, time will be needed. One will have to wait and dig deep.These are the two chief possible mistakes. Beware of them. Don’t become too active and don’t become too lazy – remain in the middle. Inactively active, actively inactive, remain in the middle. Your action should have the quality of waiting, and your waiting should have the quality of action. And then success is absolutely certain, you need not think about it – it comes of its own accord. But these mistakes can be remedied.But that can be remedied; the heart must not enter into the breathing too completely.Master Lu-tsu is giving you one of the most important secrets…the heart must not enter into the breathing too completely.You should learn to breathe very silently, as if there were no hurry to breathe, as if you were indifferent to it, aloof, far away, distant. If you can be aloof, far away and distant to your breathing, you will be able to attain to the middle. In that moment you will be neither masculine nor feminine, you will be both and neither. You will be transcendental. And then both mistakes will disappear.Breathing comes from the heart. What comes out of the heart is breath. As soon as the heart stirs, there develops breath-energy. Breath-energy is originally transformed activity of the heart.When you are distracted, watch: your breathing will be distracted too. When you are not distracted, when you are sitting silently with no distraction, your breathing will be cool, silent, rhythmic; it will have the quality of a subtle music. And that quality is the exact middle because you are not doing anything, yet you are not fast asleep; you are neither active nor inactive – you are balanced. And in that moment of balance you are closest to reality, to God, to heaven.When our ideas go very fast they imperceptibly pass into fantasies which are always accompanied by the drawing of a breath, because this inner and outer breathing hangs together like tone and echo. Daily we draw innumerable breaths and have an equal number of fantasies. And thus the clarity of the spirit ebbs away as wood dries out and ashes die.Remember, your each breath is not just a breath, it is a thought too, an emotion too, a feeling too, a fantasy too. But this will be understood only if you watch your breathing for a few days. When you are making love, watch your breathing. You will be surprised: your breathing is chaotic because sexual energy is very rough, raw energy. Sexual fantasies are rough and raw, animalistic. There is nothing special about sexuality – every animal has it. When you are sexually aroused, you are just behaving like any other animal in the world. And I am not saying that there is anything wrong in being an animal. All that I am saying is just a fact, stating a fact. So whenever you are in sexual love, watch your breath: it loses all balance.Hence, in Tantra, lovemaking is allowed only when you have learned how to make love and yet keep your breath cool, rhythmic. Then a totally different quality comes to your lovemaking: it becomes prayerful. Then it is sacred. Now for the outsider there will be no difference because he will see you are making love to a woman or making love to a man, and it will be the same for the outsider. But for the insider, for those who know, there will be great difference. In the old Tantra schools where all these secrets were developed, experimented upon, observed, this was one of the central focuses of their experimentation: if a man can make love without his breath being at all affected by it, then it is no longer sex – then it is sacred – and then it will take you to great depths of your own being. It will open doors and mysteries of life. Your breath is not just breath, because breath is your life; it contains all that life contains.So, then, should a man have no imaginings in his mind? One cannot be without imaginings. Should one not breathe? One cannot be without breathing. The best way is to make a medicine of the illness.This is the Tantra approach and this is the approach of Tao too:…to make a medicine of the illness.And this is something special to Tao and Tantra. Yoga says: Avoid sex, bypass it – it is dangerous. But Tao and Tantra both say: Don’t avoid it. Transform its energy and then the illness itself can become the medicine. And you can ask scientists, they are doing exactly that, particularly in allopathy: injections are prepared out of the illness itself, to be injected, and they become medicinal. What allopathy has discovered recently is a very ancient discovery for Tantra and Tao.Anything that is God-given must have some tremendous purpose behind it. Don’t avoid it. Avoiding it, you will remain poor. Don’t escape from it, because then something will remain unlived in you. That’s why the so-called yogi is continuously tortured by sexual fantasies. He cannot sleep well – it is impossible – because whatsoever he has been denying in the day comes with a vengeance in the night. Whatsoever he has repressed in the unconscious, when he goes to sleep and the controls are withdrawn, surfaces again: it becomes dreams. The yogi, the so-called yogi, is continuously afraid. He is afraid of seeing a woman, he is afraid of touching a woman. He is afraid. And what kind of freedom is this? This fear can’t bring freedom.Tao and Tantra have a totally different approach. They say: Whatsoever is God-given, transform it – it is raw material – something of a great treasure must be hidden in it.Sexual energy can be transformed if you can change your breathing system. Anger can be transformed if you can change your breathing system. Just watch how you breathe when you are angry. And the next time you feel angry, don’t breathe the way that you have always breathed whenever you were angry. And you will be surprised: you cannot be angry either. If you don’t breathe in a certain way, anger is not supported, anger disappears. Instead of anger, compassion arises. And so disappears sex, and instead of sex, love arises. Love is absolutely human. Sex is not just human, it is animal too. But no animal knows about love.Sex is animal, love is human, prayer is divine. Sex has to be transformed into love, and love has to be transformed into prayer.In sex, the breathing goes chaotic. That’s why I have chosen chaotic meditation for certain purposes: it is cathartic – chaotic meditation, chaotic breathing hits all your repressed anger, sex, greed, jealousies, hatred, and brings them out on the surface. It is a great cleansing process. In sex the breathing is chaotic. In love, the breathing is musical. In prayer, it almost stops.Since heart and breath are mutually dependent, the circulation of the light must be united with the rhythm of breathing.When you breathe out, let the light go out of your eyes. When you breathe in, let the light go back inside. Make a connection between your breathing and your light circulation. This way you will give some work to your breathing so it need not have any other imagination. This is an imagination – you have given something. That’s why Lu-tsu says: Man “cannot be without imaginings”– not in the beginning at least. It is only at the highest peak that imagination can be dropped. But we can use it, we can make a stepping-stone of it.Imagine: when your breath is going out your light is going out, when you breathe in your light goes in. Try it in a simple way: just when you breathe out, feel all the light that was in being thrown out, and when you breathe in feel all the light of the existence entering you. And soon the imagination will become joined together with your breathing, will be welded with breathing – so you have used imagination. And then slowly slowly, let your breathing become calmer and quieter.There is no need to practice any particular rhythm as they do in yoga, in pranayama, because each person has to find his own way. The body is different, the mind is different – your breathing cannot be alike. You will have to find your own way. Slowly slowly, one thing has to be kept in mind: that it has to be made calm and quiet and musical.For this, light of the ear is above all necessary.And then Lu-tsu introduces another thing. He says: Just as light enters from the eyes – comes in, goes out, it also enters from the ear – comes in and goes out. You will be surprised, because from the ear we don’t see any light coming in and going out. But then ask modern physics. They say that sound is nothing but electricity, a function of electricity. Sound is electricity. That’s what in the ancient language Lu-tsu is calling light. Sound goes in and comes out from the ear.The ear is the feminine part of your body just as the eye is the masculine part of your body. Just as the eye is extrovert, the ear is introvert. Hence, there are two kinds of meditations in the world: either meditations concerned with eye-energy or meditations concerned with ear-energy.The meditations concerned with ear-energy are feminine meditations, passive – you have just to listen, not doing anything. Listening to the birds, the wind passing through the pine trees, or to some music, or to the noise of the traffic – just listening, doing nothing – and great silence comes in, and great peace starts falling and showering on you. From the ear it is easier than from the eye. It is easier through the ear because the ear is passive, non-aggressive: it cannot do anything to existence, it can only let it happen. The ear is a door: it allows.There is a light of the eye and a light of the ear. The light of the eye is the united light of the sun and moon outside.It is extrovert. The light of the ear is the united seed of sun and moon within.It is introvert. The seed is thus the light in crystallized form. Both have the same origin and are different only in name.Light and sound are only different in name.There are stories in India – and possibly true stories – sooner or later science is going to prove them right. There are stories in India that there is a certain kind of melody that can create fire. You can put an unlit candle before the musician, and if he plays a certain melody, a certain raga, suddenly the candle becomes lit. Now it looks impossible, it looks just like a story – maybe a myth or maybe a metaphor. But if sound is electricity, then vibrations falling into a certain pattern can create it. Now experiments are on the way. And my feeling is, sooner or later it will be possible scientifically, to do it again.It is a well-known fact that whenever an army passes over a bridge they are told to break their rhythm. Ordinarily they walk in a certain rhythm: left, right, left, right, left, right. Many times it has been observed that when the army is passing in a certain rhythm, the bridge collapses. So now it is a well-known fact that passing over a bridge the army has to drop its right-left, right-left rhythm; that certain vibe is dangerous to the bridge.In Canada they were experimenting with plants and their relationship with music. A small experiment, but immensely significant. They planted a few seasonal flowers, the same seasonal flowers in two places, at the same time, with the same manure, the same gardener looking after them – everything exactly the same for both plots. But to one plot a recording of Ravi Shankar’s sitar was made available – continuously played – and to the other plot, pop music. And it was a very revealing phenomenon. In the plot where pop music was fed, all the plants started moving away from the mechanism. They started leaning away from the mechanism, as if wanting to escape, not wanting to hear it – tired of it. And their flowers were smaller and they took a longer time to grow – almost double the time of the other plot. In the other plot where Ravi Shankar’s sitar was played, the plants started leaning towards the mechanism; they all covered the mechanism – embracing it, hugging it. And the growth was double, and the flowers were bigger, and they came sooner than expected. Even plants feel the difference of sound waves.These airplanes passing by are driving humanity crazy. And the noise is growing so much every day that if man can survive it, it will be a miracle.Both have the same origin and are different only in name.In fact, everything is the same. It is all made of the stuff called light, fire, electricity – or whatsoever name you choose. Only the forms are different.Therefore, understanding (ear) and clarity (eye) are one and the same effective light.Understanding comes through the ear and clarity comes through the eye. Clarity is masculine, understanding is feminine. Hence, I say always that a woman finds it easier to become a disciple, a woman finds it easier to surrender, finds it easier to understand, than a man. The man asks for logical clarity, logical conviction. The woman asks for something else: the rhythmic conviction. The woman listens intuitively, she feels the vibe of the person who is saying it. She is not very concerned about what is being said but who is saying it, how it is being said, from where it is arising. She goes deeper, she catches hold of the very spirit. Man remains concerned with the letter. And because of the printing presses and the scriptures becoming available to everybody in the form of books, a great change has happened.Originally all the teachings were available only from the mouth of the master. They were transmitted orally, so the receiving center was the ear. Now books are available. When Krishna talked to Arjuna, Arjuna listened to it: he functioned from the ear. Great understanding happened – he was transformed. But Arjuna functioned as the feminine.Now you read the Gita. Reading means: through the eye. And the eye is not bothered about understanding; the eye wants logical clarity. It is a totally different approach. All the religions of the world, for centuries insisted that their scriptures should not be written. And there was a reason for it because once they are written their whole quality changes. Once they are written, the eye becomes important, and the ear is no more important.Listening to me is one thing, reading is totally another. When you read, you function as male mind. When you listen, you function as female mind.In sitting down, after lowering the lids, one uses the eyes to establish a plumb-line and then shifts the light downward. But if the transposition downward is not successful, then the heart is directed towards listening to the breathing. One should not be able to hear with the ear the outgoing and intaking of the breath. What one hears is that it has no tone. As soon as it has tone, the breathing is rough and superficial, and does not penetrate into the open. Then the heart must be made quite light and insignificant. The more it is released, the less it becomes; the less it is, the quieter.So listen to your breathing. If you can listen to it that means it is rough. If it has a tone, that means it is rough; when you can only feel it and you cannot hear it, then it is still and quiet. And that is the right way to be in tune with existence, to be in tune with yourself, to be in tune with reality. And the more quiet it is the deeper you are. When it stops sometimes, it stops! It is happening to many sannyasins here: they come and report to me because they become very frightened – when the breathing stops they think they are going to die!Just the other day there was Saguna’s question: that he started feeling as if he were going to die. He became frightened. Do not become frightened. If breathing stops, allow it, enjoy it – you are not going to die! In that very stopping of the breath you will know the true form of reality, you will know life eternal, you will know something that knows no death.All at once it becomes so quiet that it stops. Then the true breathing is manifested and the form of the heart comes to consciousness.If you can allow…. That’s why I told Saguna, “Saguna, you fool, you missed! Don’t miss it again when it happens.”If the breathing stops …then the true breathing is manifested, true life is manifested – life that does not depend on breathing, life that is eternal, life that is not part of the body, life that will be there even after the body has fallen into dust and disappeared. And in that moment consciousness is attained, one becomes a Buddha. Buddha means: utterly conscious, awakened.If the heart is light, the breathing is light, for every movement of the heart affects breath-energy. If breathing is light, the heart is light, for every movement of the breath-energy affects the heart. In order to steady the heart, one begins by taking care of the breath-energy. The heart cannot be influenced directly. Therefore the breath-energy is used as a handle, and this is what is called the maintenance of the concentrated breath-energy.Children, do you not understand the nature of movement? Movement can be produced by outside means. It is only another name for mastery. One can make the heart move merely by running. Should one not also be able to bring it to rest by concentrated quietness? The great holy ones who knew how the heart and breath-energy mutually influence one another have thought out an easier procedure in order to help posterity.You know it: if you run, the breath becomes very chaotic, it starts moving faster and faster. Hence the yoga postures, the full lotus posture-sitting erect, utterly silent, as if you have become a marble statue, with no movement – is just the opposite of running. It is just an outside device to help your breathing become quiet. If your breathing can become fast by running, it certainly will become quiet by sitting utterly as a Buddha statue. Sitting like a statue, with no movement in the body, certainly breathing becomes slower and slower and slower…and stops – in the beginning it is only for a few moments. Don’t be afraid that you are having a heart attack or anything. It is not a heart attack, it is a God-attack.“The hen can hatch her eggs because her heart is always listening.” That is an important magic spell. The hen can hatch the eggs because of the energy of heat. But the energy of the heat can only warm the shells; it cannot penetrate into the interior. Therefore she conducts this energy inward with her heart. This she does with her hearing. In this way she concentrates her whole heart. When the heart penetrates, the energy penetrates, and the chick receives the energy of the heat and begins to live. Therefore a hen, even when at times she leaves her eggs, always has the attitude of listening with bent ear. Thus the concentration of the spirit is not interrupted.This is not only so with a hen. This is so with every woman – every mother, even the human mother. There may be a thunderstorm and she will not hear it and she will not be awakened from her sleep. But let her child just start crying or just start moving and she will be awakened immediately, as if her ears are continuously focused on the child. The train will pass by and she will not be awakened, the airplane will pass and she will not be awakened. But let the child show a slight restlessness and she is immediately alert: her whole ears are listening to the child, she is connected heart-to-heart with the child from the ears. She is constantly listening, as if she could hear the very heartbeat of the child.And this is the way for all meditators: to be connected with the ear, so deeply that you can hear your breathing, your heartbeat. In the beginning you will be able to hear it because it is chaotic. But if you go on listening, listening, listening, just the very effort to listen makes it quieter. And when your listening is profound – you have become skillful, and you know how to be aware – all tone, all sound disappears. And there are moments when breathing stops. And those are the great moments of ecstasy, insight, satori, samadhi.Because the concentration of the spirit suffers no interruption, neither does the energy of heat suffer interruption day or night, and the spirit awakens to life. The awakening of the spirit is accomplished because the heart has first died.That’s why I said: if suddenly in meditation you feel your heart is dying, don’t think it is a heart attack. When the breathing stops you will feel as if the heart is dying – it is not dying. It is giving birth to your real heart.When a man can let his heart die, then the primal spirit wakes to life. To kill the heart does not mean to let it dry and wither away, but it means that it has become undivided and gathered into one.This is the secret of the golden flower: if the heart can die the flower will bloom, die as you are so you can be reborn. Jesus says, “Unless a man is born again, he will not enter into my kingdom of God.”Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-14/

The first question:Osho,What according to you is the most significant thing that is happening today in the world?A New Man is emerging. The image of the New Man is not yet clear, but the horizon is becoming red and the sun will soon be there. The morning mist is there and the image of the New Man is vague, but still, a few things are very crystal clear about the New Man.And this is of tremendous importance because since the monkeys became man, man has remained the same. A great revolution is on the way. It will be far more deep-going than the revolution that happened when monkeys started walking on the earth and became human beings. That change created mind, that change brought psychology in. Now another far more significant change is going to happen that will bring the soul in, and man will not only be a psychological being but a spiritual being too.You are living in one of the most alive times ever. The New Man, in fragments, has already arrived, but only in fragments. And the New Man has been arriving for centuries, but only here and there. That’s how things happen: when the spring comes it starts with one flower. But when the one flower is there, then one can be certain the spring is not far away – it has come. The first flower has heralded its coming. Zarathustra, Krishna, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Jesus – these were the first flowers. Now, on a greater scale, the New Man is going to be born.This new consciousness is the most important thing that is happening today, according to me. I would like to tell you something about this new consciousness – its orientations, and its characteristics – because you are to help it to come out of the womb, because you have to be it. The New Man cannot come from nowhere, it has to come through you. The New Man can only be born through your womb: you have to become the womb.Sannyas is an experimentation: to clean the ground so that new seeds can fall in. If you understand the meaning of the New Man, you will be able to understand the significance of sannyas too. And it is because sannyas is concerned with the New Man that the old orthodoxies of all kinds are going to be against me and against sannyas – because this is their end. If sannyas succeeds, if the New Man succeeds, the old will have to go. The old can live only if the New Man is prevented from coming.It cannot be prevented now, because it is not only a question of the New Man’s coming into existence. It is a question of the survival of the whole earth – of consciousness itself, of life itself. It is a question of life and death. The Old Man has come to utter destructiveness. The Old Man has reached the end of its tether. Now there is no life possible with the old concept of man, but only death. The Old Man is preparing for a global suicide. The Old Man is piling up atom bombs, hydrogen bombs, in order to commit a collective suicide. This is a very unconscious desire: rather than allowing the New Man to be, the Old Man would like to destroy the whole thing.You have to understand, you have to protect the new, because the new carries the whole future with it. And man has come to a stage where a great quantum leap is possible.The Old Man was otherworldly, the Old Man was against this world. The Old Man was always looking to the heavens. The Old Man was more concerned with life after death than life before death. The New Man’s concern will be life before death. The New Man’s concern will be this life, because if this life is taken care of, the other will follow on its own accord. One need not worry about it, one need not think about it.The Old Man was too concerned with God. That concern was out of fear. The New Man will not be concerned with God, but will live and love this world, and out of that love will experience the existence of God. The Old Man was speculative, the New Man is going to be existential.The Old Man can be defined in the Upanishadic statement: neti neti, not this, not this. The Old Man was negative – life-negative, life-denying. The New Man will be life-affirming: iti iti, this and this. The Old Man’s concern was that, the New Man’s concern will be this, because out of this, that is born, and if you become too concerned with that, you miss both.Tomorrow is in the womb of today: take care of today and you have taken care of tomorrow. There is no need to be in any way worried about tomorrow. And if you become too worried about tomorrow you have missed today! And tomorrow will come as today – it always comes as today. And if you have learned this suicidal habit of missing today, you will miss tomorrow also. You will go on missing.The Old Man was continuously missing, was miserable, sad. And because he was sad he was against the world, he blamed the world, he blamed samsara. He said, “It is because of the world that I am in misery.” It is not so. The world is immensely beautiful – it is all beauty, bliss and benediction. There is nothing wrong with the world. Something was wrong with the old mind. The old mind was either past-oriented or future-oriented – which are not really different orientations. The old mind was concerned with that which is not.The New Man will be utterly in tune with that which is, because that is God, that is reality: iti iti, this is it. This moment has to be lived in its totality. This moment has to be lived in its spontaneity, with no a priori ideas. The Old Man was carrying ready-made answers. He was stuffed with philosophy, religion and all kinds of nonsense.The New Man is going to live life without any a priori conclusion about it. Without any conclusion, one has to face existence and then one knows what it is. If you have already concluded, your conclusion will become a barrier, it will not allow you inquiry. Your conclusion will become a blindfold, it will not allow you to see the truth. Your investment will be in the conclusion, you will distort reality to fit your conclusion. That’s what has been done up to now.The New Man will not be Hindu, will not be Mohammedan, will not be Christian, will not be communist. The New Man will not know all these “isms.” The New Man will be simply an opening, a window to reality. He will allow reality as it is. He will not project his own mind upon it, he will not use reality as a screen. His eyes will be available, they will not be full of ideas.The New Man will not live out of belief, he will simply live. And remember, those who can simply live without belief, only come to know what truth is. The believer or the disbeliever never come to know what truth is – their beliefs are too heavy on their minds, they are surrounded too much by their belief systems. The New Man will not know any belief system. He will watch, he will observe, he will see, he will live, and he will allow all kinds of experiences. He will be available, he will be multidimensional. He will not carry scriptures in his head, he will carry only alertness, awareness. He will be meditative.The Old Man lived out of fear – even his God was nothing but a creation out of fear. His temples, mosques, gurudwaras, churches – they were all out of fear. He was trembling, he was afraid. The New Man will live out of love, not out of fear, because fear serves death, love serves life. And if you live out of fear you will never know what life is, you will only know death, again and again.And remember, the person who lives out of fear creates all kinds of situations in which he has to feel more and more fear. Your fear creates situations, just as your love creates situations: if you love you will find so many occasions to be loving, if you are afraid you will find so many occasions to be afraid. Love is going to be the taste of the new consciousness.Because fear was the taste of the old consciousness it created wars. In three thousand years man has fought five thousand wars – as if we have not been doing anything else – continuous fighting somewhere or other. This is a very mad state of affairs, humanity’s past is insane.The New Man will become discontinuous with this insane past. He will believe in love, not in war. He will believe in life, not in death. He will be creative, not destructive. His science, his art – all will serve creativity. He will not create bombs. He will not be political, because politics is out of hatred. Politics is rooted in fear, hate, destructiveness. The New Man will not be political, the New Man will not be national. The New Man will be global. He will not have any political ambition, because it is stupid to have political ambition. The New Man is going to be very intelligent. The first signs of that intelligence are rising on the horizon. Those who have eyes, they can see it: the children are rebelling.It is a great moment of rejoicing that the young people all over the world are rebelling against all kinds of orthodoxies – whether the orthodoxy is that of church or state doesn’t matter. They are not ready to obey – not that they have determined to disobey, they are not determined to disobey either. They will meditate, and if they feel like obeying they will obey, if they feel like disobeying they will disobey. They have no fixed ideology. “My country right or wrong” – such stupid statements they cannot make. Sometimes it is wrong, sometimes it is right. When it is right, the New Man will support it, when it is wrong whether it is one’s own country or not doesn’t matter. It may be one’s own family – one’s own father, mother – but if it is wrong, it is wrong.The New Man will live not out of prejudices but out of spontaneous responsibility. The Old Man was a slave, the New Man will be free. The New Man will have freedom at the very core of his being.The Old Man was very serious, the Old Man was a workaholic. The New Man will be playful – homo ludens. He will believe in enjoying life. He will drop words like duty, sacrifice. He will not sacrifice for anything. He will not be a victim to any altar – that of the state or of the religion, of the priest or of the politician. He will not allow anybody to exploit his life that “Go and die because your country is at war.” His commitment is towards life, his commitment is not towards anything else. He wants to live in joy, he wants to rejoice in all the gifts of God, he wants to celebrate. Alleluia will be his only mantra.Jesus says, “Rejoice, rejoice. I say unto you rejoice.”Man has not rejoiced yet. Man has lived under a great burden of seriousness. Work for the country, work for the family, work for the wife, work for the children, work for your father and mother – just go on working and working and then one day die and disappear into the grave. And then others will work and it goes on and on. Nobody seems to have any time to enjoy life.And I am not saying that the New Man will not work. He will work, but that will not be his addiction, he will not be a workaholic. It will not be a drug. He will work because he needs a few things, but he will not continuously work for more and more. He will not be accumulative. He will not believe in having a big bank balance, and he will not believe in being on a very high post. Rather, he would like to sing a song, play on the flute, on the guitar, dance. He would not like to become famous. He would like to live, authentically live. He will be ready to be a nobody.And that is already happening. The first rays are already available. It is still hidden in the morning mist, but if you search you will find: the new children, the new generation, are a totally different kind of generation. Hence the generation gap, it is very real. It has never been so – never before has there been any generation gap. This is the first time in the whole of human history that there is a gap. The children are speaking a different language from their parents. The parents cannot understand because the parents want them to succeed. And the children say, “But what is the point of success if you cannot sing a song and you cannot dance, and you cannot enjoy and you cannot love, what is the point of being successful? Why? What is going to happen through success? Even if the whole world knows my name, what is that going to give me?”The old generation believes in money. And you will be surprised, that the belief in money is so deep that even those who renounce money, they also believe in money; otherwise there is no need to renounce it. And those who praise renunciation, they also believe in money: the more money you renounce, the greater you are. So the measurement is through money, money remains the criterion. In the world if you have more money you are great. And even in the world of the monks: “How much have you renounced?” If you have renounced more money, then you are more important. Money remains important even there.The new generation is not going to be money-manic. And remember, I am not saying it is going to be against money – it will use money. In the past money has used man, in the past man has lived in such an unconscious way that he thought he possessed things, but things possessed him. The New Man will be able to use: the New Man will use money, will use technology, but the New Man will remain the master. He is not going to become a victim, an instrument. This, according to me, is the greatest thing that is happening. A few characteristics….The new consciousness is going to be counter to all orthodoxies – any kind of orthodoxy, Catholic or communist, Hindu or Jaina. Any kind of orthodoxy is a kind of paralysis of the mind – it paralyzes, you stop living. It becomes a rigidity around you. You become a fanatic, you become stubborn, you become rock-like. You don’t behave like a liquid human being, you start behaving like a mule. That’s why for Morarji Desai I have another name: Mulishjibhai Desai. One starts behaving in a mulish way – stubborn, dead set, no possibility of changing, no flexibility, no fluidity. But in the past that has been praised very much: people call it consistency, certainty. It is not. It is neither consistency nor certainty. It is simply deadness.An alive person has to remain flowing. He has to respond to the changing situations – and situations are continuously changing. How can you remain fixed in your attitudes when life itself is not fixed? When life is a river how can you remain stubborn? And if you remain stubborn you lose contact with life, you are already in your grave.The new consciousness will be non-orthodox, non-fanatic. It will be fluid. It will not react, it will respond. And the difference between these two words is great.Reaction is always rigid: you have a fixed idea, you react out of it; before the question is raised, the answer is ready. Response is totally different: you listen to the question, you absorb the question, you see the situation, you feel the situation, you live the situation and out of that very living, your response arises. A responsible man cannot be stubborn, cannot be certain, cannot be rigid. He will have to live moment to moment. He cannot decide beforehand. He will have to decide every day, each moment. And because he has to move continuously with life, its changing challenges, he cannot be consistent in the old sense. His consistency will be only one: that he will always be in tune with life. That will be his consistency, not that he has a certain idea and he remains consistent with that idea, and goes on sacrificing life for it.There was a case against Mulla Nasrudin in the court and the magistrate asked him, “Mulla, how old are you?”He said, “Forty.”The magistrate said, “But this is strange. You surprise me, because five years ago you were in court and that time also you said forty.”Mulla said, “Yes, I am a consistent man. Once I have said something, you can believe me. I will never say anything else.”This is one type of consistency.The new man will find it ridiculous. But the Old Man has been this way, consistent: in his character, in his statements, in his hypocrisy. The Old Man used to decide once and for all.Psychologists say that almost fifty percent of your life is decided by the time you are seven years old – fifty percent! – and then you remain consistent with it. And life goes on changing – no wonder that you are left behind, that you start dragging, that you lose joy, that you lose the quality of dance. How can you dance? – you are so far behind life, you are dead wood, you don’t grow. An alive tree grows, changes; as the season changes, the tree changes. An alive person grows and continuously grows. To the very moment of death he goes on growing. He never knows any end to his growth.Psychologists say the average mental age of man is thirteen. This is the situation, this is how the Old Man has lived up to now. A thirteen-year mental age means at the age of thirteen people have stopped growing. Yes, they go on growing old, but they don’t grow up. Growing old is one thing, growing up is totally different. Growing old is a physiological phenomenon, growing up means maturity, wisdom. And only those who go on flowing with life grow up.The New Man will not be obedient to stupid ideas that have been given from the past – and they may not have been stupid when they were born, they may have been relevant in those circumstances. But as circumstances change, things become stupid. If you carry them, if you go on persisting in your old fixed routines, you start behaving in an absurd way.Now, look: some religion is five thousand years old – that means five thousand years ago its rituals were born and since then they have remained fixed. How dangerous it is, how crippling! How can man be alive if these five-thousand-year-old rituals surround his soul?The New Man will be creative. Each moment he will find his religion, each moment he will find his philosophy, and everything will remain growing. He will not be obedient to the past, he cannot be. To be obedient to the past is to be obedient to death because the past is dead. He will be obedient to the present, and in being obedient to the present, he will be rebellious against the past.To be rebellious is going to be one of his most prominent characteristics. And because he will be rebellious he will not fit in a dead society, he will not fit in a dead church, he will not fit in a dead army. He will not fit anywhere where obedience is a basic requirement. The New Man is bound to create a new society around himself.First consciousness becomes new, then the society becomes new. There is going to be a long period in which the old will resist the new, will fight with the new, will try to destroy the new. But the old cannot succeed. Time, time spirit, will not be in its favor – the old has to die. Just as the old body dies and makes space for some new child, so old societies, old orthodoxies, have to die. They have already lived overtime, they have lived too long.The new consciousness will not be moralistic, will not be puritan – not that it will not have any morality. But it will have a different kind of morality – a morality that arises out of one’s own feeling for life, one’s sensitivity, one’s own experiences – not a morality learned from others, borrowed. The New Man will not be a man of character in the old sense, because all character is binding. It creates an armor around you. The New Man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have any armor. The New Man will be characterless in the sense that he will not have a prison cell around him. Not that he will not have character, but he will give a new definition to character. He will not be a hypocrite.The old puritanism, the old moralistic attitudes have created hypocrisy in the world. They have made man schizophrenic: on the surface one thing, deep within something else, almost the opposite. The Old Man lived a double life. The New Man is going to live in a unitary way. He will live a single life. Whatsoever is inside him will also be his outside. He will be authentic. Remember this word authenticity – that is going to be the New Man’s religion. That is going to be the New Man’s truth, his temple, his God: authenticity. And with authenticity, neurosis disappears. The Old Man was neurotic because he was constantly in conflict: he wanted to do one thing and he was always doing something else, because something else was required. He was taught to do something against himself, he was repressive. His own authenticity was repressed, and on top of it, a bogus character was imposed.We have praised these phony people too long. Now the time has come: their phoniness should be exposed. We have praised these mahatmas and saints so long. Now we have to see their neurosis: they were all psychologically ill, they were pathological.A healthy person is a whole person. His inside, his outside are the same. If he loves he loves passionately, if he is angry he is angry passionately. His anger has truth in it as much as his love has truth in it. The Old Man boils within and smiles on the outside. He lives without passion, without energy. He lives without any flame. His whole life is an exercise in phoniness, and naturally he suffers. A long futile story is all that his life is: “…a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”The New Man will not be a tale told by an idiot but will be a poetry sung out of wholeness, will be a dance of immense joy for God’s gift of life and being – for the flowers and the trees and the birds and the sun and the sand and the sea. The New Man will not look somewhere faraway for God. He will look here, close-by. Now will be his only time, here will be his only space.The New Man will be earthly, and by “earthly” I don’t mean materialistic. The New Man will be a realist, he will love this earth. Because we have not loved this earth and our so-called religions have been teaching us to hate this earth, we have destroyed it. It is a beautiful planet, one of the most beautiful, because it is one of the most alive. This planet has to be loved, this planet has to be rejoiced – it is a gift. This body has so many mysteries in it that even a Buddha is possible only because of this body. This body becomes the temple of the greatest possibility: buddhahood, nirvana. This body has to be loved, this earth has to be loved.The New Man will find his religion in nature – not in dead stone statues, but in living dancing trees in the wind. He will find his religion surfing on the sea, climbing on the virgin mountain. He will find his prayer with the snow, with the moon, with the stars. He will be in dialogue with existence as it is. He will not live with abstract ideas. He will live with realities. His commitment will be with nature, and through that commitment he will come to know super-nature. God is hidden here in this earth, in this very body: this very body the buddha, this very earth the paradise.The New Man will read the scripture of nature. This will be his Veda, his Koran, his Bible. Here he will find sermons in the stones. He will try to decipher the mysteries of life, he will not try to demystify life. He will try to love those mysteries, to enter in those mysteries. He will be a poet, he will not be a philosopher. He will be an artist, he will not be a theologian. His science will also have a different tone. His science will be that of Tao – not an effort to conquer nature, because that effort is just foolish. How can you conquer nature? – you are part of nature. His science will be of understanding nature, not of conquering nature. He will not rape nature, he will love and persuade nature to reveal its secrets.The New Man will not be ambitious, will not be political. Politics has no future. Politics has existed because of the neurosis of humankind. Once the neurosis disappears, politics will disappear.Ambition simply means you are missing something and you are consoling yourself that in the future, you will get it. Ambition is a consolation: today it is all misery, tomorrow there will be joy. Looking at tomorrow you become capable of tolerating today and its misery. Today is always hell, tomorrow is heaven: you keep on looking at heaven, you keep on hoping. But that hope is not going to be fulfilled ever because tomorrow never comes.Ambition means you are incapable of transforming your today into a beatitude, you are impotent. Only impotent people are ambitious: they seek money, they seek power. Only impotent people seek power and money. The potential person lives. If money comes his way, he lives the money too, but he does not seek it, he is not after it. He is not afraid of it either.The old man was either after money or afraid of money, either after power or afraid of power, but in both ways his whole focus was on power and money. He was ambitious. The Old Man is pitiable: he was ambitious because he was unable to live, unable to love. The New Man will be able to live and able to love. And his herenow is going to be so beautiful, why should he be worried about tomorrow? His concern will not be having more, his concern will be being more – another very important distinction to be remembered. His concern will be being more, not having more. Having more is just a substitute for being more. You have more money – you think you are more, you have more power – you think you are more. Deep down you remain the same beggar. Alexander the Great dies as empty-handed as any beggar.Being more is a totally different dimension. Being more means getting in touch with your reality, getting in tune with your being, and helping yourself to fall in harmony with the universe. To be in harmony with the universe you become more. The more you are in tune with existence, the more you are. If the harmony is total, you are a god. That’s why we call Buddha a god, Mahavira a god: utter total harmony with existence, no conflict at all. They have dissolved themselves into the whole, they have become the whole, just as a dewdrop disappears into the ocean and becomes the ocean. They have died in their egos, now they live as existence itself.The New Man will have no use for sham, facade or pretense. He will be true, because only through truth is liberation. All lies create bondages. Tell a single lie and you will have to tell a thousand and one to defend it, ad nauseam you will have to tell lies. Then there is no end to it: a single lie sooner or later will spread all over your being – it is like cancer.Be truthful and you need not hide. You can be open. Be truthful – you need not protect yourself against existence. You can be vulnerable. In that vulnerability existence penetrates you, God reaches to your heart.Tell a lie and you are afraid. You will be afraid of God too, you will be afraid of facing him, you will be afraid of facing yourself. You will be continuously escaping – from yourself, from others, from God. You will be constantly hiding behind your pretensions, hypocrisy will become your lifestyle, and that’s where hell exists. Hypocrisy creates hell. Authenticity is the only joy – the only joy, I say. And if you are not authentic you will never be joyous.The new consciousness will not put up with double-talk. The new consciousness will hate this kind of thing with a passion. This hatred for phoniness is the deepest mark of the New Man. The New Man will be opposed to structured, inflexible and infallible systems, because life is a beautiful flow. It is not structured, it is freedom. It is not a prison, it is a temple. He would like organizations to be fluid, changing, adapting and human. Our states are inhuman, our armies are inhuman, our churches are inhuman. They dehumanize man, they reduce man into a thing because they don’t respect man’s freedom. The New Man will respect his freedom and respect others’ freedom too.The Old Man is constantly interfering, poking his nose into everybody’s affairs, trying to manipulate, criticizing, condemning, rewarding, punishing. The Old Man is continuously concerned with others: “What are you doing?” I was staying in Bombay once. A Parsi woman came to me because just the day before I had criticized Satya Sai Baba and had called him a phony guru. She came to see me and she said, “I have come to tell you a few more things.” She was thinking that I would be very happy because she had brought some information against Satya Sai Baba. She said, “He is a homosexual. And I know it from reliable sources.”I said, “But why should you be concerned? Homosexual or heterosexual – that is his business. It is his life. Who are you? Why should you be bothered about it?”She was very shocked when I said that. She had come feeling that I would be very grateful to her because she was giving me such great information. Why should you be concerned? Can’t you leave people to their own life? I criticize only when the other’s life is concerned; otherwise there is no question. What Satya Sai Baba is doing with his sexuality is his business, it is nobody else’s business. But the Old Man was constantly poking his nose into everybody’s affairs.Here it happens every day: the old kind of people come and they are very much in agony because some man is holding some woman’s hand. Why? But he is not holding your hand. And if those two persons have decided to hold hands, they have absolute freedom to do that. And if they are enjoying, who are you to interfere? If the man is holding some woman’s hand against her will, then maybe your help is needed, but if they both are willing then you should not be concerned at all.But this is the old consciousness. It was always trying to find ways and means to manipulate others, to be dominant over others. The new consciousness will leave everyone to his own life. Unless somebody is harming others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is a danger to others, he should not be prevented. Unless somebody is interfering in somebody else’s freedom, he should not be interfered with.The old world remained without individuality – it hated individuality! It liked only sheep, crowds – people behaving in the same way and everybody following the same routine and the same structure. The New Man will allow all kinds of possibilities. The New Man will love liquid structures. He will be human, he will respect human beings. His respect will be almost religious.The New Man will have to find new forms of community, of closeness, of intimacy, of shared purpose, because the old society is not going to disappear immediately – it will linger. It will give all kinds of fight to the new society – as it always happens. It has so many vested interests, it cannot go easily. It will go only when it becomes impossible for it to remain in existence.Before it goes the New Man will have to create new kinds of communes, new kinds of families, new communities of closeness, intimacy, shared purpose. That’s why I am trying to create a small commune where you can be totally yourself – away from the structured and the rotten world – and you can be given absolute freedom. It will be an experimentation, because on those lines, the future is going to move. It will be a small experiment but of immense significance.The new consciousness will not have anything to do with institutions like marriage. The New Man will have a natural distrust of marriage as an institution. A man-woman relationship has deep value for him only when it is a mutually enhancing, growing, flowing relationship. He will have little regard for marriage as a ceremony or for vows of permanence…which prove to be highly impermanent. He loves the moment and lives it in its totality. Marriage has no future. Love has a future.In the past, love was not a reality, marriage was a reality. In the future, love is going to be the reality and marriage is going to become more and more unreal. In the past people were married to each other, hence by and by they started liking and loving. In the future people will love and like each other, only then will they live together. In the past to live together came first, and naturally when you live together a liking arises, a dependence arises. It was a need phenomenon; the husband needed the wife, the wife needed the husband, and then the children needed the parents to be together. It was more or less an economic phenomenon, but it was not out of love.The future will know a different kind of relationship which is based purely on love and remains in existence only while love remains. And there is no hankering for its permanence, because in life nothing is permanent; only plastic flowers are permanent. Real roses are born in the morning and are gone by the evening. And that is their beauty: they are beautiful when they come, they are beautiful when their petals start withering away. Their life is beautiful, their birth is beautiful, their death is beautiful, because there is aliveness. A plastic flower is never born, never lives, never dies.Marriage has been a plastic flower in the past. The new consciousness can have no respect for marriage. It will have to create a new kind of intimacy – friendship – and it will have to learn to live with the impermanent phenomenon of love and of everything.It needs guts to live with the impermanence of life because each time something changes you have to change yourself again. One wants to remain fixed – it seems safer, secure. That’s how the Old Man has lived: the Old Man was not adventurous, his whole concern was security.The New Man will have the spirit of adventure. His concern will not be security, his concern will be ecstasy. He will not believe, because belief is a search for security – he will explore. He may not have neat answers to every question, but he will accept every challenge to inquiry, to exploration. He will go as far as life can take him. He will try to reach to the stars. But he will remain open. He will not start with a belief, with a conclusion, he will start only with a quest, a question.To start with a belief is not to start at all. To start with a belief is just playing a game with yourself. You have already believed – how can you explore? To explore one has to be agnostic, and that is going to be the religion of the future: agnosticism. One will be capable and courageous enough to say, “I don’t know, but I am interested in knowing. And I am ready to go into any dimension, into any adventure.”The New Man will be ready to risk. The Old Man was very businesslike, never ready to risk: risk was anathema, security was his goal. But with security you start dying. It is only in adventure, continuous adventure, that life grows to higher and higher plenitudes, that it reaches to the Himalayan peaks.The new person will be a spontaneous person – unpredictable, willing to risk newness, often willing to risk saying or doing the wild, the far-out thing. He will believe that everything is possible and anything can be tried. He will not cling to the known, he will always remain available to the unknown, even to the unknowable. And he will not sacrifice for any future because he will not be an idealist. He will not sacrifice for any abstract ideas, ideals, ideologies. He has a trust in his own experience and a profound distrust of all external authority.The New Man will trust only his own experience. Unless he knows, he will not trust it. No external authority can help the New Man. Nobody can say, “I say so, so you have to believe, because we have always believed so you have to believe, because our forefathers believed so you have to believe, because it is written in the Vedas and the Bible, you have to believe.” The New Man is not going to have anything to do with such nonsense. The New Man will believe only if he knows. This is real trust: trust in one’s own possibilities, potential. The New Man will respect himself. To believe in external authorities is disrespectful towards one’s own being.And, finally, the New Man will like to be close to elemental nature: to the sea, the sun, the snow, flowers, animals, birds, to life, growth, death.This, according to me, is the most important phenomenon that is happening today: a New Man is coming into existence, the first rays are already on the horizon. Prepare yourself to receive the New Man, get ready – become a host to the guest who is going, just any moment, to knock on your doors. And that’s what sannyas is all about: a preparation – getting ready to receive the New Man. It is going to be a great adventure to receive the New Man, it is going to be risky too, because the old will not like it.Now you can understand why the orthodox mind is against me: I am preparing their graveyard and I am preparing for something new – I am preparing a garden for the new. You are to open your hearts for the new, uproot all the weeds of the old, drop all the conditionings that the old has given to you so you can receive the new.And remember, the days of the messiahs are over. Don’t wait for Christ’s coming again, and don’t wait for Buddha’s coming again. Nobody comes again, not at least Buddha and Christ. Those who come again are the people who live without learning anything from life. Buddha has learned the lesson – he will not be coming again. Christ has learned the lesson – he will not be coming again. Don’t wait for any messiah to come but wait for a new consciousness, not for a messiah to deliver you. That is what the Old Man used to believe: somebody will come. Hindus think Krishna will come: “When things are really dark and difficult and dismal, Krishna will come and deliver us.” All nonsense! All holy cowdung!A new consciousness is going to deliver you, not some person – Buddha, Krishna, Christ. They had been here and they could not deliver. No single person can do it – it is impossible. A new consciousness can only deliver man from his bondage. And the new consciousness can come only through you: you have to become the womb, you have to accept it, receive it, prepare yourself for it.Sannyas is nothing but getting ready for something immensely valuable, so that when the gift comes you are not fast asleep, so when the new consciousness knocks on your door you are ready to embrace it.The second question:Osho,Oh that I could have died of the shame that you've been nauseated by me…. Thank you for such a drastic reason to give up non-vegetarian habits. It hasn't arisen out of my own awareness yet, and I suspect this was my conditioning. My childhood was ruled by Jewish dietary laws and rituals – there were so many foods forbidden by my father, forbidden by his fathers for the so-called “chosen people.”Maybe an external, non-existential morality imposed on my early years blunted my sensitivity? But now it hurts so much to have nauseated you. This decision and a small light fill me.Pradeepa, it is not that you nauseated me, something in you…. And of course, you are unconscious, that is why I have been so drastic and hard on you: so that you can become conscious of it. Just a habit…. And when a person is born in a non-vegetarian family it is natural to learn the ways of the family, just as vegetarians learn the ways of a vegetarian family. Both are unconscious. And I don’t give any value to the unconscious vegetarian – he is not superior to the unconscious non-vegetarian – because both are unconscious. Only consciousness has value. If you are consciously vegetarian then there is some value in it, otherwise there is no value.In India there are so many vegetarians – unconscious – just because by accident in their childhood, they were taught vegetarianism – they have learned it. You have learned in the same way, non-vegetarian habits. You are both alike. There is no difference – not at all – not even the difference of an inch. Unconsciousness is unconsciousness. What you do out of unconsciousness is a robot-like phenomenon.I had to hit so hard on Pradeepa’s head so that she becomes a little more alert. I hit you only because I love you. And remember, the more you will become meditative, the more your non-vegetarian habits will be more nauseating. When a person comes, new to me – who has not meditated, who has no intimacy with me, no love for me, who is not close to me – his vibe is not nauseating to me. Why? – because his whole vibe is the same. But when a person starts meditating, starts becoming more and more silent – as is happening to Pradeepa, her energy is moving in beautiful dimensions – now a disparity will be felt.It is just like on white cloth, a little dirt will show; on black cloth it won’t show. When your whole being is unconscious and there is no silence and all is noise, you can be non-vegetarian – it will not make much difference, it will not show. There is no contrast to show it. You can even be a cannibal and it will not show. But when you start getting clean – some space inside becomes fresh, young, natural, some part of you becomes clear, is purified – then the dirt shows. Then even small things will show.Pradeepa, you should be happy that I could see it so clearly that something inside you, just out of old habit, is poisoning your whole being. If it is dropped you will have a great leap, your growth will be immensely enhanced.And I am here only to facilitate your growth. And I will do everything that I can do: if a shock is needed I will shock you, if you need hammering on the head I will hammer you. Whatsoever is needed has to be done – nothing has to be left undone, all possible methods have to be tried – because your entanglements with the past are deep, there are many many sources and they all have to be cut.Slowly slowly you will arise out of your past completely free. That shock can become a transformation in you. And I hope that it has already changed you. And I hope, next time you come to me, that vibe will have disappeared.But you will have to remain conscious, alert – old habits die hard, they persist. And remember, you cannot deceive me. Your mind can say, “If once in a while you eat non-vegetarian food how is Osho going to know?” It is not so. If you do something, your whole vibe will express it: your guilt will show it, your shame will show it, your face will show it. You will not be flowing when you will be close to me. You will be afraid, you will be caught again.And remember, I am not against non-vegetarian foods for any other reasons. If a man is not meditating, if a man is not trying to grow inwards, if a man is not in the search of God, then it is perfectly okay – he can eat whatsoever he wants to eat. The higher you are trying to reach, more and more unnecessary luggage will have to be dropped, only then you can fly. These are unnecessary luggages, they can be dropped.But remember, it is not that you have nauseated me, just an unconscious habit in you that has nauseated me. And you are not your habit – the habit can be dropped – and you will come closer to me and you will be able to receive more of my love. And you don’t know how much I have to give to you; you only know that much that you receive. And you receive only that much that you can receive.Become more and more capable of receiving more and more – there is no end to it. This place can become your absolute fulfillment.The third question:Osho,I want to say many things to you. Should I write them to you or not?Meditate on this small story.“Have you heard, O Socrates….”“Just a moment, friend,” said the sage. “Have you sifted what you are going to tell me through the three sieves?”“The three sieves?”“Yes, my friend. Let us see whether what you mean to tell me will stand the test. The first of the sieves is that of truth: have you made sure that all you are going to tell me is true?”“Well, no. I just heard others say it.”“I see. Of course, insofar as it is not even true, we can scarcely bother with it, unless it happens to be something good. Will it stand the test of the sieve of goodness?”“Oh no, indeed, on the contrary….”“Hmm, ‘I’m not sure he said it, and what he is supposed to have said serves no good’? Perhaps somehow it is necessary that I know this in order to prevent harm to others?”“Well, no. If you look at it in that way….”“Very well then,” said Socrates, “since what you have come to tell me about the case is neither true nor good nor needful, let us forget all about it. There are so many worthwhile things in life, that we can’t afford to bother with what is so worthless as to be neither good nor true nor needful.”Meditate on this statement of Socrates…and you will know: what to write to me, what not to write to me, what to ask, what not to ask.There are a few people who go on writing letters every day. It is not a problem to me – just Arup is troubled. She has to read hundreds of letters, sometimes late in the night…. Look, she is fast asleep. She has to sleep sometime! Late in the night she has to go on reading those letters and summarizing them – don’t torture her!Unless it is really important, something valuable, something which will help you or somebody else, don’t write. If you feel it is of some importance then certainly you can write. And then too, make it as short as possible, make it telegraphic. There is no need to write long long letters. A few people are very much into writing letters – ten pages, twelve pages. Just write a few sentences, just say exactly what you want to say. And before you write anything, ponder over this statement of Socrates – it will help you: let them pass through the three sieves.The last question:Osho,Why don't you say exactly what your philosophy is?And what am I doing every day? Morning and evening I am continuously doing that. But maybe you have some ideas already fixed in your mind and you would like my philosophy to fit and adjust with those ideas – and it is not going to fit. Hence you feel puzzled, confused.I am not here really, trying to give you a set doctrine. I am trying to provoke something in you. It is not a question of giving you an exact statement, of what my philosophy is. Rather, I am a challenge to provoke you: into thinking, into meditating. Something is lying dormant in you and it has to be provoked – I am hammering it. It is not that I have to give you a philosophy and you have to believe in it – then the whole point will be missed.I am not a philosopher and I am not trying to give you a dogma in which you have to believe. In fact, I am just doing the opposite: I am destroying all dogmas and all philosophies – this is my philosophy! I am trying to create a vacuum in you, because when the vacuum is there the dormant energy in you will immediately start rising – it needs some space to rise. But you must be having some ideas. People come to me….There was one Christian missionary who said, “It will be very good if you write a small book, a catechism, just as we Christians have done – just a few statements of all that you want to teach.”I cannot give you a catechism because I have none. I respond to your potential, to your possibilities – this way and that I provoke you. And I will go on provoking…unless you are awakened!But if you have a Christian-missionary type mind, you will be waiting: that I will deliver to you a few fixed statements, so that you can believe in them for ever and ever. I cannot do that to you, because that is harmful, that is poisoning you. And if that mind is there, you will not be able to understand what I am doing here. It is a totally different kind of work….A famous film star announced that she was about to get married for the sixth time.“Oh,” said Mulla Nasruddin. “Against whom?”People have their own understandings. Now Mulla’s experience of marriage is such that he can ask only one thing: “Against whom?”I said to Mulla Nasruddin one day, “I hear your daughter has got married. I am sure you found it hard to part with her.”“Hard?” he said. “It was almost impossible.”People have their own deep-rooted ideas: they listen from those conclusions. He was trying to get rid of her, he was trying hard to get rid of her – he was very worried. So when I said, “I am sure you found it hard to part with her,” this was his reaction: “Hard?” he said. “It was almost impossible.”One day I asked Mulla Nasruddin, “Hi, Mulla! How is your wife?”He looked at me and said, “Compared to what?”You must be listening with your mind all intact: you will have to put it aside. Then you will see that it is not a verbal transmission that I am making here, it is an energy transmission – I am trying to contact you – your mind is in between. I am trying in every way to destroy your mind, I am taking away all your knowledge – making it look ridiculous, absurd.First you start feeling confused because you were so certain, and when I go on hitting hard on your knowledge, you start feeling confused. And then problems arise: you were thinking that you would become clear and now you are becoming confused. In the beginning it is going to happen: certainty destroyed, you become confused. But only when you are confused can you drop all your knowledge, not before it. When the confusion becomes too much, maddening, one day you simply drop it – it is no more possible to carry it any longer. And then you will understand what I am doing here to you.I am not giving you any philosophy. I am provoking your understanding. It is not a verbal doctrine. It is a heart-to-heart communion, a soul-to-soul communion – I am trying to connect with you. And in that connection, a spark from my being will jump into your being, and your inner will be lit – just a small spark is needed and there will be great light in you – and that light will give you eyes to see, ears to hear, heart to feel. That light will make you alive, that light will bloom in you as a Golden Flower.Enough for today.

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

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

https://oshoworld.com/the-secret-of-secrets-vol-1-15/

Master Lu-tsu said: The two mistakes of indolence and distraction must be combated by quiet work that is carried on daily without interruption; then success will certainly be achieved. If one is not seated in meditation, one will often be distracted without noticing it. To become conscious of the distraction is the mechanism by which to do away with distraction. Indolence of which man is conscious, and indolence of which man is unconscious, are a thousand miles apart. Unconscious indolence is real indolence; conscious indolence is not complete indolence, because there is still some clarity in it. Distraction comes from letting the mind wander about; indolence comes from the mind’s not yet being pure. Distraction is much easier to correct than indolence. It is as in sickness: if one feels pains and irritations, one can help them with remedies, but indolence is like a disease that is attended by lack of realization. Distraction can be counteracted, confusion can be straightened out, but indolence and lethargy are heavy and dark. Distraction and confusion at least have a place, but in indolence and lethargy the anima alone is active. In distraction the animus is still present, but in indolence pure darkness rules. If one becomes sleepy during meditation, that is an effect of indolence. Only breathing serves to overcome indolence. Although the breath that flows in and out through the nose is not the true breath, the flowing in and out of the true breath takes place in connection with it.While sitting, one must therefore always keep the heart quiet and the energy concentrated. How can the heart be made quiet? By the breath. Only the heart must be conscious of the flowing in and out of the breath; it must not be heard with the ears. If it is not heard, then the breathing is light; if light, it is pure. If it can be heard, then the breath-energy is rough; if rough, then it is troubled; if it is troubled, then indolence and lethargy develop and one wants to sleep. That is self-evident.How to use the heart correctly during breathing must be understood. It is a use without use. One should only let the light fall quite gently on the hearing. This sentence contains a secret meaning. What does it mean to let the light fall? It is the spontaneous radiation of the light of the eyes. The eye looks inward only and not outward. To sense brightness without looking outward means to look inward; it has nothing to do with an actual looking within. What does hearing mean? It is the spontaneous hearing of the light of the ear. The ear listens inwardly only and does not listen to what is outside. To sense brightness without listening to what is outside is to listen inwardly; it has nothing to do with actually listening to what is within. In this sort of hearing, one hears only that there is no sound; in this kind of seeing, one sees only that no shape is there. If the eye is not looking outward and the ear is not harkening outward, they close themselves and are inclined to sink inward. Only when one looks and harkens inward does the organ not go outward nor sink inward. In this way indolence and lethargy are done away with. That is the union of the seed and the light of the sun and the moon.If, as a result of indolence, one becomes sleepy, one should stand up and walk about. When the mind has become clear one should sit down again. In the course of time there will be success without one’s becoming indolent and falling asleep.One hot afternoon an owl was sitting in a tree and a swan flew up and sat there too.“Phew, it is hot, Brother Owl,” he said. “The sun is bright and I am all hot and sweaty.”“What!” said the owl. “What? What are you talking about? Sun? Hot? When darkness gathers it gets hot. What is this sun you are talking about? Are you mad or something? What are you trying to tell me? There is no such thing as the sun. There has never been. What is this light that gets hot? We have never heard about it. It gets hot when darkness gathers. Are you trying to make a fool of me? And I’m not alone in saying so. All our scriptures also say so.”The swan was flabbergasted with all this. “How can I explain it to this blind old owl?” he thought.“Look, brother, I can see with my eyes – it is the middle of the day and the sun is shining brightly and it is very hot. You are saying that it is dark? How can I explain it to you?”“Let us go then,” said the owl. “There is a big tree over there where there are lots of owls and great scholars too. We will ask them about it – and they know all about the scriptures, and a few of them are very learned. Come on. We will see if you are making a fool of me.”They flew over and there were many many blind owls there. “This swan has turned up,” the owl said, “and he says that it is the middle of the day and the sun is beating down and that there is light everywhere and that’s why it is hot. What do you people say?”“What is all this?” they cried. “Our fathers and their fathers and their fathers, in fact the whole of our community has never seen a sun, so there is no such thing as a sun. How can it be there? He is having you on. Don’t listen to him. He is either mad or a very fraudulent fellow. He is trying to corrupt our religion. We have always lived in darkness and we have always worshipped darkness. It is the very foundation of our way of life. He will destroy our way of life. That is the sort of person he is. If you want, we will take a majority vote on it.”One owl got up and said, “What is the truth? Does darkness exist or does light?”“Darkness, and darkness alone,” they all cried in unison.“Why then has it got so hot?”“Because it is so dark,” they cried. “Heat is a function of darkness.”“Don’t let him stay here,” they all cried again. “He will spoil our religion, our tradition, our very cherished past. Drive him away immediately. He is either totally blind or utterly mad.”This small parable contains a few truths of immense value.First: truth cannot be transferred – there is no way to transfer it – my truth is my truth. I can talk about it to you, but talking about it is not transferring it to you, listening to it is not understanding it. You will have to open your own eyes.The function of a real master is not to say to you that God exists but to help you to open your eyes, to open your windows of the soul so that you can see, so that you can realize the meaning of the word God in your own bones, in your own blood, in your very marrow. I cannot see for you through my eyes and I cannot walk for you with my legs and I cannot fly for you with my wings. You will have to live your life and you will have to die your death.This is one of the most fundamental things to be always remembered; otherwise one becomes burdened with borrowed knowledge which is not knowledge at all but a pseudo coin. It looks like knowledge, hence it can deceive you.And that’s what has happened to humanity: humanity is living under the curse of borrowed knowledge. People go on reciting the Bible, the Koran, the Gita like parrots – blind old owls reciting the Koran, the Gita, the Bible. But this is not their own experience; their own experience is just the opposite. Their own experience simply denies the truth of the Gita and the Bible and the Vedas and the Dhammapada. Their own experience simply says that “Buddha is mad,” that “Jesus is deceiving us,” that “Socrates may be very clever, but beware of him, don’t listen to him. He will destroy our religion.”Man has created a religion with his blind eyes – not one, many religions – because blind eyes cannot see the one, blind eyes can only believe in the many. Hence there are so many religions – nearabout three hundred religions on this small earth – and each religion proclaiming that, “My truth is the only truth,” that, “My God is the only God,” that, “All other Gods are false,” that, “All other truths are fabrications,” that, “All other paths only lead into wastelands – only my path is the path to paradise.”These three hundred religions are continuously fighting with each other. None of them is aware, none of them has seen, none of them has looked into reality face to face – they have believed. These religions are not religions but traditions – they have heard. They have heard down the ages and they have believed, because to believe is cheap, to explore is risky; to repeat like a parrot is comfortable, to go into the adventure of discovery is to risk your life. It is dangerous. Exploration is dangerous; belief – convenient, consoling, you need not go anywhere. It is given to you ready-made, but it is secondhand.And miserable is the man who lives with a secondhand God, because God can only be firsthand. The experience has to be authentically yours. Nobody else’s experience can become a foundation of a true life. Buddha may have seen, but to become a Buddhist is not going to help. Buddha was not a Buddhist – certainly not. Jesus may have looked, encountered, realized, but to become a Christian is utter stupidity. Unless you become a Christ you will never know God.The really religious person avoids traditions, the really religious person avoids secondhand gods, avoids beliefs, keeps himself open, available for the truth to happen. Certainly he works – only he works. The believer never works upon himself; there is no need for the believer to work upon himself. The explorer, the inquirer, the seeker of truth works hard upon himself because there are many things which have to be dropped, many impurities which have to be dropped, many hindrances and blocks which have to be dissolved. The eyes have to be opened and the ears have to be unplugged and the heart has to be made to feel.One has to fall in rhythm with the existence. When you are utterly in rhythm with existence your eyes are open, and then for the first time, you see. And that seeing is transformation, that seeing changes you, root and all. That seeing becomes a new vision, a new life, a new gestalt. You are no more confined then by your body, no more confined by your mind, no more confined by anything whatsoever. You are unconfined, infinite, eternal. And to feel this eternity flowing in you is to know God, to see this infinity extending into the eternal past and into the eternal future is to see God. To feel godliness inside your own being is to know God. This can’t be secondhand.When I see a Christian or a Hindu or a Jaina or a Mohammedan, I see secondhand people. You would not like to purchase secondhand shoes from the market and you would not like to purchase secondhand clothes used by others from the market. But for your soul you purchase secondhand beliefs, secondhand shoes, secondhand clothes – dirty, ugly, used, rotten – and you think you are beautifying your life? You are insulting your very soul, you are dehumanizing yourself. To become a Christian or to become a Buddhist is to dehumanize yourself. The search has to be alone, the search has to be authentically individual.Truth cannot be decided by the vote of the majority because truth is utterly individual and private. It is not an objective phenomenon. You can see my body – it is an objective phenomenon: whether my body exists or not can be decided easily by others. But whether I am enlightened or not cannot be decided by anybody else – certainly not by any majority vote.A buddha is a buddha not because people have voted for him and given their majority vote that he is a buddha. He is a buddha by his own sheer declaration. Except himself there is no witness – it is utterly private. It is so interior that nobody else can penetrate it.Truth cannot be decided by a majority vote. But that’s how people decide. That’s why religions are so interested in increasing their population, because if they have more people, certainly they have more truth. Christians can claim more truth than Jainas because they have a big crowd behind them. If there is a voting, then Christians will win and Jainas will be defeated. But it is not a question of voting. Even if a thousand owls vote that it is dark and there is no sun and light has never existed, even then, the lie remains a lie. A single swan is enough to declare that it is day.Truth is not a question of democratic decision, it has nothing to do with the crowd. Catholics are against birth control, Mohammedans are against birth control, for the simple reason, for a political reason; the reason is that if birth control is allowed their population will start decreasing. And that is their only strength. They want to increase their population so one day they can prove to the world: “Look, if we have so many people on our side, it must be that truth is on our side.”I would like to remind you of a famous statement of George Bernard Shaw. Somebody was arguing with him and the man said, “But so many people believe in what I am saying. How can so many people be wrong?”And Bernard Shaw retorted, “If so many people believe in it then it must be wrong, because how can so many people be right?”See the point of it: how can so many people be in the right? The crowd is blind, the crowd is not enlightened. Truth has always been in the minority. When Buddha arises he is alone, when Jesus walks in Jerusalem he is alone, when Socrates fights he is alone. Of course, a few seekers gather together around Socrates, a school arises, but that school is a minority. And to be with Socrates needs courage, needs guts, because he is not there to console you. He will take all your consolations away, he will shatter all your illusions, because that is the only way to bring you to truth. He will force you to open your eyes, he will not sing a lullaby to help you to go to sleep. He will shout from the house tops to wake you up, he will shock you, he will hit you.Just the other day Pradeepa came to see me. She was crying – naturally. I had shocked her tremendously. She would not have ever dreamt that one day, out of nowhere, I would just hit her exactly on the head with a hammer. And she was also disturbed because she has been a cause to create nausea in me – she feels for me, she loves me, as you all love me. She was crying for all these reasons.But I have to tell you, and to her particularly, that you should feel grateful whenever I hit you hard, because I will hit you hard only when you are worthy of it; I will not hit just anybody. I will hit only when somebody is really growing. The more you will be growing the more demands will be made on you.I have not told everybody to drop non-vegetarian food, but I have told Pradeepa, in a very shocking way, to drop it. Her consciousness is growing, now this is a hindrance. People who are not soaring high, they can carry as much of a burden as they like. But those who are starting, soaring high, they have to drop all unnecessary luggage. The more pure your energy becomes, the more you will have to be careful about it, because something precious can be lost! And it is very difficult to create that precious energy, it is very easy to lose it. Those who don’t have anything to lose, they need not worry. They can go on doing all kinds of stupid things, their whole being is in tune with those stupidities.This has to be remembered by you all: that as you will be growing I will be making more and more demands on you.There is a beautiful story….India has known a great painter, one of the greatest of all – Nandalal Bose, a genius. He was a disciple of another genius, Avanindranath Tagore. Avanindranath Tagore was an uncle of Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath and Avanindranath were sitting together one day, sipping tea early in the morning, chit-chatting, and Nandalal came with a painting of Krishna. Rabindranath has written in his memoirs: “I have never seen such a beautiful painting of Krishna – so alive that it looked as if he is just going to come out of the painting any moment, that any moment his flute will start singing a song. I was dazed.”Avanindranath looked at the painting, and threw the painting out of his house and told Nandalal, “Is this the way one paints Krishna? Even poor painters in Bengal do far better.”Rabindranath was very shocked. Rabindranath knew his uncle’s paintings too, because he also had been painting Krishna his whole life, and he was absolutely certain that no painting of his uncle’s could be compared with Nandalal’s painting. Nandalal’s painting was far superior. But he kept quiet. It was not right for him to interfere between the master and the disciple. Nandalal touched the feet of Avanindranath, went out, and for three years disappeared.Rabindranath many times asked Avanindranath, “What have you done to this poor man? – and his painting was superb.”And Avanindranath will cry and he will say, “You are right. His painting is superb. I have never been able to do such a beautiful thing.” And when Nandalal left, Avanindranath took the painting inside and had it always, in his room.“Then why,” Rabindranath asked, “did you behave in such a rude way?”And Avanindranath said, “But I expect much more from him. It is not a question that he has done a beautiful painting – this is just the beginning. He has a much more potential to do – I am going to make many more demands on him.”And for three years Nandalal went around the villages of Bengal because the master had said, “Even the village painters do far better paintings of Krishna.” So he learned from village painters – ordinary, poor painters. For three years he moved around in Bengal – the whole province. And then one day he appeared, touched the feet of the master and said, “You were right. I have learned a lot. You did well to throw my painting out.”Avanindranath hugged him and said, “I was waiting. I was getting old, and I was getting frightened whether you would be coming back or not. I am happy. Your painting was beautiful, but I see much more potential in you.”Whenever I will see much more potential in you I will hit you hard, because that is the only reason you are here with me and I am here with you. I have to provoke you, to your very depths, so that all that is dormant in you can start rising, can start soaring high. And you don’t know your potential…I know. So whenever I make demands, feel grateful!You will be surprised to know that in Zen monasteries whenever the master hits somebody’s head with his staff, the person who is hit bows down seven times and touches the master’s feet to thank him. And disciples wait for that moment when they will be hit, for that blissful moment to come when the master will take so much trouble as to hit their head with his staff. They dream about it, they pray, they hope that some day that blissful moment will come.Remember, this is an alchemical academy. You are not here just to be entertained but to be transformed. And transformation is painful, because much that is old has to be dropped. And that old stuff is not like clothes you can easily drop – it has become your skin: your skin is peeled, it hurts. But this is the only way to bring you to your senses, this is the only way to destroy your shock absorbers, this is the only way to destroy your armor, that surrounds you and keeps you in bondage. Slowly slowly your own energy will start rising, your eyes will open, your ears will be able to hear. Then God is firsthand. And always keep in mind that only a firsthand experience of God is a true experience. It is not decided by the majority, it is not decided by tradition, it is not decided by anything except by your own energy encounter with God.It was perfectly alright for the owls to think that the swan is mad. That’s how people have always been thinking – Buddha is mad, Mohammed is mad, Zarathustra is mad – because how can they believe what they cannot see?It was perfectly alright for the owls to throw the swan out, to drive him away. They became afraid, shaken: if this swan is allowed to live in the tree he is going to disrupt their tradition, he is going to destroy their way of life. They have always lived in darkness and they have always believed in darkness. Darkness is their God, all their rituals have arisen out of darkness. Their priests praise darkness, their learned people write great treatises on darkness. Their whole philosophy is centered on the basic theme of darkness. In their philosophy there is no place for sun and light and day. Now this mad swan comes up and is trying to infiltrate, smuggle some alien ideas into their world: their whole structure will collapse.That’s why Jesus is crucified. That’s why people are so much against me. I am trying to give you a new gestalt, a new pattern, a new way of life, a new approach to reality. I am trying to open a new door to existence. Naturally, those who have very much invested in the old patterns of life will be angry, will be madly angry. They would like to drive me out of their world – that’s exactly what they are trying to do. It is all natural, it is all simple; once you understand, you start laughing about it.How do you go on believing in God? Why? How do you manage to believe in the soul, and why? The same reason: “Our fathers and their fathers and their fathers, in fact the whole of our community has never seen a sun, so there is no such thing as a sun. He is having you on. Don’t listen to him. He will corrupt our religion.” You have heard your father say to you, “God is, and God is a Christian,” or “God is a Hindu,” and they had heard it from their fathers and so on and so forth – rumors, gossip. Neither your father has known nor you have known. Gather courage to drop all that which is not your knowledge.This is the first requirement for being a sannyasin, and this is the first requirement for going into the inquiry of truth scientifically: drop all prejudices, drop all a priori conceptions; start from the beginning, from the very beginning, from ABC, as if you are Adam and Eve – that there has been no tradition before you, that there has been no scripture before you.D.H. Lawrence once said – and I perfectly agree with him – “If all the scriptures of the world are destroyed, man may become religious.”If whole traditions are simply dissolved, then only is there some hope, otherwise who bothers to inquire? When the tradition can supply you so easily and you have not to pay anything at all, why bother? Others have known, you can simply believe. But to know is one thing, to believe is just the opposite.To believe means to go on living in darkness. To know means to be transformed, transmuted, transplanted into another vision – luminous, eternal.These sutras are not to be believed, they have to be experimented upon. These sutras are simple clues on how to work it out within your own being. Unless you work on them you will go on missing the point. You have to start looking at your own body as a great spiritual lab and you have to look upon your life as a great adventure into reality. And you have to be very alert, watchful, to see what is happening – within and without.These sutras are keys. If you really try to work upon your being you will be surprised: that you are emperors – having great treasures, inexhaustible treasures in your being – and yet behaving like beggars.Master Lu-tsu said: The two mistakes of indolence and distraction must be combated by quiet work that is carried on daily without interruption; then success will certainly be achieved.Success is a by-product; one need not think about it. And if you think about it, you will not get it – that is a condition. Don’t think about success because if you start thinking about success you become divided. Then you are not totally in the work; your real mind is in the future: How to succeed? You have already started dreaming how you will be when you have succeeded, how you will be when you have become a buddha – what beauties, what benedictions, what blessings will be yours! Your mind has started playing the game of greed, ambition, ego. Never think of success; success is a natural by-product. If you work really sincerely upon yourself, success will follow you just as your shadow follows you. Success has not to be the goal. That’s why Lu-tsu says, “Work quietly, silently, untroubled by any idea of success or failure.”And remember, if you think too much of success you will be thinking constantly of failure too. They come together, they come in one package. Success and failure cannot be divided from each other. If you think of success, somewhere deep down there will be a fear also. Who knows whether you are going to make it or not? You may fail. Success takes you into the future, gives you a greed game, an ego projection, ambition; and the fear also gives you a shaking, a trembling – you may fail. The possibility of failure makes you waver, and with this wavering, with this greed, with this ambition, your work will not be quiet. Your work will become a turmoil; you will be working here and looking there, you will be walking on this road and looking somewhere far away in the sky.I have heard about a Greek astrologer who was studying stars, and one night, a very starry night, he fell into a well, because he was watching the stars and moving and he was so concerned with the stars that he forgot where he was – he moved closer and closer to a well and fell into it.Some woman, an old woman who used to live nearby, rushed up. Hearing the sound, she looked inside the well, brought a rope, and pulled the great astrologer out. The astrologer was very thankful. He said to the old woman, “You don’t know me but I am the royal astrologer, specially appointed by the king. My fee is very large – only very rich people can afford to inquire about their future. But you have saved my life. You can come to me tomorrow and I will show you: I will read your hand, I will look into your birth-chart and I will interpret your stars, and your whole future will be plainly clear to you.”The old woman started laughing. She said, “Forget all about it. You cannot see even one step ahead that there is a well, how can you predict my future? All bullshit!”Don’t look too much ahead, otherwise you will miss the immediate step. Success comes, Lu-tsu says, of its own accord. Leave it to itself. This existence is a very rewarding existence, nothing goes unrewarded.That is the whole Indian philosophy of karma: nothing goes unrewarded or unpunished. If you do something wrong, punishment follows like a shadow; if you do something right, rewards are on the way. You need not bother about them, you need not think at all, not even an iota of your consciousness need be involved with them, they come – their coming is automatic.When you move on the road do you look again and again for your shadow – whether it is following you or not? And if somebody looks back again and again to see whether the shadow is following or not, you will think that he is mad. The shadow follows; it is inevitable. So if your work is in the right direction, with the right effort, with the totality of your being, the reward follows automatically.And what is the work? The first thing:The two mistakes of indolence and distraction must be combated…Indolence means laziness, lethargy; it is because of the feminine part in you. The feminine part is lazy, lethargic, because it is passive. And the other is distraction; it is because of the masculine part in you. The masculine part is always restless, active: it wants to do a thousand and one things simultaneously.A character of Camus’ says, “I want all the women of the world. I cannot be satisfied by one or by a few or even by many. I want all the women of the world.” This is the extreme male attitude. The woman is satisfied by one, the man is not even satisfied by many. Contentment is natural to the woman, discontent is natural to the man.Both have positive and negative polarities. If the woman allows her passivity to become negative, it will create lethargy. That’s why women have not created much in the world, or very little – you don’t find great women painters and poets and scientists. And it is not only because man has not allowed them. Even if freedom comes – which is coming – and the woman is liberated, this lethargy is part of her being. She is not much interested in doing, her interest is more in being. And this interest can be a great blessing too, or a curse; it depends. If this restfulness becomes meditative, if this restfulness really becomes contentment with existence, harmony with existence, it will be a blessing. But usually, out of a hundred, in ninety-nine percent of cases it becomes lethargy. We don’t know how to use our blessings. Then blessings become bitter and prove curses.And the male mind is restless. There also a blessing is possible: he can be very creative. But it has not been so. Rather than being creative he has become destructive; the blessing has turned into a curse. Man’s restlessness has made him very anxious, full of anxiety, tension. His whole mind is constantly boiling, he is always on the verge of madness. Somehow he goes on managing to contain himself, but deep inside him there is a crowd ready to burst forth. Any small excuse, and the man can go mad. Because of this restlessness man has lost his beauty, his grace.The woman is graceful, beautiful. Just watch a woman: the way she walks, the way she sits – there is elegance. Her being has a subtle silence, a restfulness you can feel in her vibe. In a house where there is no woman you will see chaos. You can immediately know whether the house is lived in by a bachelor: you will see chaos, all the things are topsy-turvy, nothing is in its right place. You can immediately know whether a woman is part of the house or not because everything is in harmony, in its place. There is a grace, a kind of exquisite climate, a very subtle climate of love, of culture, a musical quality to the house. When man lives alone there is a neurotic quality to the house.Both of these are beautiful if used rightly. Then the feminine part gives you grace and the male part gives you creativity. And when grace and creativity meet, you are whole. But that rarely happens – in a Buddha, in a Meera, in a Teresa, in a Jesus, in a Magdalene – very rarely. Ordinarily, just the opposite happens: the wrong sides meet. Man’s restlessness, neurosis, and woman’s lethargy – these two things meet, and then you see the ugliest phenomenon possible.Let me remind you again: when I am talking about man and woman I am not using biological terminology. Each man has a woman within as well as a man within, and each woman has a man within as a woman within. Man is not just man and woman is not just woman. They are both. Both are both Their being is bisexual. Maybe one is predominant, that’s why one is man: the male part is predominant – the animus is in the conscious and the anima is deep in the unconscious – then you are a man. Or if you are a woman that means that the anima is in the conscious, the feminine part is predominant, and the male part, the animus, is in the unconscious. But both are always present together. Just as electricity cannot be without two poles, positive and negative, no being can be without two poles. Man and woman, yin and yang, positive/negative, Shiva/ Shakti – you can find your own names for them.These two mistakes have to be combated. Quiet work is needed to be……carried on daily without interruption; then success will certainly be achieved.And what is that quiet work? This is the quiet work:If one is not seated in meditation, one will often be distracted without noticing it.And you must have observed – thousands have reported it to me because thousands have been meditating around me and it is an accepted experience of all meditators – that when a person starts meditating, he suddenly becomes aware of a strange phenomenon: his mind has never before been so restless as it becomes when he meditates. That is very puzzling in the beginning because one hopes that through meditation the mind will become quiet. And this is just the opposite that is happening: the mind becomes more restless, you see more thoughts coming than in your ordinary day-to-day life. Working in your shop, in the office, in the factory, thoughts don’t bother you so much. But when you sit in a temple or in a mosque or a church to meditate for a few minutes, suddenly a great crowd of thoughts comes, surrounds you, starts pulling you to this side and to that. A maddening experience, and puzzling, because the meditator was hoping to become quiet and silent – and this is just the reverse that is happening.Why does it happen? The reason is this: you have always been with all these thoughts; even when you are occupied in your shop, in your factory, in your office, these thoughts have always been there. But you were so occupied that you didn’t notice them, that’s all. What is new is not the crowd of thoughts. Thoughts don’t know where you are sitting – in a church, in a temple, in a meditation hall, they don’t know. All that is happening is that when you are sitting in meditation you are not occupied with anything on the outside, so your whole mind becomes aware of all that is always clamoring within you.It is not because of meditation that more thoughts are coming to you, through meditation you become aware of their presence – they have always been there, you just notice them more.If one is not seated in meditation, one will often be distracted without noticing it. To become conscious of the distraction is the mechanism by which to do away with distraction.Hence it is insisted that: sit in meditation at least one or two hours every day so that you become unoccupied, completely unoccupied with the outer engagements, and your full observation is focused on your inner world. In the beginning you will see you have opened a Pandora’s box, in the beginning you will see you have entered into a madhouse, and you will want to escape and become engaged again. Avoid that temptation. To avoid this temptation is a must, otherwise you will never be able to meditate.Many tricks have been found to avoid the inner turmoil. Transcendental Meditation is a technique, not of meditation, but of avoiding facing your inner reality. A mantra is given to you and you are told to repeat the mantra. That helps – not to meditate but to remain occupied. You go on repeating, “Ram-Ram-Ram” or “Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola.” You go on repeating something – any word will do, your own name will do, any absurd sound will do. You go on repeating. By repeating it you are occupied, and through that occupation you are avoiding your inner turmoil. This is not different. You were occupied in your office, you were occupied with the film, seeing the movie, you were occupied listening to the radio, you were occupied reading the newspaper; now you are occupied with this mantra. This is neither meditation nor transcendental.Real meditation means: don’t avoid the inner madhouse; enter into it, face it, encounter it, be watchful, because it is through watchfulness that you will overcome it. It is because of avoiding it that it has been growing on and on. You have avoided enough! Now there is no need to take the help of a mantra. No help is needed – just sit silently. Zen is the purest of meditations: just sit silently, doing nothing.The most difficult meditation is sitting silently, doing nothing. People ask me, “Please give us some support. If you give us some mantra it will be helpful, because just sitting silently doing nothing is very difficult, most arduous.” A thousand and one things arise. The body starts driving you crazy, the head starts itching, suddenly you feel ants are crawling upon your body, and when you look there is no ant – just the body playing tricks. The body is trying to give you some support to be engaged. The body wants to change the posture, the legs go to sleep – the body is simply making things available to you so that you can become occupied.Avoid all occupation. For a few moments just be unoccupied and just see whatsoever is happening inside, and you will be surprised. You will be surprised because one day, just by looking and looking and looking, thoughts start disappearing: “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, spring comes and the grass grows by itself.”This is the purest form of meditation, this is transcendental meditation. But nobody can call it transcendental meditation because Maharishi Mahesh Yogi has made it a trademark. TM is now a trademark! Nobody has ever done business in such a way. You can be sued in a court if you call your meditation, “transcendental meditation.” It is patented. Look at the whole ridiculousness of it: meditation has become a thing, like a commodity, to be sold in the marketplace.This has been happening again and again: the so-called Indian gurus who go to America, they never succeed in changing anybody but America succeeds in changing them. They all become businessmen, they all start learning American ways. They never change anybody, they cannot. If they were able to change anybody they would not have gone anywhere; those who want to be changed would have come to them. There was no need for them to go anywhere: when somebody is thirsty he starts searching for water. The well need not go to the thirsty, the well never goes – the thirsty come to the well. And if you see a well on wheels, beware!To become conscious of the distraction is the mechanism by which to do away with distraction.A tremendously pregnant sentence. The only way to get rid of distraction is to become aware of it, to watch it, to silently be aware of it, to see what mind is doing with you – continuously distracting you. Just watch it. Many times you will forget, because mind is cunning, very clever, very diplomatic, knows all the strategies of the politicians. Mind is essentially a politician: it will try all its magic charms on you.Whatsoever you have been repressing it will bring. If you have been repressing sex, when you start meditating, immediately you will see apsaras descending from heaven. The mind says, “Look! What are you doing, wasting your time? Beautiful women are being sent by the god Indra, and what are you doing?” And if you have been repressing sex then your mind will use sex as a bait for you. If you have been repressing ambition, your mind will start imagining that you have become the president or the prime minister and you will start falling into that trap. If your mind has been deprived of food and you have been fasting, the mind will create such beautiful, delicious dishes for you: the aroma, the smell of the food and you are distracted.Hence one of my insistencies for my sannyasins is: don’t repress, otherwise you will never be able to meditate. If you repress, then in meditation you will have to encounter your repression. And whatsoever you have repressed becomes powerful, immensely powerful; it takes roots in your unconscious.Do you think the old stories of Indian seers – old people they were, all old and almost dead, shrunken, just bones, skeletons, because they were fasting and living in forests, and suddenly, one day they see that Urvasi, the most beautiful dance-girl of the god Indra is dancing around them…. What would Urvasi see in these skeletons? How does she become interested in these skeletons, and for what? The stories say that the god Indra sends them to tempt. That is all nonsense! There is no god Indra and there is nobody functioning as a tempter. There is no devil, no Satan; the only devil is your repressed mind. These are the people who have been repressing their sexuality, and they have repressed so much that when they relax in meditation all that repression starts surfacing: it takes beautiful forms.Repress anything and you will see. Just do a three-day fast and you will come to know what I am telling you. Just a three-day fast and all your dreams will become full of food. And there is every possibility that one day in your sleep you will simply start moving, sleepwalking, towards the fridge. Your whole mind will become food-obsessed. Hence I say, don’t repress.All the therapies available in this ashram are just to help you to vomit the repressions that the society has forced on you. Once those repressions are vomited, thrown out of your system, once those toxins are taken out of your system, meditation becomes such an easy, simple thing – just like a feather falling slowly towards the earth or a dead leaf falling from the tree, slowly slowly…. Meditation is a very simple phenomenon, it has to be, because it is your spontaneity; you are going towards your nature. Movement towards nature has to be easy, movement away from nature has to be difficult. Meditation is not difficult, but between your mind and your being, there are a thousand and one repressions which distract you.Lu-tsu is right: just watch those distractions, be alert. If you are distracted and you forget meditation, don’t be worried. The moment you remember that you have been distracted, again go back, again cool down, again make the heart quiet, again start breathing silently. Don’t feel guilty that you have been distracted because that will be another distraction. That’s why I say mind is cunning. First it distracts you, and then one moment you see…what are you doing? You were meditating, and you have gone to Vrindavan and you are eating and…what are you doing? You drag yourself. Now you start feeling guilty. This is not good. Now feeling guilty is another distraction, now guilt makes you feel miserable – misery is another distraction. One distraction leads into another.Don’t feel guilty, don’t feel angry. The moment you find yourself caught red-handed, simply go back – with no complaint. It is natural. For millions of lives you have been repressing, it is but natural that the mind distracts. Take it for granted and move back, bring yourself again to your center, again and again and again. And slowly slowly the time at the center will become greater and greater, and distractions will be fewer and fewer. And one day, suddenly it happens: you are at the center and there is no distraction.This is success. And why is this called success? – because this is the point where you know that you are a god, that you have never been anybody else, that you had fallen in a dream and dreamt that you had become a beggar.Indolence of which man is conscious, and indolence of which man is unconscious, are a thousand miles apart. Unconscious indolence is real indolence; conscious indolence is not complete indolence, because there is still some clarity in it.If you are lazy, be consciously lazy. Know that you are lazy. Watch your laziness. Just as you watch distraction, watch your laziness. At least watching is not lazy, watching is not laziness, so something is there which is not lazy. Being attentive of your inattention, one thing in you is still attentive, so you are not completely inattentive. And all hope hangs around that small spot of no laziness, of no distraction. That small spot is like a seed. It looks small but if time, patience, is given to it, it will become a big tree with great foliage. And one day the Golden Flower will arrive.Distraction comes from letting the mind wander about; indolence comes from the mind’s not yet being pure. Distraction is much easier to correct than indolence. It is as in sickness: if one feels pains and irritations, one can help them with remedies, but indolence is like a disease that is attended by lack of realization.Distraction is easier to tackle because distraction is outward. Indolence is more difficult because it is inward. Distraction is male, indolence is female. Distraction, by its very activity, creates tensions which become unbearable, and you can become aware of it easily. But indolence is very silent, dark; it makes no noise, it is simply there. It is very difficult to become aware of it. First one has to become aware of distractions. When all distractions disappear, then one becomes aware of indolence. Then the whole energy is available to look inward, then you see it there, like a rock holding you – inactive, uncreative. Then watch it.And remember, watching is the only key. Observation is meditation – there is nothing more to meditation. It is another name for being aware. And the miracle is that when you become aware of something, utterly aware, it disappears. It remains only if you are unaware. Your unawareness is a food for distraction, for indolence. Your awareness means they are no more being fed, they start starving; sooner or later they wither away of their own accord.Distraction can be counteracted, confusion can be straightened out, but indolence and lethargy are heavy and dark. Distraction and confusion at least have a place, but in indolence and lethargy the anima alone is active. In distraction the animus is still present, but in indolence pure darkness rules. If one becomes sleepy during meditation, that is an effect of indolence. Only breathing serves to overcome indolence. Although the breath that flows in and out through the nose is not the true breath, the flowing in and out of the true breath takes place in connection with it.If you feel very sleepy while meditating, then start watching your breath and sleep will disappear. That’s why many Buddhist monks who do vipassana start suffering from insomnia. I have come across many people who were suffering from insomnia because they were practicing vipassana and they were not aware of it: if you watch your breath, it destroys your sleep.So to my sannyasins I say: never practice vipassana for more than two or three hours a day, and those three hours should be between sunrise and sunset, never after sunset. If you practice vipassana in the night you will disturb your sleep, and to disturb sleep is to disturb your whole body mechanism.One monk from Ceylon was brought to me. For three years he had not been able to sleep. A sincere monk…that was his problem. Thinking that vipassana was so great, he was practicing it day in, day out. Even when he was in bed feeling that no sleep was coming, he would practice vipassana. Now if you practice vipassana in bed, it is impossible for sleep to come: sleep never comes to a person who is becoming very alert of the breath. You can try it – if you need insomnia you can try it. To watch the breath is the best way to destroy sleepiness in you, because breath is life and sleep is death; they are antagonistic to each other.The child starts his life by breathing. The first act of life is breath, and the last act of life will be letting the breath out and never breathing again. The first act is inhalation and the last act is exhalation. When there is no breathing we say this man is dead.Remember it: sleep needs that you forget all about your breath. Sleep is a small death, a tiny death – and a beautiful death, because it gives you rest, relaxation, and tomorrow morning you will come out of the death chamber fresh, younger, rejuvenated.Watch your breath when you feel sleepy in meditation. And never do such meditations in the night.And the second thing of great importance which the sutra says is: this breath that we take in and out is not true breath, this is just the vehicle of the true breath. What is true breath? In India we call it prana. This breath is just the horse; the rider is invisible. This breath is just the horse of the rider called “prana,” vitality, or what Henri Bergson used to call “élan vital.” It is invisible.When you take breath in you are not only taking air in, you are taking life in. Without air life will disappear. Life exists through air; it is the invisible part of air. Breath is like the flower and life is like the fragrance that surrounds it. When you breathe there is a double process going on. Hence yoga became very much interested in pranayama. Pranayama means expansion of breath. The deeper your breath goes, the more deeply you become alive; the better your breath, the longer you will be able to live. Yoga became very interested in the secret. The elixir is in the system of breathing. One can live very long. Yogis have lived the longest.I am not telling you to live long because you can live a long but stupid life. Length is not the question at all; intensity, depth, is the question. I am not interested in long life. What is the point? If you are stupid it is better to die sooner.Genghis Khan once asked a great wise man, “What do you say – should one live long? Should one do something to live long? Is life a blessing or not?”The wise man said, “Sir, it depends. For example, if you live long that will be very bad. If you die soon that will be a great blessing. If you sleep twenty-four hours a day that will be really great, because there will be less trouble in the world.”It depends. But yoga became very interested in long life as if that in itself were a goal. And that’s where yoga got lost: it became more and more physiological – its concern became focused on something unimportant.But the secret is there – it is in the breath. Breath is a vehicle of two energies: one is the visible air, the tangible air that contains oxygen; and somewhere around the oxygen is élan vital, prana, that makes you more and more deeply alive, aflame with life. So whenever you feel sleepy, just watch your breath and sleep will disappear. And because of breath more life will enter in you; your indolence will disappear.While sitting, one must therefore always keep the heart quiet and the energy concentrated. How can the heart be made quiet? By the breath.Again, …By the breath. Breath has functioned as one of the greatest of techniques.Only the heart must be conscious of the flowing in and out of the breath…Just watch the breath coming in, the breath going out. In that very watchfulness your sleep will disappear, your indolence will disappear, and you will feel centered.Breath can be watched at two points: either at the tip of the nose where the air touches on first entering your body, or at the last center, at the navel center, where the breath goes and makes your belly move up and down. These are the two centers which you can watch.Just the other day somebody asked, “Osho, watching the tip of the nose is good, but what about Jewish noses?” In fact, only Jews have noses, others only believe they have. If you have a Jewish nose then watch the tip of the nose where the air enters in. A Jewish nose is immensely helpful in such meditations. Feel happy that you have a Jewish nose. And at least fifty percent of people here have Jewish noses because fifty percent of people here are Jews.Reading the question I was really surprised because then I became very concerned about Master Lu-tsu and his Chinese people to whom he was giving these methods. They don’t have any noses at all! It must have been really difficult for them to watch the tip of the nose. What tip?Only the heart must be conscious of the flowing in and out of the breath; it must not be heard with the ears. If it is not heard, then the breathing is light; if light, it is pure. If it can be heard, then the breath-energy is rough; if rough, then it is troubled; if it is troubled, then indolence and lethargy develop and one wants to sleep. That is self-evident.How to use the heart correctly during breathing must be understood. It is a use without use.Effort without effort, practicing without practicing, a pathless path, a gateless gate – these are the expressions of Tao and Zen. You have to do something without effort, without strain.So the Master says:It is a use without use. One should only let the light fall quite gently on the hearing.You are to be in a let-go.That is the difference between yoga and Tao: yoga is the path of will and Tao is the path of surrender. Yoga says breathe in this way, take this much breath deep inside, hold it there for this long, then exhale deeply, then hold it out for that long – make a certain pattern through will; Tao says let it happen.One should only let the light fall quite gently on the hearing.Just as you are listening to me, my words are falling on your ears: you need not jump upon them, you need not drag them in – there is no need. You simply remain attentive, silent, available, open.This sentence contains a secret meaning. What does it mean to let the light fall? It is the spontaneous radiation of the light of the eyes. The eye looks inward only and not outward. To sense brightness without looking outward means to look inward…Whenever you are in a kind of let-go you will feel a great light inside you.That happens automatically in a let-go. When you are surrendered to existence you will feel very very bright inside – a great light inside and a great delight outside. It happens naturally. And when you feel that brightness inside this is what is meant by looking in.To sense brightness without looking outward means to look inward; it has nothing to do with an actual looking within. What does hearing mean? It is the spontaneous hearing of the light of the ear. The ear listens inwardly only and does not listen to what is outside. To sense brightness without listening to what is outside is to listen inwardly…When you start feeling a light behind your eyes and within your ears, deep inside you, a source of your own, then you are settled, centered, then the heart is quiet. And then you are in the world and yet beyond it. This is transcendence.…it has nothing to do with actually listening to what is within. In this sort of hearing, one hears only that there is no sound; in this kind of seeing, one sees only that no shape is there.You will not see any shape, you will not hear any sound within; you will see only a silent light – a soundless sound, a formless light. Hence God is defined as soundless sound, formless form.If the eye is not looking outward and the ear is not harkening outward, they close themselves and are inclined to sink inward. Only when one looks and harkens inward does the organ not go outward nor sink inward. In this way indolence and lethargy are done away with. That is the union of the seed and the light of the sun and moon.If your hearing is inward, your seeing is inward – and that means you are feeling light without form, sound without sound, a silent music inside – your inner man and inner woman have met. This is the union, the total orgasm, unio mystica.If, as a result of indolence, one becomes sleepy, one should stand up and walk about. When the mind has become clear one should sit down again. In the course of time there will be success without one’s becoming indolent and falling asleep.These sutras have to be practiced: without practice make efforts to enter into the secrets of these sutras, without strain learn to surrender and be in a let-go.Enough for today.

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The Secret of Secrets Vol 1, 01-16Category: TAO

The Secret of Secrets Vol 1 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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The first question:Osho,Would you please comment further on the differences between C. G. Jung's “process of individuation” and the essence of The Secret of the Golden Flower?Habib, Carl Gustav Jung was groping in the right direction but he had not yet arrived. It was not his own experience, it was a philosophy. He was thinking about individuation, he was going into the idea of individuation, deeper and deeper. But it was not his own meditation, it was not his own existential experience.The Secret of the Golden Flower is an alchemical process. These are the words of those who have known.Jung was not an individual in the sense of individuation; he was yet divided: he had the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and the collective unconscious mind. He was not one, he himself was a multiplicity. He was a crowd as everybody else is. He had all the fears, all the greeds, all the ambitions that any normal human being is expected to have. He was not a buddha, he was not enlightened. He had not known his own inner being which is timeless.In the moment of inner illumination, all differences and distinctions disappear. There is only pure consciousness – neither conscious nor unconscious nor collective unconscious.The same was happening with Sri Aurobindo in India. He was also talking about conscious mind and the superconscious mind, and so on and so forth.In the moment of illumination mind disappears. Mind means division. Whether you divide it into conscious and unconscious or you divide it into conscious and superconscious does not make a difference: mind means division. Individuality means undividedness. That is the meaning of the word individual: indivisible. Mind is bound to be a crowd. Mind cannot be one – by its very nature it has to be many. And when the mind disappears, the one is found. Then you have come home. That is individuation.But still I say Jung was groping in the right direction – but still groping in the dark. He has not yet arrived at the door, he had dreamt about the door.There are parallels in human history. For example, Democritus, the Greek thinker, had stumbled upon the idea of the atom without any experimentation. There was no possibility to experiment in his days, no modern sophisticated techniques were available. He could not have divided the atom, he could not have come to the atomic structure of matter, but he speculated. He must have been a great thinker – but only a thinker. He stumbled upon the idea of atomism.Then there is Albert Einstein and modern physics. Both talk about the atomic structure but the difference is tremendous: Democritus only talks, modern physics knows.In the East also there has been talk about atomism. Kanad, one of the great thinkers of India, has talked about atomism – and in a very subtle, refined way – but it is all talk. In fact, because he talked so much about atoms – his whole philosophy is based on the hypothesis of atoms – that his name became Kanad. Kan means atom, Kanad means one who continuously talks about atoms. But still, it was philosophy. He had no real experimentation, it was not based on any scientific exploration – must have been a great thinker, almost three thousand years before Albert Einstein – but he stumbled, and I say stumbled, upon the truth of atomism. But it was an unproved hypothesis. There are many parallels like that.The same is the case with Carl Gustav Jung and the process we are talking about: the process given by The Secret of the Golden Flower.The book of The Secret of the Golden Flower is an alchemical treatise – it knows – and if you follow the method you will come to know. It is absolutely certain. And when I am saying this, I am saying because I know – because I have gone through the process. Yes, the golden flower blooms in you: you come to a point when the many disappear, the multitude disappears, the fragments of the mind disappear and you are left all alone. That is the meaning of the word alone: all alone, all one.If you think about it, the thinking is bound to take you to a certain line. If you think about it, then you will ask how to come to the one, how to make these fragments of the mind join together, how to glue them together. But that will not be real unity. Glued or unglued, they remain separate. A crowd can be transformed into an army: that means now it is glued together, it is no more a mob. But the many are still many, maybe in a certain discipline, as if there is a pile of flowers and you make a garland out of those flowers: a thread runs through all the flowers and gives them a certain kind of unity.That’s what Jung was trying to do. How to bring these fragments together, how to glue them together, that is his whole process of individuation.The real experience of individuation is totally different: you don’t glue these fragments, you simply let them disappear, you drop them. And then, when all the fragments of the mind have disappeared – receded farther and farther away from you – suddenly you find the one. In the absence of the mind it is found – not by joining the mind together in a certain discipline, not by putting mind together into a certain kind of union. Union is not unity. Union is only an imposed order on a chaos.This can be done, and then you will have a false kind of individuation. You will feel better than before, because now you will not be a crowd, a mob, many noises will not be there. They would have fallen in a certain kind of harmony, a certain adjustment would have arisen in you. Your conscious mind will be friendly with the unconscious, not antagonistic. Your unconscious will be friendly with the collective unconscious, not antagonistic. There will be a thread running through the flowers: you will be more like a garland than like a pile. But still, individuation in the sense I am talking about here has not happened.Individuation is not the unity of mind but the disappearance of the mind. When you are utterly empty of the mind, you are one. To be a no-mind is the process of real individuation.Jung was groping in the dark, coming very very close – just as Democritus was coming closer to the atomic structures of matter – but he was as far away from real individuation as Democritus was far away from real modern physics. Modern physics is not a speculation, it is a proved phenomenon.For the book of The Secret of the Golden Flower, individuation is not speculation – it is experience. Before one can know the one, the many have to be said goodbye to: one has to be capable of becoming utterly empty. Individuation is the flowering of inner emptiness – yes, exactly that: the golden flower blooms in you when you are utterly empty. It is a flower in the void; in the lake of the void the golden lotus blooms. So the process is totally different. What Jung is doing is trying to put all the pieces together – as if a mirror had fallen and now you are trying to put it together, gluing it together. You can glue it together, but you will never find the same mirror again. A broken mirror is a broken mirror.In the East the work has moved from a totally different dimension: we have to let this mind go, each part of the mind has to be dropped slowly slowly. In deep awareness, meditativeness, thoughts disappear, mind sooner or later becomes contentless. And when the mind is contentless, it is no-mind, because mind as such is nothing but the whole process of thought. When you are without thought, not even a single thought stirring in your being, then there is no-mind. You can call it individuation, you can call it samadhi, you can call it nirvana or what you will.But beware: people like Jung can be very alluring, because they talk in terms which are really beautiful. They talk about individuation and you may start thinking that the individuation of Jung is the same. It is not the same, it can’t be the same – he never meditated himself.He was really afraid of meditation. He was basically afraid of the East. And when his friend, Richard Wilhelm, who had translated the I Ching into German and who was also the translator of The Secret of the Golden Flower, went mad, he became even more afraid. Then he started saying that the methods of the East are not useful for the West, they are dangerous. Then he started saying that the Eastern methods should not be used in the West because the West has followed a totally different line of evolution. Yoga, Tantra, Tao, Zen, Sufism – no Eastern methods should be tried by the Western mind – then he started saying that. He was really afraid. And he was not aware of what he is talking about – he had never tried these methods.Wilhelm went mad, not because he tried these methods; he became mad because he was trying to make a synthesis of the Western psychology with the Eastern psychology. That thing can drive you mad. He was not practicing, he was not a practicing meditator. He was philosophizing.In philosophy, East and West cannot meet – it is impossible. In philosophy you cannot make death and life meet, in philosophy you cannot make positive and negative meet. But in actuality they meet: in actuality, the positive never exists without the negative, in actuality death is nothing but the culmination of life, in actuality silence and sound are two aspects of the same phenomenon. In reality, man and woman are together, one, but in philosophy you cannot make them meet, because philosophy is a process of the mind. Mind divides, mind cannot unite; only in a state of no-mind, in existential experience, they meet.It happened….A Sufi mystic, Baba Farid, was given a present from a king. The present was a beautiful pair of scissors, golden, studded with diamonds. The king had loved them very much – some other king had given them to him as a present.When he came to see Farid he thought, “This will be a beautiful present.” So he brought those scissors.Farid looked at them, gave them back to the king and said, “What will we do with them here? – because a scissors cuts, separates, divides. They will not be of any use to me. Rather than scissors, give me a needle, which joins, which puts things together. A needle will be more representative of me than a scissors.”Mind is a scissors: it goes on cutting. It is like a rat, a mouse, which goes on gnawing.You will be surprised to know that one of the mythological figures in India is Ganesh, the god with the head of an elephant. He is the god of logic. He rides on the back of a rat; the rat is his vehicle. Logic is rat-like: it gnaws. It is a scissors.Mind always makes things divided. Mind is a kind of prism: pass the white ray of light through it and immediately it is divided in seven colors; pass anything through the mind and it becomes dual. Life and death are not life-and-death. The reality is lifedeath. It should be one word, not two, not even a hyphen in between. Lifedeath is one phenomenon, lovehate is one phenomenon, darknesslight is one phenomenon, negativepositive is one phenomenon. But pass this one phenomenon through the mind and the one is divided immediately in two. Lifedeath becomes life and death – not only divided but death becomes antagonistic to life – they are enemies. Now you can go on trying to make these two meet, and they will never meet.Kipling is right – that “East is East and West is West and the twain shall never meet.” Logically it is true. How can the East meet the West? How can the West meet the East? But existentially it is utter nonsense; they are meeting everywhere. For example, you are sitting here in Pune: is it East or is it West? If you are comparing it with London it is East, but if you are comparing it with Tokyo it is West. What exactly is it, East or West? On each point East and West are meeting, and Kipling says, “The twain shall never meet.” The twain are meeting everywhere. No single point is such where East and West are not meeting and no single man is such where East and West are not meeting – it cannot be otherwise. They have to meet, it is one reality: East, West – one sky.But mind divides. And if you are trying to put things together through the same mind, you will go crazy. That’s what happened to Richard Wilhelm – a beautiful man, a genius in his own right, but just intellectual. And when he went mad, Jung was naturally afraid: it was Wilhelm who had introduced Jung to these secret books of the East, the I Ching and The Secret of the Golden Flower. He had persuaded Jung to write a commentary on this book. He became really afraid of the East. He talked about these things but he never tried in any way to practice them. And he has prescribed to the Western man that the West has to evolve its own yoga, its own methods of meditation, it should not follow the Eastern methods. It is as stupid as some Eastern chauvinist saying that the East should evolve its own science, its own physics, its own chemistry. It should not follow the West because these methods have been developed in the West. They cannot be followed because “East is East and West is West.”Do you think that the East has to evolve its own chemistry? What difference will there be? Has the East to evolve it’s own physics? What difference will there be? Will water evaporate in a different way in the East than it evaporates in the West? Nothing will be different. And if it is so with matter, it is so with the inner consciousness too.All the differences are superficial. All the differences are in your conditionings, not in your being. Your essential being is the same; whether you have the skin of a white man or a black man does not matter. The difference is only of a little bit of color. In the old days they used to say: the difference is only of a little pigment – four annas’ worth. The white man has a little less pigment than the black man. Remember, the black man is richer – four annas richer, but just four annas’ difference in the color in the body. Sooner or later we will be able to invent injections so that the white man can become black and the black can become white. Just an injection and in the morning you are a perfect negro! The difference is not much – it is only superficial, just on the surface. And so too is the difference in the mind.A Hindu has a different mind – certainly – than a Mohammedan or a Jew, but the mind is nothing but that which has been taught to you. When the child is born he is neither Jew nor Hindu nor Christian. He is simply pure essence. If the child is born out of Jewish parents and is brought up by Hindu parents, he will have a Hindu mind, not a Jewish mind; he will never become aware, that he was a Jew, his blood will not show it. Blood doesn’t show at all, who is who. You cannot go and be tested by the doctor, through your blood, to show whether you are a Hindu or a Mohammedan. Your bones will not show…. So the difference is only in that which is taught to you, imposed upon you. The difference is only of clothing, dresses, and nothing else; behind the dresses, the same naked humanness.So what nonsense is Jung talking about, that the West has to develop its own alchemy, its own Tantra, its own Tao? But he was afraid: this is his way of avoiding, to face his own fear.The West has not to evolve anything just because it is the West. Yes, every age has to evolve its own methods, but that is a different matter. It has nothing to do with East and West. I am evolving new methods because many things have changed. In these twenty-five centuries since Buddha much has changed. Buddha was working on a differently conditioned consciousness.Much has changed – man has become more mature: doubts more, is more skeptical – “yes” has become more difficult to say – would like to explore, but without any belief, cannot trust easily, distrust has become very deep-rooted, is no more innocent, knowledge has corrupted him. These changes have happened. According to these changes, a few changes have to be made in the devices. But it has nothing to do with East and West. And particularly in the modern age to talk of East and West is sheer crap.The globe is one. For the first time this beautiful phenomenon has happened in the world: we are global, we are universal. Nations are just hangovers, just hangovers from the past – old habits that die hard. And because old habits die hard, man is suffering unnecessarily.Now science and technology have made it possible that no human being should remain in a kind of semi-starvation. But the old boundaries of the nations are preventing this. If people are poor in the world it is not because now, methods are not available to help them, but because of the nations and the states and the political boundaries. Man is capable enough now to make this whole earth a paradise, but politicians won’t allow this. The one thing that the new generation has to do sooner or later – and the sooner the better – is to dissolve nations. We need one world, and that one world will be the answer for many questions and many problems.Poverty can disappear immediately – if the world is taken as a whole and if all that man has invented, discovered, is used. Otherwise poverty cannot disappear, it is going to persist. Illness can disappear from the world, man can become healthier and healthier. All the means are available, just the old rotten mind goes on clinging.My own suggestion is for a world government. No national government is needed anymore, all national governments are outdated. But politicians won’t allow it to happen. Why? – because if it happens then they all disappear. Where will Morarji-bhai Desai be? Where will all these so many prime ministers and presidents be? All these people will become insignificant. Then they cannot make much fuss and they cannot create much noise on the stage. They will be forgotten. They are really useless, they have to be put in the museums. They are no longer needed.The world needs one government. The world needs all nations to disappear, only then will wars disappear, otherwise stupid wars, just for small pieces of land which belong to nobody or belong to all. Wars can disappear only if nations disappear: they are by-products of nations. But politicians don’t like that, their whole importance will be gone. In fact, politicians like more and more nations.India was one nation but Indian politicians decided to have two, India and Pakistan, so there can be double prime ministers, presidents, ministers, and all kinds of buffoons. But then Pakistan was divided in two again because if Pakistan was one, then the Bengalis were suffering: they were not prime ministers and they were not presidents. They had to separate from Pakistan. Now India has become three countries, and if it goes on and on in this way, India will become many countries.Now, deep down, South India wants to separate from North India over the question of language. Now they say that they are a different race – Dravidians, and the North is a different race – Aryans. “Our blood is separate, our ideal is separate, our language is separate.” So the idea of separating from the North is getting more and more powerful because then they will have their own prime minister. Up to now all the prime ministers have been from the North.They make the president from the South just to console them, because the president in India is a nonentity. He is like the Queen of England: he is a nominal head of the country, without any power. Just to console the South, all the presidents are from the South. And the prime minister is the powerful man, the whole power is his; he is from the North. Now the South is suffering, the South politicians particularly, are suffering very much. Sooner or later the South would like to separate.The world goes on dividing into small parts. If all the politicians are allowed, then each village will be a nation because then each village will have its own politicians, its own parliament, president, prime minister, ministers – if it is allowed. But why is it not allowed? It is not allowed, again for a political reason: because if South India goes separate, then half of Morarji Desai’s power is gone. So those who are in power resist: they would not like the country to be divided. And those who are not in power, they try to divide the country. This goes on.The world simply needs to decide one day to drop all this nonsense and to become one. No passports should be needed, no visas should be needed. We need a world citizenship. We need freedom to move. Why so much distrust? Why so much antagonism, against each other? This earth is our planet, we should be able to move freely. This world is not yet a free world because of the hangovers of the past. They can be dropped. And with the dropping of them, the world can become as rich as you would like, as healthy as you would like, poverty can disappear.Poverty cannot disappear by Mahatma Gandhi’s traveling in a third-class compartment. These are just strategies, political strategies. How can poverty disappear by Mahatma Gandhi’s traveling in a third-class compartment? In fact, he is crowding the third-class compartment which is already crowded! If he had moved in an air-conditioned compartment, at least one person less would have been in the crowd. And these things don’t help. But poor people like these things.They think their poverty is something very special: “Look, even Mahatma Gandhi moves in a third-class compartment. Look at Mahatma Gandhi, he lives like a poor man.”So poverty has something spiritual in it. Poverty has been worshipped, that’s why the world remains poor. And wherever poverty is worshipped, those people are going to remain poor.In India poverty is worshipped – as if there is something spiritual in it. It is pathological. Nothing is spiritual in it. To be poor simply means: you are stupid, you cannot manage. To be poor means only: that you are too attached to old forms which are no longer useful in the world. To be poor simply means: you are not inventive, not creative. To be poor simply means that you are not intelligent. It is nothing spiritual; it simply shows lack of energy, lack of intelligence.Poverty should be condemned. Poverty should not be worshipped. We have to change the whole consciousness of man about these things, then they can disperse very easily. Technologically we are able to live in a very affluent world, but psychologically we are not capable of living in an affluent world.It happens that a person becomes rich but still goes on living the life of a poor man – and people appreciate it very much. They say, “Look, he has so many riches, so rich, and still: look at the simplicity of the man.” It is the sheer foolishness of the man! Why should he not live the riches that he has attained through great labor and effort? He is just a miser. He does not know how to live richly. He hides his impotence to live richly behind a beautiful facade: that he is “simple.” We have to change these ideals.Poverty is ugly, as ugly as illness. But it is going to remain there if nations remain, it is going to remain there if politicians remain. It is going to remain there if the world remains divided. Wars will continue. We can go on talking about peace but we will go on preparing for war, because peace is just talk. The hangover of the past is big. What is the hangover? Three thousand years of continuous quarreling and fighting and murdering and killing – that is our past.We have to disconnect ourselves from the past. The Western man has to disconnect himself from the Western past, the Eastern man has to disconnect himself from the Eastern past, the Hindu from the Hindu past and the Christian from the Christian past. And the methodology of disconnecting oneself from one’s past is going to be the same – it cannot be Eastern, it cannot be Western. The methodology to disconnect oneself from all past hangovers is going to be the same.But Jung was very much afraid. He was afraid to move into silence, he was afraid to move into his own inner being, because that inner being is first experienced as utter emptiness. But he will not say that he is afraid; he will say he has to devise Western methods.There are no Eastern methods, no Western methods; methods are methods. And when you are trying to go beyond mind, it is the same method: awareness. What will you do in the West, what can you do except be aware? To be aware, alert, to be in the moment, spontaneous and total, wherever you are, will help you to get rid of the whole past – political, social, religious. And once you are disconnected from the past, your mind disappears because your mind is nothing but the past hanging around you. Mind is memory, memory is past, and when there is no mind you are utterly here, brilliantly here and now. In that luminous state of being here and now is individuation, in the sense of the book of The Secret of the Golden Flower. But Jung was thinking in the right direction – only thinking.Habib himself is a Jungian analyst, hence the question. It may be very hard for him to understand what I am saying. He has asked another question too. He says, “Osho, when you mention Freud, Jung and Adler in one line, it hurts. It appears as if you are mentioning Buddha, Christ and Nixon together.”It will be hard for you, Habib. But the truth is: that Freud is a genius, Jung and Adler are just pygmies – just pygmies – they don’t reach to his height. Freud is a pioneer. He has contributed something of immense value to humanity. Freud is the source, the very tree. Jung and Adler are just branches. Freud can be there without Jung and Adler – he will not miss anything – but Jung and Adler cannot even exist without him. You cannot conceive of it. Can you conceive of Jung and Adler if there had been no Freud? It is impossible, even to conceive of it – they are his children. Even if they have disobeyed him, even if they have rebelled against him, it makes no difference: you can fight with your father, you can go against him, but still he is your father. You can fight with him, you can murder him, but still he is your father. You cannot kill the relationship. You can kill the father, but you cannot kill his fatherhood. That is absolutely determined. Now there is no way to undo it.Freud is the father, Jung and Adler are just rebellious children – small branches which are trying to go away, as far away from the father tree. But they cannot go very far because deep down they still get the shape from the same tree, deep down they are still joined. They are reactions against Freud. And the reason is not that they have been able to develop something very new – nothing of the sort. Jung is to Freud exactly what Judas is to Christ.It always happens: the closest disciple can betray the master very easily. Judas was the closest disciple of Jesus, the most intelligent, educated disciple – more intelligent, more educated than anybody else. In fact, he was more educated than Jesus himself – the most sophisticated one. And of course, he was hoping that he will be the second: after Jesus is gone, he will be the leader. He was next to Jesus, and naturally a deep jealousy and ego started arising in him, that why can’t he be the first? How long has he to wait? And he knows more and he is more articulate than Jesus; Jesus was uneducated. Naturally, he must have started thinking in these terms, and the conflict arose. He must have been very egoistic.And this is not that it has happened only once, it has happened many times. With Mahavira it happened: his own son-in-law betrayed him – was his disciple and then left with five hundred other disciples. Buddha’s own cousin-brother, Devadatta, betrayed him – tried to murder Buddha, poison him. Why? – because Devadatta was always thinking that he is as good as Buddha, “So why is Buddha respected so much, and why not me? We have grown up together, we have been educated by the same teachers, we are both from the same family, the same royal family – why has he become the enlightened one and I am still a disciple?” He wanted to declare himself also an enlightened one. It was ambition, it was jealousy, it was ego. And the same was the case with Jung and Adler and a few others.Freud is a revolution, Freud is a milestone in the history of human consciousness, a great transforming force – not himself enlightened like Buddha or Mahavira or Jesus, but a great revolutionary as far as thinking is concerned and he has opened a door which makes many things possible. Without Freud it would not have been possible for Tantra to be understood by the West. Without Freud the Western man would have lived with Victorian puritanism, with Victorian pseudoness, hypocrisy. Freud opened the doors: to be more real, to be more authentic, to be more honest and true. Jung and Adler are just offshoots.Jung was second to Freud. Freud himself had chosen him as his successor – that’s why I say he was almost like a Judas. But Freud missed, in the very choice he missed. He himself was not enlightened. He must have chosen the most egoistic because the most egoistic is the most active. Jung was the most egoistic. You can look at the old pictures of him with Freud and with the other disciples: Jung seems to be the most egoistic – even in pictures he cannot hide it – it is impossible to hide. It is written all over his face.Freud must have chosen him because he was articulate, talented, active – tremendously active – was capable to philosophize, speculate, argue. But all those qualities were such that sooner or later Jung became aware that he can become a master in his own right, he can start a new school of psychology in his own right – why should he bother to play second fiddle? He can be the one, the first, the foremost. He started his own school.His school is just a reaction – reaction to Freud – and his understanding never went very deep. Although he was groping in the right direction, but, I repeat: it was groping, he was not conscious of it. He was just moving as far away from Freud as possible.Freud had a very scientific attitude, Jung started moving into the world of art – just to be away from Freud. By accident he started moving in the right direction. Freud was very mathematical, Jung started becoming poetic. Freud was very factual, Jung started becoming more and more mythological. This was because of reaction: he has to prove himself separate, utterly separate from Freud, he had to drop all kind of links with Freud, he had to become his polar opposite – unknowingly, unconsciously. But in a way, it was good. It was good in the sense that he stumbled upon a few facts which Freud would never have stumbled upon on his own – because he was down-to-earth, practical, pragmatic, scientific, a realist, and there are many things which cannot be contained by facts.There are millions of things which cannot be reduced to facts. And the higher you go, the deeper you go, the more difficult it becomes to talk the language of science or to use the language of science. One has to have more poetic freedom; one needs poetry, one needs fiction to express. Mythology becomes the only means to express certain heights and depths.But Habib must be feeling hurt. He has been a Jungian analyst and now he has fallen into my hands. And I am going to beat him as hard as possible…because I have to create something totally new out of him: not an analyst but an individual. I have to give him individuation and for that he will have to suffer much too, he will have to pass through many fires. This also is a fire. And once I see your attachments I start attacking them. His attachment is with Jung. Now, because of your attachment, Habib, even Jung has to suffer.The second question:Osho,Why do you use parables?A parable is a way of saying things which cannot be said. A parable is a finger pointing to the moon: forget the finger and look at the moon. Don’t catch hold of the finger, don’t start biting the finger. The parable has to be understood and forgotten.And that is the beauty of a parable, a story: when it is told, you listen attentively because a story always creates curiosity – what is going to happen? You become attentive, you become all ears, you become feminine. You become very intrigued, you start expecting – what is going to happen? The parable creates a suspense. It brings a climax and then suddenly, the conclusion. And when after the climax the conclusion happens, you are so hot that the conclusion sinks deep into your heart.To say something about truth is not an easy matter. One has to devise parables, poetries, different methods and means so that the listener can be aroused into a kind of passion, can become vibrant, available, can wait for what is going to happen.And it is not that only I am using parables; that has been always so. Buddha used them, Chuang Tzu used them, Jesus used them – all the great teachers of the world have been using the parable as a methodology. And it has served its purpose down the ages, and it is still tremendously meaningful – and it is going to remain meaningful.A parable is not just a story; it is not to entertain you but to enlighten you. That is the difference between an ordinary story and a parable: a parable has a message in it, a coded message in it; you will have to decode it. Sometimes it will take you your whole life to decode the message, but in its very decoding you would be transformed.A parable is not an ordinary story, just to entertain you for the moment; its significance is eternal, its significance is not momentary. In fact it is more significant than your so-called facts, because facts have a limited impact. A fact is an event: it happens and then it disappears. And after it has disappeared, there is no way to be certain about it – no way at all.You cannot be certain whether Jesus existed or not, whether Jesus is a historical person or not – you cannot be absolutely certain. At most you can feel the probability, that he may have been. But the doubt persists: he may not have been – who knows? Because except for his four disciples, nobody mentions him, nobody at all.Now these four disciples may have been just inventions of a novelist – the whole story is so dramatic. It has all that a dramatic story needs, all that a modern film is based on: a prostitute falling in love with Jesus, a carpenter’s son declaring himself the son of God, a young man doing miracles – opening eyes of the blind people, giving limbs to those who had none, helping people to be healthy and whole, who had suffered their whole life – not only that, but calling forth Lazarus out of his grave. What more suspense, what more do you need to make a story dramatic? And then being caught, then all the political intrigue, then the efforts to kill him, and then one day he is crucified. And the story does not end there: then after three days he is resurrected. Now no detective novel has so much in it.Resurrection…. Then he is seen again by the disciples. He again meets his disciples and they cannot even recognize him. And then this son of a carpenter – uneducated, unsophisticated – becomes the founder of the greatest religion in the world, also becomes the founder of the greatest religious empire in the world, defeats all other prophets and all other messengers of God. Now what credentials did he have? Buddha is the son of a king, but this carpenter’s son has defeated Buddha as far as the number of followers is concerned. Socrates has not a single follower in the world today and he was such a sophisticated man – so intelligent, so utterly intelligent – and he has the same story. He was poisoned and killed, yet he could not gather any followers. What happened? How did it happen? And was this man Jesus really there, a historical figure? – because no history books carry his name, no monuments are there. He may have been just a fiction, a fictitious story.Historical events cannot be proved once they have happened – cannot be proved totally, absolutely. At the most they remain more or less probable. But a parable has eternal reality about it. It does not claim any historicity, it simply claims a message. It has nothing to do with events that happen in time. A parable is something that happens in timelessness, it remains relevant.Whether Jesus existed or not is not the point, but the stories that he has told are, whether he told them or they are some fictitious invention of some novel writer, it doesn’t matter. But those parables have eternal messages in them, something so eternal that time cannot make them irrelevant, no passage of time can make them irrelevant.The truth of a parable is timeless. The truth of history is the truth about particular events in the present or the past. Once past, there is no way to prove, beyond all doubt, that they actually happened; all that can be established is only a probability. The only truth which we can trust is the truth which is in the present tense. Only the truth of a parable, because it is beyond all time, can speak to us forever in the present tense. A parable remains always in the present tense; it is never past.A parable is always present; if you are ready to understand it, it is ready to deliver all its treasure to you. And it does not depend on arbitrary conditions of history.Parable and history may coincide: a story which is historically true may also present us with the truth of parable. The Jesus or the Buddha story may be historically accurate, but even if it is, it is by the truth of the parable not by the truth of history that we are healed.It does not matter whether Jesus existed or not, whether Buddha was ever born on the earth or not, that doesn’t matter. Just the parable, the possibility, that a buddha is possible is enough to stir our hearts in a new longing, is enough to make us feel thirsty for the divine. It is enough – the very possibility of the parable is enough – to make us look upwards towards heaven, to send us into an exploration; not to be contented with the limitations that we have created around ourselves. It provokes us into adventure.A man is drowning, a rope comes spinning down. He clutches it and he is saved. Who wove the rope? This parable…. Some say Buddha, some say Jesus, some say Mohammed, but to the drowning man the important question is: “Will it bear my weight or not?” Who wove the rope is a question about history: you may get it all wrong and still be saved.That is the beauty of a parable: Buddha may not have ever existed, but if you understand the parable you will be saved.What is a parable? For example:Buddha is going to participate in a youth festival in his beautiful golden chariot. Suddenly he sees an old man for the first time in his life, because this is the parable: that when Buddha was born, great astrologers came to his father to depict the future, to predict the potential of the child.All the astrologers said, “Either he will become a world ruler, a chakra-vartin who will rule all the six continents, or he will become a sannyasin who will renounce the whole world. These are the two possibilities.”All the astrologers except one raised two fingers to the king and said, “One possibility: he will become the greatest ruler in the world, never known before, never heard of before – such will be his power. And the second possibility: that he may renounce the whole thing completely and move into a forest, become a sannyasin and meditate, and attain to buddhahood.”Out of all the astrologers there was one astrologer, the youngest, who raised only one finger. The king said, “All have raised two fingers, and you are raising one?”He said, “Because he is going to become a buddha. There is no other possibility.”But he was the youngest astrologer and the king was not puzzled by him and not worried – how much can he know? And the old people, all were saying, “Two are the possibilities.”So he asked the old people, “What should I do so he never renounces the kingdom?”And they suggested, “Make beautiful palaces for him, separate palaces for separate seasons. In India there are four seasons, so four palaces, with beautiful gardens, acres and acres of flowers. Make it almost like a paradise.“And make it a point that no old man ever enters into his gardens, no ill person ever comes across him, he never sees a sannyasin, the ochre-robed, he never comes across the phenomenon of death – these four things are prohibited. Even if leaves are falling they should be removed before he sees the old dying leaf. Flowers should be removed from his garden before he becomes aware that flowers fade and die.“And he should be surrounded by beautiful, the most beautiful women of the kingdom. And he should be kept continuously entertained. Remember, then only can he be saved from the desire of enlightenment: keep him continuously entertained, exhausted, tired. By the morning, he gets up and he should see beautiful women dancing around him to the very last moment when he falls asleep. He should fall asleep with the tunes of music and dance.”And this is how it was managed.Now whether it is history or not is not the point; this is how we are all managing in some way or other – this is a parable: this is how all parents are afraid – maybe not so much as Buddha’s father because that is the extreme point. To make the parable absolutely clear it has to be stretched to its logical end, that’s all. But all fathers, all mothers are afraid: you should not become a drop-out, you should not renounce.Now one woman from America has written to Morarji Desai that her daughter is caught by an Indian master, hypnotized – “Save my daughter! Send her back to me.” The papers have not said who this man is who has hypnotized her. More is the possibility it must be me and the daughter must be here. Where else?Now parents are making associations, societies, forming groups – protecting their children from getting into any Eastern trip. They are more afraid of meditation than drugs. In America now there exists an organization of the parents to kidnap their children if they become meditators. And then those children have to be given to deprogrammers, to psychoanalysts, to deprogram them – a kind of mindwash.This is illegal. And one psychoanalyst has been sent to jail in California for deprogramming, because he was too enthusiastic. First parents were giving him the authority to kidnap their children, then he started on his own. Not even a parent has that authority. Once the child is of age no parent has the authority to kidnap the child. But maybe they can manage: they have lobbies in the parliament, they can manage because the judge is also a parent, a father, and the police and the lawyers and all are parents. They can manage, they can enforce it.But the psychoanalyst, on his own, became a missionary; started kid-napping, had an organization of kidnappers and started mindwashing programs. He called them “de-programming” – so that a person becomes anti-meditation, anti-East, and falls back into the old fold. If he is a Catholic, becomes a Catholic, goes to the church; if he is a Protestant, becomes a Protestant, reads the Bible. These people are afraid – not only now, they have always been afraid. Buddha’s story is just a logical extreme. Parents are afraid their children may renounce the world, that is the eternal truth in it.But the parable goes on:Whenever Buddha will move into the capital town, roads were cleaned, all old people were removed, sannyasins were barred. When his chariot will pass, he will never come across anything ugly, ill, old, dead. But that day something happened.The parable says that the gods in heaven became very worried. They became worried that “Is Buddha going to remain in this stupid kind of continuous entertainment? Will he never become enlightened?”Roads were cleaned, traffic was managed and controlled, but those gods managed: one god appeared as an old man, another god appeared as a sannyasin, another as a very ill, coughing, almost-dying person, another as a dead man being carried by other people to the cemetery.The parable is beautiful – gods became worried. It has a significant message. This existence wants you to become enlightened – that is the meaning of it – existence becomes worried, existence cares, existence wants you to become free of all bondage, free of all darkness. Existence wants to help you.And when it sees that you are going and going and going and wasting your life, it creates situations in which you can be provoked. That is the meaning of the parable.There are no gods in heaven and no gods will come and walk like old men, but the parable is a way of saying certain hidden truths. The hidden truth is: that the existence cares for you, that you have been sent into this existence to learn something – don’t get lost.Now this is an eternal message. It doesn’t matter whether Buddha was born or not, whether he is an historical person or not, all that matters is that existence cares for you. If it cared for Buddha, it cares for you too, it will create occasions for you. And if you are a little bit alert you will be able to catch hold of those occasions, and those occasions will prove a transforming situation, an awakening.Buddha saw the old man and asked his charioteer, “What has happened to this man?”Naturally, because he had never seen an old man. You would not have asked because you see it every day. It was so strange: he was married, he had a son, and he had never seen an old man. Suddenly he was shocked at seeing the old man. And the charioteer was going to lie because he knew Buddha’s father.But, the story says, one god entered into the charioteer’s body and told the truth. He said, “Everybody has to become old.”And Buddha asked, “Am I also going to become old? And my beloved, my wife, Yashodhara too? And my little child, Rahul, who was just born a few days before, he too?”And the god, through the charioteer, said – forced the charioteer to say, “Yes, everybody is going to become old.”And then the dead man was seen. “And what has happened to him?” Buddha asked.And the god, through the charioteer said, “Everybody has to come to this state – illness, old age, then death.”“Am I also going to die? And what about my beautiful woman, Yashodhara, and my child, Rahul, who was born just a few days before?”And the god said, “All are going to die without any exception.”And then Buddha saw the ochre-robed sannyasin. And he has said, “Why is he wearing ochre, orange?”And the god said, “This man has also seen illness, old age, death happening; now he is trying to find the source of immortality. He has become aware that this life is contaminated with death. He has seen the fact that this body is going to disappear – sooner or later, dust unto dust. So he is trying to seek and search something which is undying. He has become a meditator. He has renounced entertainment. He is in search of enlightenment.”And Buddha said, “Then wait. There is no need to go to the youth festival anymore, because if youth is just a momentary phenomenon, I am already old. And if life is going to disappear into dust, I have died.”See the insight of the parable:Buddha says, “If it is going to happen, what does it matter whether it is going to happen tomorrow or after seven years or seventy years? If it is going to happen, it has already happened. Turn back! I am no longer interested in any festival. All festivals are finished for me. I have to seek what you call enlightenment. Before this body disappears, I have to use this body as a stepping-stone towards something that is undying. I have to search for nectar.”And he turned back. The same night he left his palace and escaped into the deep forest to meditate.Now this is a parable. Whether it happened or not, I am not concerned at all. How does it matter whether it coincides with history or not? That’s why many times people who are too obsessed with history become angry with me – because I have no commitment to history at all. I take all poetic freedom.My commitment is to parables, not to history. If I see that the parable can become more beautiful, then I play with the parable; I don’t bother whether it is written so or not. Who cares? My whole commitment is to the poetry and the parable and the hidden message in it. And whether it happened or not, it can save you still.“Who made the rope – Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed?” What is the point when you are drowning in a well? The whole point is: whether this rope is going to bear your weight or not.Try it – and you may get it all wrong and still be saved. The rope may have been made by Buddha and you may think it has been made by Jesus – it doesn’t matter, you can still be saved. The Bible may have been written by a ghostwriter – it doesn’t matter, it has the message – and whosoever the writer was, he must have been enlightened otherwise he could not have written such a beautiful parable. He was Jesus. Whosoever has created the story of Buddha, he was Buddha. Whether the story existed or not doesn’t matter. Hence I use so many parables.“The parable embodies the hope, the danger and the possibility held out by Lao Tzu or Zarathustra. If all the Bibles were destroyed, if the name of Jesus were forgotten, it would not matter anymore so long as the fire kindled the hope, the beauty – the possibility still went on burning.” If it is proved, absolutely proved, that Buddha never happened, Jesus was never born, Mohammed never walked on the earth, Mahavira is a myth, Lao Tzu is an invention of some fictitious writers – if the hope continues and if man continues to hope to surpass himself, if the fire continues to burn, if the longing remains to seek and search the truth, that’s enough: you can forget all about the Bibles and the Korans. If the longing continues, the Koran is going to be born in you. If the longing is intense enough, you will see one day, Buddha arising out of you, you will see Jesus being born in you.The last question:Osho,You say that one has to pay for everything in life. Is not there any exception?Listen to this anecdote….An American in Paris asked a cabby to give him the address of a good brothel. He went there alone, selected his partner and ordered dinner. Later that evening, after satisfying his every whim, the thoroughly-drained gentleman went downstairs and asked the Madame for his bill.“There is no charge, Monsieur,” said the lady of the house. Astonished, but not disposed to argue the matter, the gentleman departed. The next night he returned to the brothel and repeated his performance of the previous night. Upon leaving this time however, he was shocked to learn that his bill was eight hundred francs.“Impossible!” the American shrieked. “I was here last evening and I got everything and you didn’t charge me a sou.”“Ah,” said the Madame, “but last night you were on television.”Yes, sometimes you may get something free, but be aware: you may be on television.In fact there is nothing in life that you can get without paying for it – and you only get as much as you are ready to pay for. When you are ready to pay with your life, you get eternal life in return. Nothing is free, nothing can be free.Enough for today.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 01 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there any definition of the ultimate experience other than satyam shivam sundaram: truth, godliness, beauty?The experience of the ultimate is always the same, but the expression can be different. The expression depends on the mystic; the experience does not depend on him.The first definition I gave you is the definition by the poetic, aesthetic, sensitive individual for whom satya – truth – can come only as beauty; truth and beauty create the ultimate peak of godliness. The poet cannot imagine that beauty will not be a part of the ultimate unity. His eyes are receptive to beauty. In his expression, truth comes to him and is transformed as beauty. Beauty is the god of the poet, of the painter, of all creative artists.So the first definition was the definition from the artistic soul. Most of the mystics have been poets – not ordinary poets, concerned with the mundane, but poets of the sacred. This sensitivity of the poet is essential to arrive at the definition of the ultimate experience as truth, godliness, and beauty.But there are also other mystics, who are not poetic because to be a poet takes a certain talent. Everybody can be a mystic – the mystic is our very being, the unfolding of the mystic rose within us – but not everybody can be a poet. Poetry is a talent, though it comes very close to mysticism. So either the poet becomes the mystic – then comes the definition satyam shivam sundaram – or the mystic suddenly finds himself filled with tremendous beauty and out of his spontaneity starts singing and dancing. He may not be linguistically right, but that is not his concern.Meera, Kabir, Farid were not poets from the very beginning. They became poets when the experience happened. As they opened their hearts to the universe, perhaps a talent that was dormant in them suddenly became active; everything opened. An immense poetry started flowing through them, a poetry no poet can write, because the poems are not compositions but their heartbeats, their very life.There are other people who have attained the ultimate, for example, Gautam Buddha or Socrates or Pythagoras or Lao Tzu. They were not poets. They didn’t have the talent of being a poet, either at the beginning or at the end of their experience. Their definition is bound to be different. The experience, remember, is always the same, but the expression will depend on the individual.The second most important definition, which is in the same category as satyam shivam sundaram, is sat-chit-anand. Sat means truth; chit means consciousness; anand means bliss. Certainly, in any definition, truth is going to be the essential part that cannot be dropped. It is the experience of ultimate truth. In the second definition – just as in the first definition – sat remains the most prominent. But two new things have come in: consciousness and blissfulness.Although the first definition is beautiful – tremendously beautiful – it will not be many people’s experience because the talent to be a poet is rare. The second definition is going to be the experience of many more.Meditation brings you to the final peak of consciousness – that is chit, exactly in the middle. On one side is truth; on the other side is bliss. As meditation flowers, you will find that on the one hand truth has revealed to you all its mysteries and on the other that blissfulness is showering all its treasures on you. It is as significant a definition as the first, but you can see the difference: there is no place for sundaram, beauty. The person has no sensitivity toward beauty, but the person is absolutely alert and conscious of great blissfulness overflowing in him and a feeling, an indubitable feeling, that he has arrived home. That is his truth.In Sanskrit, unlike other languages, words can be joined together. Sanskrit has an approach, and perhaps this approach has come from the enlightened ones. So many people have become enlightened in this country and they have left their impact on Sanskrit, on the language. They will not say sat-chit-anand the way I have explained it to you. I have cut one word into three, just to explain it to you, because in English there cannot be one word for all three. You cannot join truth, consciousness, blissfulness into a single word. The Sanskrit word is sachchidanand. All three words are joined together. Sat is there, chit is there, anand is there, but they are not separate and there is no gap: sachchidanand.It is significant to remember that the experience is one orgasmic, organic, unitary experience. It does not come in parts as sat, as chit, as anand. It comes into existence in totality, and that totality is sachchidanand. To denote, to emphasize, the unity – neither sat can exist without chit, nor can chit exist without anand – they have used a joined word: sachchidanand. It is not only a question of language. Deep down it is an experience that they all come together. In fact there is no way to create demarcations: this is truth, this is consciousness, this is bliss. Suddenly they are all within you. In other words, truth is consciousness and bliss; or vice versa, bliss is consciousness and truth.The division I made was just to make you understand. Now I want you to be aware that in the experience itself there is no division. It has the fragrance of blissfulness, it has the light of consciousness, it has the revelation of truth – all simultaneously and together. They are not steps to each other. It is not possible to drop one of them and experience the other two; they are an intrinsic unity, an organic unity.This is also a very beautiful definition, and is applicable to more mystics than the first definition. Gautam Buddha would never have defined the ultimate experience in terms of beauty. Beauty somehow carries a sense of our ordinary life. You may say it is a much higher beauty but still something of the ordinary remains. The moment you say “beauty,” you come down to the body, you come down to the flowers, you come down to the sunset. The beauty the mystics are talking about is not the beauty of these small experiences but the beauty of the whole – a beauty of which we have no idea, of which we have not even dreamed.The second definition I am giving to you today is absolutely a unity. Nothing of it connects with our unconsciousness and its world – neither truth, nor consciousness, nor bliss. In a way, it is purer; in a way, it simply makes it clear that you have gone beyond the mundane and entered the sacred. The whole vision has changed, not even a trace of the mundane is left. It can be said to be a more authentic definition than the first, and more mystics have defined their experience with the second definition.Naturally, most probably, if you ever experience the ultimate, you will come to the second definition. Very few of you may experience beauty as that is a minority definition. But I respect minorities, so I took it first.This is the majority definition: more logical, more perfect, but less sensitive, less human. The first was more human – at least there was a connecting link between our ordinary world and the extraordinary experience. In this definition, all bridges are broken. You are no longer part of the ordinary. You have simply transported your consciousness to the extraordinary which is not visible to the eyes, which is not tangible: you cannot hear it, you cannot see it, you cannot taste it.But in the first definition, the word sundaram, beauty, gives a sense that your eyes are capable of seeing it; perhaps your hands can feel it, perhaps your ears can hear the beautiful music in it. The word beauty functions almost as a bridge. In the second definition there is no bridge but a quantum leap. You simply jump from mind to no-mind. Only no-mind can be aware of truth; only no-mind can be filled with consciousness; only no-mind can be showered with thousands of flowers of bliss. Nothing relates to your ordinary world, so in this way it is purer.Both have their pros and cons, and I want you to be aware of them. But remember: don’t choose the definition. First choose the experience, then the definition will come on its own accord. If you choose the definition first, it may not fit your individuality and the definition itself may become a hindrance.Go deeper into meditation. Experience is the thing that matters. Then how you express it is dependent on you. Most probably you will define it as sat-chit-anand: truth, consciousness, bliss. It is more universal; very few people are poets.I am reminded of Rabindranath Tagore. He absolutely insisted that there is only one definition of the ultimate experience, and that is satyam shivam sundaram. He could not conceive of the ultimate experience not having beauty in it. He could drop anything but beauty. His poetic soul was even ready to say that you can drop truth, you can drop godliness, but please save beauty.It happened that Mahatma Gandhi wanted the temples of Khajuraho… These are some of the most beautiful creations of man; there is nothing comparable on the whole earth. The temples of Puri and Konark, which are similar, have not achieved the perfection of Khajuraho. There must have been at least one hundred temples, very big temples, and you cannot find even a single inch which has not been carved, which has not been made beautiful. Naked men and women in different postures of love…Naturally Gandhi was very much annoyed, and at first he wanted to demolish those temples. Seventy temples had already been demolished by the Mohammedans because Mohammedans have a fanatical attitude that God cannot be represented in a statue, a picture, or anything. This is perfectly okay if it is your idea, but to interfere with somebody else’s idea is idiotic. Somebody wants to represent his god in a statue – who are you to interfere? But every religion thinks it is responsible for the whole of humanity and wants to impose its idea on every human being. So when the Mohammedans came they could not believe it; they destroyed seventy temples of tremendous value.But thirty of the temples were hidden in a thick forest, so they were saved. Gandhi wanted to do the same as those Mohammedans had done. He wanted to demolish them, but for a different reason. He was afraid that the temples would show the whole world that the Indians are not very moral people, that they are not puritans.What kind of temples are these, in which each temple has thousands of couples carved in stone? Full-sized men and women, so beautiful that once you have seen a Khajuraho temple woman, a statue, no woman will look beautiful to you. Every woman will seem just a faded memory of something real. Those stones are so real…I used to go to Khajuraho. It was very close to my university, just a hundred miles away, so whenever I had time I would drive there. The guide, who finally became a sannyasin, was himself ashamed to show them to people, but I told him, “You don’t understand. You need not be ashamed. These pictures, these statues, these sculptures are not obscene. There is not a single hint of obscenity, even though they are absolutely naked, in loving embraces, making love. There is not a hint of obscenity, unless your mind is full of obscenity.”A European prime minister was going to visit Khajuraho. One of my friends was the education minister of the state in which Khajuraho lies. The prime minister of India told the education minister, “I am busy and cannot come; otherwise I would have come with the guest to show him Khajuraho. So it is your responsibility to take him there because you are the most educated minister in your state.”My friend phoned me and said, “I am very much ashamed of Khajuraho; it is such an embarrassing place. And when outsiders who have only seen churches in the name of religion come, they cannot believe that this is a temple, a holy place. And I myself feel guilty, so I cannot explain, and I don’t know what to explain.”I said, “I will come.” I went there with the guest and the education minister who was shrinking inside. You cannot conceive of any possible loving posture that is not carved there, in such beauty, such tremendous beauty, that it is almost as if the stones have come alive. It seems as though the woman is going to come out of the wall on which the statue is carved. So alive…The education minister remained outside and I took the guest in. He was amazed at the beauty, that bodies can be made so beautifully in stone, can give such life to the stone, such warmth. He had not known that such a thing exists anywhere in the world. I explained to him, “These are on the outer side of the temple, but you should be aware that inside the temple there are no sculptures, no statues; there’s just absolute silence.”He said, “This is a revelation, this is strange. Statues should be inside the temple. Why are they outside, and inside there is nothing, just silence?”I said to him, “These temples were made some three thousand years ago by the greatest psychologists that have appeared on the earth.”They were called Tantrikas; their whole approach was called Tantra. The very word tantra means expanding consciousness. They made these beautiful temples all around the country. Mohammedans destroyed them; it was just fortunate that these were in a thick forest, hidden. Only meditators used to go there; there is no village surrounding the temples. By a fortunate coincidence they were saved.I told him, “The secret is, Tantra believes that unless you have gone through all sexual experiences to the point where sex does not matter to you at all… That is a transcendence of your energy. At that point, you are capable of entering the inner sanctum of the temple. You are ready for the nothingness of Gautam Buddha; you are ready for pure silence.”Meditators used to meditate for months on those statues. It is a great strategy, because looking at all those statues, a moment comes when something in your unconscious disappears. Not just looking – at one time it was months, sometimes years, of training. But they were not allowed inside the temple until they became uninterested in these sexual scriptures. When their master saw that somebody had become completely uninterested – even when sitting in front of the most beautiful woman he was sitting with closed eyes – then he was allowed to enter the temple.Now, those sexual thoughts are the major thoughts in your mind. Every three minutes the ordinary man thinks about sex at least once, and every five minutes every woman thinks at least once about sex. These are the very subtle mistakes which God made when he created the world; that’s why I say there is no God, to relieve him of all this responsibility. This is a disparity which is dangerous!When we came out, the prime minister was very much impressed. The education minister was waiting outside. Although he had not been inside, he was still feeling embarrassed. Just to hide his embarrassment, he told the guest, “Don’t take much note of it. It was a small current of thinkers who created these temples, and we are ashamed – they are so obscene.”The guest said, “Obscene? Then I will have to go back and take another look; I did not find anything obscene.”Those naked statues look so innocent, so childlike; they are not there to provoke your sexuality. Obscenity is a very subtle phenomenon, it’s very difficult to make the distinction whether something is obscene or not. But this should be the criterion – I think this is the only criterion: obscenity is when it provokes sexuality in you and if it does not provoke sexuality but just a sense of tremendous splendor and beauty, it is not obscene. However, it will depend on individuals. The same statue may look to someone obscene, and to someone else a beautiful piece of art.I told the education minister, “Your mind is full of obscenity. This guest from the outside is far clearer. He did not raise a single question about the obscenity of the temple.”Mahatma Gandhi’s mind was full of sex his whole life. When India became free, he thought that now was his chance: either dismantle the temples, destroy them, or at least do what he had been insisting on from the 1930’s: if you don’t want them destroyed, cover them with huge hills of mud – the temples are very high. Then they would remain there, and if, once in a while, you want to show them to some special guest from the outside, you can remove the mud, clean the place, and then put the mud back again.It was Rabindranath Tagore who opposed Mahatma Gandhi’s proposal, saying, “It is sheer stupidity. I have seen those temples; they have inspired me to great heights. Under their inspiration I have written such beautiful poems. And they are the greatest heritage of one of the most significant schools of psychologists, who penetrated into human psychology and life energy so deeply that they found a way, a device, to transform it and make men free of sexuality.” Because Rabindranath resisted, Gandhi could not cover them with mud.It was Rabindranath who insisted that the only definition that is exactly right is “truth, godliness, beauty.” If something has to be dropped from the definition, you can drop truth, you can drop godliness, but you cannot drop beauty.Beauty is the sky for the poet, for the painter, for the musician – how is it possible for the ultimate truth to be ugly? It has to be the most beautiful experience. But the definition will be applicable to only very few people. The second definition will apply to a vast majority of people.There is one more difference that has to be remembered: the first definition is outgoing. Truth is at the center of being, then godliness surrounds it, and then there’s another circle of beauty. But that beauty is not beyond the beauty of the trees and the flowers and human faces; everything that is beautiful in the world is a link to the ultimate.Rabindranath was the first man in history who said beauty is truth. Nobody has ever said that. There have been people who said truth is beauty, but nobody who has dared to say that beauty is truth, putting beauty on the highest peak. That will be possible only for those who can feel the sensitivity of the beautiful. It is not for everyone. The second definition is not so outgoing – it does not go out at all. Truth, consciousness, bliss – all are inside you. None of these three experiences takes you out.In psychological terminology, the first definition can be said to be of the outgoing consciousness, expanding consciousness – just as when you throw a pebble into a silent lake, and ripples start moving toward the farther shore. The first definition is expanding, outgoing. Psychologists have a special word for it – they call it extrovert. And certainly the poet is an extrovert because he sees the beauty of the trees and the beauty of the stars and the beauty of the birds singing. He is an extrovert. The second definition is introvert. It concentrates on your very being. It is enough, there is no need to go out: truth, consciousness, blissfulness.In still other words, it can be said that the first definition is that of the bodhisattvas and the second definition is of the arhats. I have explained to you these two kinds of enlightened people. The arhats simply become pillars of silence, joy, truth, but they never share it. They never bother to initiate anyone, they never guide anyone. The bodhisattvas, the moment they have attained, start spreading like ripples all around to the farther shores of humanity. They want to reach everyone.Your individuality already contains an inbuilt program for whether you will turn into a bodhisattva or into an arhat. Nothing can be done about it; you cannot change it, you cannot decide it. You will have to pass beyond the mind, and only then will you realize who you are: a bodhisattva or an arhat.Sat-chit-anand is absolutely inner, introvert – your interior subjectivity. It has nothing to do with anyone else. It is another thing if somebody gets attracted to you, it is another thing if many are magnetically pulled toward you, but the arhat himself does not make a single move to transform anybody or to give him a hand to pull him out of his ditch. If somebody is interested, he can come, but the arhat does not take on the responsibility of being somebody’s master. If you insist, he will say something to you, but as telegraphically as possible.The bodhisattva functions totally differently: sharing is his joy and he wants this world to become more beautiful. He wants to contribute to the world in some way, so that when he leaves the world, he leaves it a little more beautiful than the world he had come into seventy or eighty years before. The arhat is simply not concerned with anyone. He is just a pillar of consciousness. If somebody can learn something from his lifestyle, that’s another thing. He is not a master; he is only a mystic.This second definition has to sink deep in you because, finally, most of you will find this definition. Remember this beautiful word: sachchidanand.Osho,Is it true that you make things happen to us according to our needs in this very moment, or does your aura cause us to choose the happenings ourselves?My mother is suffering from cancer and multiple sclerosis, and has been feeling strong healing energy in the last weeks. She thought you had been sending it. How do you manage to arrange all these learning situations and send all the necessary energy to your sannyasins all over the world?There are a few things I would like put on record. First, I never do anything. Second, if you want, all my energies are available to you, but that is your doing. Third, it is possible if you are in deep trust and love with me to unconsciously become a transmitter to your mother of a healing energy.But please don’t make me responsible for anything. This responsibility is very dangerous – it is walking on a razor’s edge. Today you find your mother is healing, and you praise me and love me and trust me. But no mother can live forever. The day she dies, your whole love, your trust in me, will simply disappear because I allowed your mother to die, because I did not give her the healing energy. That’s why, from the very beginning, I want my hands to be completely clean.I don’t accept praise because I know that behind every praise there is the possibility of condemnation. All over the world I am already so condemned, at least leave a few people who don’t condemn me! But you may not be aware that this is how things go wrong. People start expecting, and if by some coincidence their expectations are fulfilled, they are immensely grateful. But it is only a coincidence. If they are not fulfilled, then I am “the god who failed.” They make me a god, only to declare later that I am the god who failed. I am simply enjoying my energy. It is overflowing and enough for anybody who wants to share it. But the whole doing is theirs.So remember: it is your trust, it is your love, it is your devotion that may become a transmitting medium to your mother. Because you love me and trust me, because you love your mother and want her to be healed, it is possible for a subtle energy to reach her. But you are the doer – that is my emphasis. I am not the doer.What you are saying is beautiful, and it will be difficult for anyone other than me to reject it. Just go to any so-called guru – India is so full of them – and if you say such a thing, he will reply, “That’s perfectly right. I am taking care of the whole world.” But as far as I am concerned, I cannot even take care of myself! I am certainly a lazy guy. I will not take such trouble to reach your mother. Otherwise it will become difficult for my sannyasins to die. And just as a symbol, I have made samadhis for the sannyasins who have died. So remember, I am not going to protect you.When death comes, it is perfectly good. Let it come. I may even help death rather than you, because death will relieve you of all pain, all stupidities, all diseases and particularly the fear of death. Once you are dead, you are no longer afraid – even of death – and you will rest in your grave for eternity. So why should I prevent you? But if you go and say these things to somebody else, he will be immensely happy. These are the people who go on creating wrong concepts in people’s minds.My thing is very clear: I am available. If you trust me, you can draw as much energy as you want. If you don’t trust me, you have closed the doors yourself. But it is always your doing, it is never my doing. I cannot take the credit for it; the credit goes to you. You must be in deep love with your mother and because you are in deep trust with me, you can become a medium for a healing energy to reach to your mother.As far as I am concerned, my whole teaching is doing without doing, action in inaction. But this kind of misunderstanding happens.Two cannibals, a father and son, are walking through the jungle checking their mantraps when they find a beautiful white girl who is in distress. The son, an impulsive boy, exclaims, “Look, Dad! A white girl. Let us eat her right now.”His father, who has had more experience in the world and has been to the mission school, pauses thoughtfully and says, “No, son, let us take her home and eat your mother.”Different people take different approaches…When an Englishman does not get on with his wife, he goes to the pub; a Frenchman goes to his mistress, a Greek goes to sea, a German goes to war, an Australian goes to a cricket match, an Indian goes to the Himalayas, an American goes to his lawyer and a Japanese goes and commits hara-kiri.Just different people, different understandings. But here with me… This one is for all of you.Rubin Moskowitz went to one of the best restaurants in New York and treated himself to a huge meal with all the trimmings, finishing up with a Havana cigar.Finally, the waiter brought the bill on a silver tray. It came to ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents, so Rubin paid with a hundred dollar bill.About five minutes later, he called the waiter back and asked for his change. Without altering his expression, the waiter left but returned a moment later with his silver tray. On it sat a penny and a packet of condoms.Rubin was shocked and demanded an explanation. The waiter lifted his nose in the air and said, “Sir, it is the policy of our restaurant to encourage customers like you not to reproduce.”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 02 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Can one really miss you? When love and this incredible pull are there, can one really go astray?Prem Anugraho, it seems almost impossible to miss the goal when you are just one foot away, but even then people have missed. How far away was Judas from Jesus? He was his most cultured, educated and sophisticated disciple. In fact, among all the others, he was the only one who was educated – and he was really close. But life always remains unknown; it is not something like mathematics or logic where you can come to a conclusion.Just because he was so close, he missed. It is very illogical, but if you go deep down, you can understand the psychology of it. Because he was very close, he was hoping – perhaps unknowingly – that he would be Jesus’ successor. I am not saying he was intentionally trying to be the successor. In fact, it was obvious that there was nobody else except Judas to succeed Jesus.In every way, he was qualified; in every way, Jesus showered his love and his blessings on him, but the day Jesus said “Nobody is going to be my successor. I have not come here to create a dynasty. My kingdom is of the other world – the Kingdom of God,” that distance of just one foot became a distance of thousands of miles. That same night, Judas betrayed Jesus. He sold him to the enemies for only thirty pieces of silver. Of course, it was done in a very emotional, hasty way – again unconsciously.This is the trouble with man; his actions are not conscious. Hence you cannot condemn him. Like a blind man, he is groping in darkness, not knowing where he is going and why he is going. He becomes a little alert when it is too late, when he has acted. Then there is no way to undo it.When Judas sold Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, he was not aware of what exactly he was doing and what it was going to lead to. On the day Jesus was crucified, Judas was in the crowd with tears in his eyes and he threw away those thirty pieces of silver. He didn’t think that this was going to be the consequence of an act done in anger, rage, frustration – he was not thinking that it would mean crucifixion. Twenty-four hours after Jesus’ crucifixion he hanged himself in a tree, committed suicide.Christians don’t talk about Judas much, but his psychology should be understood more clearly as he is not alone. It happens almost always, with every great master. Strangely enough, those who were very close have gone far away; those who were far away – had never thought, dreamed, of being very close – came close.There is a very subtle psychological background to it. Gautam Buddha was betrayed by one of his cousin-brothers; Mahavira was betrayed by his son-in-law. In both cases the situation was the same as with Judas: because they were so close, they naturally hoped – without being conscious of it – that they were going to be successors.Now, nobody can be a successor in enlightenment. It is not a worldly treasure, you cannot inherit it. You cannot become enlightened just because your father was enlightened. You cannot become enlightened just because you are very close to somebody who is enlightened. The distance of one foot or the distance of one mile or the distance of one light-year makes no difference – distance is distance.I insist on this so that you will not miss. I understand your love, your gratitude, your deep commitment. You are asking, “Can one really miss you?” It should not be so. One should not miss; there is no reason for it. But man is so unconscious that he does not function reasonably. He functions irrationally. He functions without any understanding of his own actions, intentions, hidden desires, ambitions.You are saying, “When love and this incredible pull are there, can one really go astray?” One should not go astray if one is conscious, but the possibility cannot be denied. You have to forgive me, the possibility cannot be denied. The closer you come to a master, the more you are lost, the more you are dissolved. In the fear of dissolution, the fear of your personality being lost, you may start backing off.You have to understand that this fear is there. Even the moth that is magnetically attracted toward a flame does not go directly into the flame. I have been watching moths – strangely enough, they never go directly into the flame. They first go round and round, perhaps hesitating, perhaps having another thought, perhaps taking time – a little more time – before they take the jump. The jump into the flame is going to be their death on one plane, and the other plane on which they will be reborn is not yet there – it is not guaranteed.Only your trust is the guarantee, your love is the guarantee. Other than that, you don’t have any solid foundation. You are gambling by taking a jump. And the ultimate is available only to the gamblers, not to the businessmen who are continuously counting pros and cons, whether this will be profitable or this will be a loss. These people will go on counting for millions of lives. They may come across a Gautam Buddha, a Jesus or a Socrates, but seventy or eighty years are not enough for them to come to a conclusion.Only a gambler, in a single moment, can take the jump. I hope you will be able to take the jump. Nobody can prevent you except yourself. You have asked a very significant question, a question that implies the very quantum leap of the disciple to the devotee, the quantum leap from personality to individuality, from a dewdrop to the ocean.Have you ever seen a lotus flower with its leaves just above the water? In the night, dewdrops gather on the leaves. They look so beautiful in the early morning sun, far more beautiful than any pearls, far more alive, far more radiant. But slowly they slip from the leaves, finally dropping into the ocean. A dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf is the situation of a disciple. So close to the ocean and yet – because of the closeness itself – a tremendous fear arises: to pull oneself back.You are saying, “And this incredible pull…” Just because of this incredible pull, one can start resisting, because you don’t understand all the subtle workings of your mind. Nature, as it is, has to be understood if you want to transcend it.In all the medical “-pathies” developed around the world – homeopathy or ayurveda or acupuncture – except allopathy, nobody has exactly understood the inner function of nature in man’s body and mind. I say except allopathy because others may be helpful, not in a small way either – if you look at their help, it is tremendous – but they are not scientific.In almost seventy percent of cases, ayurveda will be successful, acupuncture may be successful, homeopathy may be successful, naturopathy may be successful. But remember the seventy percent – it is no more than that because seventy percent of diseases are false. They are just in your mind, they don’t really exist. That’s why you don’t need real medicine; any hocus-pocus will do. And seventy percent is not a small percentage so I would not like these “-pathies” to disappear from the world. I want them to be recognized, because seventy percent is big. Strangely enough, those seventy percent of the cases are the most difficult as far as allopathy is concerned.Allopathy finds itself in difficulty: how to deal with a person who has no disease but believes he has? Allopathy has no way of helping such a person – only thirty percent remain to be helped by allopathy. It is a strange world. Thirty percent are helped by the most scientific approach and seventy percent by all kinds of hocus-pocus – superstitious approaches which really don’t make any change, but they help. The most scientific approach of allopathy is based on a deep understanding of nature: the body has a resistance of its own. Because of this fact, naturopathy condemns allopathy.Allopathy goes on injecting viruses into patients because the allopathic understanding is that the moment the body gets a virus, it immediately creates antibodies. It immediately starts fighting, it has a resistance of its own. The whole body immediately goes on red alert to destroy the disease. Naturopathy condemns it because it thinks people are being poisoned with diseases. You are supposed to take out diseases and you are, on the contrary, putting poisonous viruses into people’s bodies. Naturopathy cleans people’s bodies by fasting, by strange methods that you cannot believe. But they can help only those people who are not suffering from any real disease.It is the same situation with the mind. A scientific approach to the mind will make it clear. The closer you come to the master, in deep love, in an incredible pull, your biological mind – which is thousands of years old – immediately creates an anti-pull as a protection, as a defense. You are moving toward danger: because of the danger of the death of your personality, the mind immediately pulls back.You always keep a little distance to people you love, but you can come very close to the person you don’t love because there is no fear, no question of merging or melting. You can come close to your enemy without any problem. You are not going to melt into him, so you can rub shoulders with your enemy without any fear. But with a friend, the mind always keeps a little distance. Coming too close is risky; you may not be able to come back to your old personality again – the risk is real.You ask me, “With this incredible pull, can one really go astray?” It’s just because of this incredible pull that you may go astray. Just to avoid it, you may take a different route. So if you are clear about it, missing can be avoided. As far as I know, neither Jesus nor Mahavira nor Gautam Buddha ever told their disciples that it is possible to miss. They all took for granted that those who had come to them had simply come to them. But I see deeper into the nature of man, and their disciples prove what I am proposing.Jesus never thought, even dreamed, that Judas would sell him for thirty silver pieces. He loved the man so much and Judas loved him so much – it seemed almost impossible. That’s why after twenty-four hours Judas felt so repentant that the only way he saw to get out of this guilt was to commit suicide. To go on living with this guilt was more difficult than committing suicide. He also could not believe it. He loved Jesus so much. How could he have done such a thing?The whole psychology of man has not been explored and because it has not been fully explored, there are corners – dark corners – that you go on forgetting. You simply remain attentive to the lighted spots of love and trust, but you forget completely that there are nooks and corners in your being where there is no light, no love, no trust. They are also part of you; in a strange way they are more powerful than your love and your trust.On what grounds can I say that? I say it on a very fundamental ground – your love is spent, your trust is spent, but your dark spots are unspent. Their whole energy is gathering. They are the antibodies against your love, against your trust. They are your doubts, they are your distrust, they are your hate – and they are accumulating.You go on sharing your love, you go on sharing your trust. What about your hate, what about your distrust, what about your doubt? These go on accumulating. Naturally, these phenomena are the phenomena of darkness. So they hide in dark corners in your being, just waiting for the chance when they can take revenge with full vengeance.Any moment, when you start wavering a little, hesitating a little – to go one step more or wait – those forces which are repressed in you immediately take possession of you. And they are so powerful that they can pull you away from the source that was going to be a rebirth to you. They can pull you away from your love, from your trust, from your commitment. They can pull you away from the ultimate revolution that was going to happen within you.But if you are aware, alert, watchful, not allowing any dark corners inside you, making every nook and corner of your mind full of light, then of course it is impossible to miss, impossible to go astray.Anugraho, your very name means gratitude, and to me gratitude is the only prayer. But small words like gratitude contain so much that you should go deeper into them, so that you can become aware of the whole territory. Your gratitude should not remain a small lighted spot in your being; it should become your whole being. Only then are you absolutely safe from going astray, from missing the message, from missing the master.Remember, I am not a missionary. I am not trying to convince you of any ideological, intellectual or philosophical theories. That is very simple. It is necessary for you to understand that not a single philosopher was betrayed by his students. I have been wondering about that: what happened? Jesus was betrayed, Mahavira was betrayed, Buddha was betrayed – what happened to the great philosophers like Aristotle, Hegel, Kant? They had thousands of students. But nobody betrayed them because they were only students, far away. They never came close because they didn’t even become disciples, what to say about devotees? They never came so close, where the distance is almost negligible, nonexistential. That is the reason why they were not betrayed.Their whole philosophical teaching was just intellectual. They were giving you arguments in support of their system of thought – and they were great intellectuals. At the most you could argue with them, but you could not win. The students who were at the side of Plato or Aristotle or Hegel or Kant were not great intellectuals. They could raise questions, they could argue a little bit, but those philosophers were tremendously logical and they had worked out their systems in such minute detail that it was impossible to win an argument with them. Every argument meant that finally the students would be even more convinced.But it was just a communication from one head to another head. There was no question of coming close to the heart; there was no question of love or trust. I am not trying to convince you of any ideology, I am trying to impart to you a new being, a new transformation. It is more than mind can do; it is much more than words can express. It is something that goes on happening without words, without mind.Slowly, slowly, the more you start feeling my presence, the more you become accustomed to my silences of the heart, the closer you will move. The final stop will be when you have come too close. Just for a moment you will have to think whether to go one step more or a few steps backward or move away – it is too dangerous. The moth has come very close to the flame – any closer and death is certain.The ancient seers of the East describe the master as death: a strange definition! When I first came across it… Death? But slowly, slowly it became clear. To me they were right, yet their definition is only half. I say, the master is death and resurrection. Just to stop at death is very dangerous. It will give a totally different idea to the disciple, making him even more afraid. He has to be assured of a resurrection.That is not possible only with intellectual argumentation, but by opening your heart to the disciple, inviting him within. By and by his fear will disappear. He will start feeling a new energy arising in him, a new life and a new way of seeing things, a new approach to looking at the world. And everything becomes so psychedelically beautiful, so colorful, so blissful. Then he does not care, he knows he is on the right path.It is not a conviction, but a realization that one is on the right path. Each moment the silence is becoming deeper, each moment the joy is becoming wider, greater. Each moment new flowers are continuously blossoming, new fragrances are surrounding you. Each moment you are coming to something tremendously valuable. But you cannot figure it out unless you have entered it.A missionary is an ugly phenomenon. I am absolutely against anybody being a missionary. He neither knows anything, nor can he help anybody toward knowing or toward being. A master is a totally different thing. A missionary can be prepared in a school, in a college. There are colleges around the world where missionaries are prepared.Just a few days ago I was telling you about a Catholic missionary college where a professor asked a student, “When you have become a missionary, how are you going to deliver your sermons in the church?“For instance,” he said, “when you are talking about heaven, let your face show a radiance, let your eyes light up, let your whole being, your body, indicate that you are thrilled.”The student asked, “That’s okay, but what about when we are talking about hell?”The professor said, “For hell, your normal face will do. You don’t have to make any effort.”A Catholic is trying to convert a Jew. He is really taking on a very difficult job. I am the only person who is deeply conversant with the Jews. Half my sannyasins are Jews. It has never happened before and it will never happen again; Jews are difficult people.A Catholic trying to convert a Jew tells him that if he becomes a Catholic his prayers will certainly be answered, because the priest will give them to the bishop, who will give them to the cardinal, who will give them to the pope, who will shove them up into heaven through a hole in the Vatican roof – which just matches a hole in the floor of heaven – where St. Peter will take them to the Virgin Mary, who will speak on their behalf with Jesus, who will put in a good word for them with God.The whole channel of all the right people!The Jew repeats this whole story with an astonished air, ending with, “You know, I guess it must be true, because I have always wondered what they do with all the shit in heaven. They must throw it down through that little hole in the Vatican roof, where the pope gives it to the cardinal, who gives it to the bishop, who gives it to the priest, who gives it to you – and now you are trying to give it to me!”Converting anybody just with words is an absurd activity. It is not conversion, it is just salesmanship. Authentic conversion comes by experience, but experience is only possible if you allow yourself to become vulnerable, receptive, to someone who has arrived. Perhaps it was possible with Jesus, but it is not possible with the pope.Just look at his picture! Can you think this man can radiate anything that will thrill your heart? And he is God’s representative, he is the infallible representative of God. Look at his face! He is just a stupid Polack; everybody knows it. You cannot make a Polack infallible simply by choosing him as pope; that goes against all the laws of existence.But if it happens in your life that you come close to a man who is at home, who has arrived, then don’t be worried about taking any risk. Every risk is a great opportunity to have a taste of the infinite, to become one with the eternal mystery of existence. Hence I say again: there is no need to miss, but people are unconscious and go on missing. There is no need to go astray, but people are not alert, so it is very difficult to prevent them from going astray.When somebody turns back, goes away, the master can only look on helplessly with tears in his eyes, because the master cannot interfere in your independence, in your freedom. Even if it is the freedom of going astray, the freedom of going away, he will allow it. He respects you and loves you and he cannot enforce anything on you.Osho,What is the difference between the master seeing the disciple and the disciple seeing the master?The master sees you not only as you are, but also as what you can become. In your seeds, he sees the spring and the flowers. When you see the master, it will depend from what distance you are seeing. If you are just a student, you will see his beautiful words, arguments, ideology. If you are seeing him as a disciple, you will see him much more in his silences than in his words, much more in his presence than in his presentation, much more in his eyes than in the ideas and the philosophies he is talking about, much more in his gestures, in his grace. But if you are looking at him from the space of a devotee, then you will see only a mirror in which your ultimate being is reflected.As far as you are concerned, what you see will depend on where you are, where you are standing, at what distance. As far as the master is concerned, whatever your distance, he sees only two things: what you are right now and your potential, which can explode any moment. In your bud he will see the open flower, with the fragrance released.But there are many who are not even students, who are just spectators or curiosity-mongers – in them the master sees nothing. They are so far away in darkness that it is impossible to see who they are and what they can become. Their distance is too great and they are surrounded with such darkness. Nor will they be able to see anything in the master. Perhaps a faraway echo of his words, but nothing more.Hymie Goldberg entered the synagogue and began to pray, “Dear God, please let me win the lottery.”Then he left the synagogue and went home. Nothing happened that day so he returned to the synagogue the next day.“Please, God,” beseeched Hymie, “please, won’t you let me win the lottery?”He went home and again there were no results, so he went back to the synagogue the following morning.“Almighty God,” Hymie wailed, “I beg of you, let me win the lottery!”Suddenly, he heard God’s reply, “Hymie, meet me at least halfway,” God thundered. “Buy a lottery ticket!”Even without a lottery ticket he wants to win the lottery, just by asking God! Obviously, it’s only to such people that God has ever spoken. They irritate him so much that he forgets that he’s not supposed to speak. Now this fellow will torture him every day, and he is not even purchasing a ticket.With the master also you have to meet him at least halfway!Osho,According to you, what is the most hilarious thing in the world?According to me the most hilarious thing in the world is man. Among all the animals, trees, mountains, rivers, oceans, stars, clouds, man is the only hilarious animal.I will give you a few examples:Hamish MacTavish became a sergeant with a Scottish Highland regiment. One day he walked into the pharmacy and deposited an old condom on the counter. “How much for a repair job?” he asked.“Well,” replied the chemist, “with washing, drying, patching, lubricating and re-rolling it comes to thirty pence.”“My God,” said MacTavish, “how much for a new one?”“Fifty pence,” replied the chemist.Tucking the condom back in his kilt, MacTavish walked out saying, “I will talk it over with the lads at the barracks and let you know our decision tomorrow.”One day, Paddy, who worked in the local brewery, fell into a gigantic barrel of beer and drowned. When his wife was informed of the accident she asked if she could see the scene of the tragedy.At the brewery, the foreman explained to her, “He was climbing this ladder when he slipped and fell into the beer and drowned.”“How terrible!” exclaimed Maureen. “It must have been an agonizing death.”“I would not say exactly agonizing,” replied the foreman. “He managed to get out twice to go to the bathroom!”An American, an Englishman and a Frenchman are discussing a good example of savoir faire.“Well,” said the American, “if you came home and found your wife in bed with another man and you did not kill the son-of-a-bitch, that would be a good example of savoir faire.“Nonsense, old chap,” says the Englishman, “if you came home and found your wife in bed with another man and you said ‘Please carry on, sir,’ – that is savoir faire.”“Non, non!” cries the Frenchman. “If you came home and found your wife in bed with another man and you said ‘Please, sir, carry on,’ and the man was able to continue – that is savoir faire.”Except man, nothing is hilarious in the world. Just look around you. There are so many examples, it is not that there are only a few. In fact every man – if he watches himself – will find himself behaving in a hilarious way in many situations. Or if you are alert enough and a witness, you will find so many people… When there is so much hilariousness going on, you cannot believe why the world is so sad; it should be a continuous festival of laughter. That’s what my concept of an authentic humanity is: it will be hilarious, enjoying every moment. It will not be serious, it will not be saintly. It will be utterly human and absolutely respectful of its humanity, its laughter, its dance, its song, everything that human beings are prone to.Be more alert and watch and note down whenever you see something hilarious happening – and particularly in my place. Where do you think I get all these jokes? My people just go on watching each other and creating jokes and informing me. I never go out. But people are learning watchfulness, so they come across so many hilarious things in themselves and in others. They go on preparing jokes for me.I’m never short of jokes because in my place, twenty-four hours a day, there is nothing else to do. It is a continuous carnival.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 03 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sitting in front of you, I feel something tremendous is happening to me which I don't understand at all. I feel so thankful, but I don't know why and for what. Tears are coming, but I cannot see any reason. I leave discourse with unsteady knees, as if I have done twenty-four hours' hard work. But what happened? Is it a matter of my undeveloped awareness that I don't grasp what is happening, or does my mind want an answer where there is no answer?It is one of the perennial questions that you have asked. One day or another, every seeker on the path stumbles on the same question. It is the mind which wants to know everything, because the knowing mind becomes powerful through what it knows. It then becomes its own territory. But existence consists of three layers.One is that of knowledge – that which is already known. Mind is perfectly at ease with it. The other is the territory of the unknown which, sooner or later, will become known. What is known today was unknown yesterday; what is unknown today is bound to be known tomorrow. Mind is uncomfortable with the unknown, but only a little. It knows that it is still beyond its territory, but it cannot remain beyond its territory much longer. The first territory belongs to all the religions of the world. That’s why they are all past-oriented. They don’t have any tomorrows, only yesterdays.The second category belongs to the scientific world. It is perfectly at ease with the yesterdays because tomorrow is going to be based on yesterday, but its focus is on the unknown. That is the adventure of science: to go on conquering the unknown and making it known; in other words to demystify the universe. That is the basic purpose of all scientific research. There should be no mystery in the world; everything should be known. Science is the mind’s final growth, therefore it cannot go beyond mind. The very word science means knowledge. Hence science does not divide existence into three categories, but only into two: the known and the unknown.Then there is a third category, which I call the unknowable. We are the pilgrims of the unknowable. To move into the unknowable feels very scary to the mind because in no way can the unknowable be made part of knowledge. It can never become the dominion and the empire of mind. It will always remain a mystery.You can live it, but you cannot know it. You can experience it, but you cannot reduce your experience into knowledge. You can dance it, you can rejoice in it, but you cannot transform its basic quality of being mysterious into knowledgeability – knowledge is absolutely unmysterious. This is the world of the mystic. This is the world of sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss.These words are absolutely unknown to science, and these words are absolutely scary for the mind. It neither knows the truth nor does it want to know the truth; lies are so beautiful and comfortable. Truth is dangerous for the mind because the mind’s whole basis is false and phony. The moment truth arrives, the mind has to leave; its time is over. The arrival of truth is instant death to the mind. Its whole empire simply disappears.The mind is not interested in consciousness. In fact, the mind tries in every way to remain as unconscious as possible. Down the ages, every society and every culture has condemned alcohol and other intoxicating drugs, but to no effect – they have survived and they go on growing more and more influential. The reason is: mind wants to drown itself in unconsciousness, which is its only relaxation. Otherwise there is always tension because the unknowable is very close. The mind wants to forget all about the unknown, all about truth.You will be surprised to know that science is not interested at all in discovering the truth. It is interested in discovering relative truths. Relative truths are simply relative lies. You can use those words as synonyms – just try.If you say to someone “I love you relatively,” what will it mean? It will simply mean that you love many more people too. Relatively, you can say “I love you too.” You hate many people relatively; you just don’t hate that person. With love, you are really saying “I love you, relatively,” but no lover has ever made such a statement. Every lover says “I love you totally, absolutely.”Science is only interested in the objective world, where you can never come to the ultimate truth because from the very beginning it boycotts the subjective world. So its truth is always going to remain relative. The scientist is interested in objects but he is not interested in himself. To be interested in oneself means to be interested in truth, to be interested in consciousness, to be interested in bliss. But those are fearful, dangerous paths for the mind – any one of them. In fact, all three come together as three aspects of one experience. The moment you experience truth, you also experience a tremendous explosion of consciousness and, at the same time, an immense overflowing of bliss from your own heart.In this flood of light, the mind finds itself even incapable of opening its eyes. It is a bird of darkness – like the owl which in the day closes its eyes and in the night its day begins. The overflowing bliss becomes almost like a flood. Bliss will take away all the dead wood that the mind has collected as knowledge; consciousness will dispel all the dark corners in which the mind is hiding – repressing desires, repressing anger, greed, lust and a thousand and one other things that have been condemned by society.The mind’s greatest fear is not death. Its greatest fear is enlightenment. Death is nothing to be worried about. It cannot take away anything from the mind, but illumination is going to destroy the mind completely.Your question is really the mind trying to figure out what is happening to you. And what is happening to you is beyond the capacity of the mind, which is why you are afraid, shaky, worried. I will read your question: “Sitting in front of you, I feel something tremendous is happening to me, which I don’t understand at all.” Neither do I! Nor has anyone ever known what it is – no Gautam Buddha, no Jesus Christ, no Socrates. Nobody has ever known what it is, but they have all drunk of it, felt its sweetness, its fragrance, its music. Everything is so vast, so tremendous, they cannot reduce it into words so that mind can figure out what it is.Unless something is reduced to language, the mind is incapable of understanding it. The mind is a linguist, full of words and language. That is its only treasure but if something cannot be brought into language, it remains outside the world of the mind. But the mind is only a small part of you: you are far bigger. Hence you can experience many things which the mind cannot understand.You are saying, “I feel so thankful…” You are experiencing the inexpressible. All that you can do is feel grateful. You cannot even say what you are grateful for because that “what” is part of the mystery of existence. It is a good indication that what is happening to you is bringing thankfulness. And thankfulness or gratefulness is far more important than any knowledge because it transforms you; knowledge only informs you.You can find great scholars, full of knowledge, but their lives are empty and poor. Nothing happens in their lives. Underneath the load of their knowledge, they have not lived. They are simply carrying the load because that load makes them respectable in a world of ignorant people. If those same people were surrounded by mistakes, they would be laughed at.Mohammed used to say, “A man of knowledgeability is just a donkey carrying holy scriptures.” He may feel very proud among other donkeys who are carrying mundane things: one carrying salt, another carrying mud, another carrying sand, another carrying wood – naturally the donkey who is carrying holy scriptures is a priest among the donkeys. He is a great scholar among the donkeys and all the donkeys are going to be respectful to him; he is no ordinary donkey.It’s the same with your scholars, great professors, great priests, great rabbis – they have wasted their lives on books. I am not against books, but you should remember that is only one dimension; it is not your whole life. If your whole life becomes full of books, you are just a bookcase, otherwise utterly empty. Books can enhance your life. If you have some life, if you have some love, you may be able to find in poetry something which even the poet may not have been aware of. If he was just a man of the mind, then what he has written is only a composition of words according to the rules of grammar and language. But a mystic can read in those words something he pours into them, something which is not there.One of the significant qualities of the mystic is thankfulness, without even knowing for what. “But I don’t know why and for what” – that’s exactly the right thing. Full of gratitude for the unknowable, full of gratitude for that which is beyond the capacity of the mind. You are touching new horizons, you are flying close to the stars. The mind cannot reach there. That’s why there is thankfulness.“Tears are coming, and I cannot see any reason.” They are not tears of rationality. In fact nobody has heard of rational tears, nobody has ever experienced that tears are flowing from his eyes because two plus two is four – my god, two plus two is four brings tears! Knowledge cannot bring tears. Tears are indicating something very deeply significant – you have touched something which can only be expressed by tears or laughter or dancing. They are all irrational; you cannot explain them rationally.I gave Shunyo a small antique Rolex watch for Veeresh. I told her, “Find him and give it to him.”She came running back to me saying, “Veeresh is really crazy. When I gave him the watch, he simply started crying and dancing. I could not believe it! He did not say anything, he is simply dancing outside!”Because she was searching for him, she asked Anando to also look for him. After Shunyo had given the watch to Veeresh, Anando found him and she could not believe it either – “What has happened?” Just tears and laughter together, and he was dancing, jumping. She brought him close to my room, to inform Shunyo.Anando said, “It is strange. What has happened to him?”Shunyo said, “It is nothing, just that Osho has given him a watch.”It is irrational, but a man who knows only reason knows only a desert of a life. He does not know the roses. He does not know the beautiful sounds of the birds, which don’t mean anything – they are irrational. In fact, even to call them songs is not quite right. The birds are just making sounds for no reason at all, just out of tremendous gratefulness to this beautiful morning, to the sun, to the trees; just for another day to breathe, to fly in the sky, to love, to sing and dance. They are making sounds because they don’t know how to thank the universe in any other way.When you also experience something of the heart, you will find a tremendous desire to cry. That crying is not out of sadness. Those tears are more valuable than any heartbeat. Those tears are still warm, those tears are still alive, and those tears are saying that you have touched something beyond words, beyond mind. They are of immense joy and gratefulness, sensitivity and helplessness – helplessness because you cannot express what you are experiencing in words. In fact, anything that is great in life has no reason.Once Picasso was painting by the side of a rosebush and for almost an hour a man stood there, watching. Finally he could not resist the temptation and said to Picasso, “Excuse me, sir, but I cannot see any reason in what you are painting. I have looked at it from every side but I can’t figure out what it is.”Picasso looked at him and said, “Just look at the roses. Go to them and try to find out why they are there. I am harassed so much, but nobody asks the birds, nobody asks the peacock ‘Why this tail, with so many beautiful colors?’ Nobody asks the cuckoo – whose sound is so sweet, almost incomparably sweet; nobody asks the trees ‘Why are you green?’ But every idiot comes to me and asks, ‘What are you doing? What is the meaning of it?’“Go to God and ask him, ‘What is the meaning of this whole universe?’ I am a small creator, he is the big creator. Just go – perhaps he knows the reason.”But I know that if you meet God, he will not know the reason either. What reason can he supply for why he painted the peacocks feathers so beautifully? What was the reason? Why has he given a long white tail to the birds of paradise? You will find one here in my garden. It comes and goes seasonally. Just two days ago, it came again. For a few months it had disappeared. It has such a white tail, so snow-white, and the bird is very small and black. Such a small bird and carrying such a long white tail – it does not make any sense. Because of the tail, the bird can hardly fly; he simply jumps from one tree to another tree. Now what reason could there be? But he is so beautiful, just the combination of colors is so beautiful.Beauty need not be rational; neither bliss needs to be rational nor silence. Meditation is not a rational endeavor: it is basically irrational. To be more accurate, it is suprarational: it goes beyond reason and all its concepts.Picasso was right. He was simply saying that nobody asks God. Everybody goes to pray in the church, in the synagogue, in the temple, and nobody asks him, “What is the purpose of it all?” The sun goes on rising every morning, creating such a beautiful sunrise over the oceans, over the mountains, creating so many beautiful colors on the horizon – for a strange reason which I don’t know.I was a student in a university which has, perhaps, the best location in the whole world – certainly in India. I have visited many universities, but the University of Sagar, a very small place, has some special quality to it – not the university, but the mountain and the lake. The university is on the mountain, a small mountain, but the lake is very vast, miles long.I have seen the horizon being painted every morning by God, every evening by God in many places around the world, but I have never seen as many psychedelic colors as those at Sagar University. I have never seen such colors as when the sun rises over the lake and when it sets over the mountains. It spreads so many colors, absolutely without reason, just out of sheer abundance!After seeing the mornings and evenings in Sagar I have been searching for the same colors, but I have not found them anywhere. Every place seems to be poor as far as mornings and evenings are concerned. Sagar is a small place. The only remarkable thing is that it has a university in one of the most beautiful places. But why should God be so generous? There is no reason.Even if you meet God, he cannot explain anything to you. That’s why I have removed the very hypothesis of God. There is no need of God, because to accept God is to put so much burden and tension, worry and concern on the poor fellow – it is better that he is not. It is not that I’m against God; it is just out of my love and compassion. I feel he should not be. My own way of denying God is totally different from an atheist’s – they are against him. I am absolutely for him, but he is not there.Picasso was right when he became angry.Another time it happened…A very rich woman, super-rich, asked him to make a portrait of her. He said, “I don’t paint portraits.”She said, “The price is not a question at all – whatever you demand – but I want a portrait from you, just because you don’t do portraits. I want something unique; nobody in the whole world except me will have a Picasso portrait. I’m ready to pay whatever price you ask, but you have to do a portrait.”For a moment, Picasso thought to himself, “Ask such an enormous amount that the woman will escape.” So he said, “Five million dollars.”The woman said, “I will give you six. Start painting; I am already prepared.”Now he was caught, so he had to paint the portrait. When the portrait was complete, the woman said, “Everything is beautiful, but just tell me one thing: where is my nose? I cannot find it.”A nose is the very center of your face. If you can find the nose, then you can figure out where the eyes are, where the mouth is, where the ears are – everything. But without finding the center…The woman said, “Just tell me about the nose, everything else I will figure out.”Picasso said, “I told you already that I don’t do portraits because this kind of problem always arises later on. I don’t know where your nose is. I knew when I was painting, but now all that I know… It is a beautiful painting, so many beautiful colors – who cares about the nose? Just don’t tell anybody that this is your portrait.”Picasso, in a certain way, has come closer to mysticism than any other painter because whatever he has painted is not to be understood, only to be experienced. His colors, his combination of colors, are just unbelievable. He has defeated God many times. But don’t ask the meaning, don’t ask the reason, don’t bring it to the mind – just enjoy!You know it already: when you are enjoying a really good ice cream – what do you call it, tutti-frutti? – you don’t ask the reason, you don’t ask the meaning. And when you go to Sarjano’s place for pizza, do you ask, “What is the meaning of it?” Taste is enough. I don’t even know what pizza is because I have never tasted it but I feel saliva coming into my mouth – what about you? And I can promise you I will never taste pizza because I love to keep a few things mysterious!You are saying, “I leave discourse with unsteady knees…” – I also leave in the same way, somehow I manage to reach my room! You are saying “…as if I had done twenty-four hours’ hard work.” The reason for unsteady legs is that you are drunk with something that is not chemical drugs or alcohol, but something of consciousness, something of truth, something of bliss, which can make you as drunk, or even more drunk, as any alcoholic beverage.And now you are asking me, “But what happened?” Don’t ask such questions. Something really happened. If you ask questions, there is a danger that it may stop happening; it is a very shy phenomenon. Allow it to happen, enjoy as much as you can, and don’t be worried about unsteady knees. The more you stop asking questions, or figuring out what is happening, the less you will feel that you have worked hard for twenty-four hours. To ask about the unanswerable creates great tension. It really creates the feeling of hard work and failure because you can never succeed. Even if you work your whole life you cannot succeed.“Is it a matter of my undeveloped awareness that I don’t grasp what is happening…?” No! With developed awareness you will find your knees becoming even more unsteady. It is simply what you recognize yourself, “Does my mind want an answer where there is no answer?”Yes, stop doing that!Dolores marries old Mr. Pincus because she figures she will get his money without having to put out much. On their wedding night she giggles when he takes out a condom and lays it on the night table.“Darling,” she murmurs, “don’t you think you are being a little cautious? After all, you are eighty-eight.”But Mr. Pincus only sniggers and moments later takes cotton wool from the drawer and stuffs it up his nostrils. He then takes out a pair of earplugs.“Darling,” she says, “I understand the condom, but what are you doing now?”“Honey,” he replies, putting in his ear plugs, “you might as well know now that there are two things I can’t stand in life. One is a woman screaming, and the other,” he says as he snaps off the light, “is the smell of burning rubber.”Hymie Goldberg had worked hard all his life and become very rich. But now he’s on his deathbed with his wife Becky by his side, and he is dispersing his worldly possessions.“My Cadillac,” he begins, “with the push button motorcycle-cop detector, I leave to my son Sam.”“Better you should leave it to Joe,” says Becky. “He is a better driver.”“All right,” whispers Hymie. “My Rolls Royce I leave to my daughter Linda.”“You had better give it to your nephew Willie,” interrupts Becky. “He is a very careful driver.”“All right. Give it to Willie,” continues Hymie. “And my twelve-cylinder Jaguar, I give to my niece Sally.”“Personally,” says Becky, “I think Judy should get it.”Hymie raises his head and shouts, “Becky, please! Who is dying? You or me?”Osho,The deeper and deeper I go into meditation, the fatter and fatter I am getting. Am I in danger of exploding?First a small story…Once there was a Japanese meditator called Wu, whose master lived in a little house on the other side of the river. One morning, after a particularly “good” meditation, Wu felt so overjoyed that he dedicated a small poem to his master.He wrote, “At the peak of the mountain, the sun is rising in the East. Sitting here in my lotus posture, the three worldly evils cannot affect me.”He folded the paper and gave it to his servant to take to the master. The master looked at the paper and wrote a few words on it, telling the servant to take it back to Wu. Wu was most upset to have his poem returned, especially when he opened the paper and found three words written underneath it, “Fat, fat, fat.”Wu immediately ran down to the river and swam across as fast as he could to his master’s house. Prostrating himself in front of the master, he said, “Oh, master, I wrote you this poem as an expression of my love for you and look what you have done!”“So,” said the master, “you sit on top of the mountain and feel that the three worldly evils cannot affect you any longer, but three little words are enough to blow you right across the river.”Don’t be worried about your getting fatter.You are saying, “The deeper and deeper I go into meditation, the fatter and fatter I am getting. Am I in danger of exploding?” I hope so! That’s the whole purpose of your being here – exploding. But becoming fat is not because of meditation. Perhaps you are meditating too much and not doing enough exercise. You will have to do one of two things. I hate exercise myself, but then you have to reduce your calories. I have to live on only six hundred calories per day. That is now. A few days ago I was living on twelve hundred calories per day.If you don’t want to exercise, then you will have to cut down on the stuff that you go on putting in your mouth. Meditators are known to become fat because they forget completely that meditation is sitting silently, doing nothing, and the fat grows… So either start doing some exercise or cut down on your food.Gautam Buddha had to cut out one meal completely from his disciples’ diet. They could eat only once a day, not twice; and of course not five times a day with different names: breakfast, lunch, coffee break, supper, and the last – just a little bit before you go to sleep. He had to cut down from two meals, which are common in India, to one meal. That means fifty percent.Mahavira was even more… He was teaching longer periods of meditation than Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha had an alternating system: one hour meditation, one hour walking. That repeated walking one hour and meditating one hour kept the balance. And then only one meal a day. But Mahavira had no such alternating system. People were in meditation for eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours. He also insisted on one meal, but he made another condition: you had to eat it standing. Also you could not use plates; you had to use only your hands. So whatever fits into your two cupped hands – that’s all. And eat it standing, because when you are sitting you are at ease, comfortable.We make our meals as comfortable as possible: comfortable chairs, table, beautiful plates, candlelight, some fragrance, flowers, and then you go on, course after course. So if you are meditating as well, then naturally you will become fatter and fatter.There is also a reason for this fatness other than food: a meditator slowly becomes less and less interested in sex. That has two by-products. One is: the little gymnastics that you used to do in sex are dropped and that may have been your only exercise. Secondly, the moment you drop sex, you become more interested in food. People who drop sex automatically start eating a little more.The way life starts creates this connection. The child becomes aware of his mother’s breast and the food that comes from it at the same time. Later on the breast becomes a sexual symbol, but the association with food is very deep in your unconscious. The people who drop sex – here it is otherwise; here sex drops people – start eating more to substitute because eating is connected with man’s sexuality. So you have to be aware: exploding is perfectly good, but that is an exploding of consciousness, an explosion of your inner being, not an explosion of your body.People are already afraid of coming close to me, and if you do this kind of exploding, then I am going to lose all my crazy people. So please, be kind toward yourself and be kind toward me. Cut down on your food, create an alternating system: meditation, walking, jogging, running, anything that gives your body enough exercise to absorb your food. This is tremendously significant: if you can create an alternating system your meditation will go even deeper, because when the body is tired, it quickly relaxes. When it is not tired, it does not relax quickly.That is one of the reasons why rich people cannot sleep. Their bodies are not tired. Sleep is part of relaxation. Laborers, beggars, sleep so deeply that even emperors feel jealous. Because they are working the whole day, their bodies are so tired that it is impossible for them not to fall asleep immediately.You will be surprised to know that there are aboriginals in India, in Burma, in Thailand, and in other Far Eastern countries, who don’t dream. The reason is that their work is so hard, they are so tired, that by the time they go to sleep they fall so deeply asleep that they miss a layer of dreams. The first layer is of your waking consciousness; the second layer is of your dreaming consciousness; the third layer is of your dreamless sleep; the fourth layer is your awakening, enlightenment. Because their lives are so hard – just to have a little food, just to survive – they don’t dream.When they first came in contact with the Christian missionaries… Christian missionaries are now being trained in psychoanalysis. Christianity is the most cunning religion in the world. Seeing that the old style of priesthood was getting out of date, they started sending their missionaries to learn psychoanalysis. They could see that in the future psychoanalysis is going to replace the priesthood. The psychoanalyst is the future priest. He is already taking the priest’s place. He has become the most highly-paid professional in the world – and all he does is analyze your dreams.So when these missionaries, trained in psychology, reached the thick forest in Burma, in Thailand, they could not believe what they found. When one of them asked the aboriginals, “What did you dream last night?” the aboriginals looked at each other and said, “What does he mean by ‘dream’?” They had never dreamed. They have not dreamed for two reasons.One, their life is not of repression. A repressed person dreams more because the mind has to get rid of whatever is repressed in dreaming. It is a kind of catharsis – the mind unbinding itself. Secondly, it is only those who cannot go to the deeper layers of sleep who are stuck in the dreaming layer. Once in a while you slip into the deeper layer, where there is no dream. But you surface again.Your sleep graph is not the same the whole night. Sometimes you are very superficial, sometimes you are going very deep. Sometimes you are again superficial, just on the verge of waking. Sometimes you go very deep, almost close to death. On one superficial layer is your life and on the deepest layer is your death, and just below your superficial layer is the dreaming layer. Many aboriginals completely miss dreaming.You will be able to go deeper into your meditation, into your relaxation, because relaxation is essential for your meditation. Make it a point to jog, jump, run, and then when you feel tired, utterly tired, sit down or lie down and meditate. Then you will find that you are not getting fatter and your body is not going to explode, but your consciousness is going to explode into the tremendous phenomenon we call enlightenment.The East has never bothered about dreams but the East has been concerned for thousands of years with consciousness. It is a strange phenomenon. The West became concerned with consciousness only one hundred years ago, and immediately it jumped on dreams. The whole psychological endeavor became dream analysis. One wonders what happened. The East has been concerned for at least ten thousand years with consciousness. Its whole genius has been focused on searching deeply into consciousness – more than has happened anywhere else. This has been the only contribution to human evolution as far as consciousness is concerned.The East is poor. It has not developed science, it has not developed technology because it has put all its intelligence into one direction and that is consciousness. But the strange fact is: even after ten thousand years, Eastern psychology has nothing to do with psychoanalysis-type psychologies, which are concerned with dream analysis. What is the reason?The reason is Christianity. Christianity is the most repressive religion in the world. It represses everything. And because of that repression the layer of dreams becomes thicker and thicker and thicker. Now Western psychoanalysts say that if a man sleeps eight hours per night, he dreams for six hours. For only two hours, once in a while, he goes a little deeper and does not dream. Otherwise, for six hours he is dreaming. What happened to the Eastern explorers of consciousness? They did not come to such a thick layer – six hours! And, strangely, the conclusion of Western psychology is that if you are not allowed to dream that amount of time, you will not feel refreshed in the morning.They have done some experiments. One man is disturbed whenever he is dreaming. It is very easy to know when a person is dreaming. Whenever a person is asleep without dreams, there is no movement of the eyes under the eyelids. You can see that there is no movement. The moment he starts dreaming, he is watching a film and his eyes start moving. You can immediately check whether the person is dreaming or not – very simple.So one person in this experiment is disturbed. Whenever he moves his eyes he is immediately woken up, then allowed to sleep again. When he goes to sleep, again he will dream. The whole night the disturbance continues. He can only sleep for those two hours when he does not dream. Another person in another room is being disturbed differently. Whenever he is not dreaming, he is disturbed, he is woken up – and then allowed to dream six hours without disturbance.This has been repeated many times in many psychological labs around the Western world and the conclusion, the result, is very strange – nobody had ever thought such a result would come out of it, not even the psychoanalysts had thought of it. The result is that the man whose dreams are disturbed is disturbed the whole day. He feels tired, tense, sad, depressed. He feels that he has not been able to sleep, he is utterly tired and because of the continuous disturbance the whole night, he wants to sleep again. The other person, whose sleep time was disturbed but not the dream time, has no problem. He gets up rejuvenated, fresh, with no tiredness.The conclusion is that you need dreams more than sleep. Your body, your physical well-being, depends on dreaming, not on sleep, which has been the traditional concept. Traditionally it has been understood that dreams are a kind of disturbance. Now the situation is totally different: dreams are not a disturbance, they are a tremendous help. But this is the Western mind and the experiment is confined to Western people. They should not apply their conclusion to the whole of humanity. Their conclusion belongs only to the Christians. A meditator starts dreaming less and less, and once you are at the very peak of meditation, dreams disappear.Primitive people, aboriginals, don’t dream at all. The East has not paid any attention to dreams because it would have been futile. There was not such a repressive attitude in the East before Christianity came. All the repression that you see today in India or in other Eastern countries is not part of its heritage. It has been brought by Christian missionaries. Although Hindus are not Christians, Christian ideology has penetrated every religion in the world. They may not have been able to convert everybody to Christianity, but they have fed their ideology into every mind.Just see: Hindus were perfectly at ease with the temples of Khajuraho. They never thought that they were pornographic. And today? Even if you wear slightly fewer clothes than you do now, that’s enough to disturb the Indians. It is not Indian culture; it is Indian culture polluted by Christianity. Before, Indians were never worried. All Indian gods have their wives but the Christian god has no wife.Before Mohammedanism – which is a by-product of Judaism, just as Christianity is – India was a totally different world, absolutely unrepressed. There was no question of repression at all. With Mohammedans, repression started entering the Indian mind, and with Christianity it became absolute. The Mohammedans invaded India about thirteen centuries ago. Alexander the Great had started the influx of invaders just two hundred years after Gautam Buddha, but there were no repressive ideologies preached to people then; people were more innocent. Hence, a method like vipassana – which is a Buddhist method – was possible for meditation: just by watching the mind silently, meditation happens.Meditation was not something arduous or difficult, but to the Western mind or even to the Eastern mind as it is today – absolutely overtaken by Western ideology – watching the mind is not easy. So much garbage and so much crap has been forced into the mind that you go almost crazy just watching it. It is a film which begins, but never ends. You can go on watching day in, day out, year in, year out and the mind is always ready to supply new images, new dreams.It is because of this I had to create a few devices – Dynamic, Kundalini, and others – before you could enter a silent witnessing meditation like vipassana. I have made devices to help you cathart, throw out your garbage rather than waste time in watching it.It can be thrown out by latihan – tremendously beautiful – but it is not a meditation; it is only a clearance. It can be done even better by Dynamic Meditation than by latihan – because latihan has some dangers which I have cut out of the meditation. Sometimes latihan people go mad because they cannot stop.It is an Indonesian method which became immensely successful in the fifties in Europe and America. It never became successful in the East because in the East – particularly in Indonesia, which is a backward country – there is nothing to cathart! The man who invented Latihan was Bapak Subuh. He called his philosophy subud. He has taken the word subud from Buddha, which means “the great awakening.” But latihan cannot bring the great awakening. It became fashionable in the West and then disappeared completely because it created many people who had to be put into mental asylums, for the simple reason that no stop is built into the process.Once you start latihan you are overtaken by the process of catharsis, and it goes on and on and you don’t know what to do; you are almost without control. But I have divided Dynamic Meditation into different sections. Latihan has to be done alone; Dynamic Meditation has to be done under instruction. Under instruction, after each ten-minute section, the process is changed. Then once you have learned it you can do it alone. So you are always in control. It never becomes so big as to take all control into its own hands. These devices are needed just to clear the rubbish that Christianity has created, and to bring you to a state of naturalness, simplicity.From there the only way is witnessing, which Buddha called vipassana. Vipassana means “looking at.” If you want to do vipassana, or any silent meditation, Dynamic Meditation becomes absolutely essential. Christianity has poisoned your mind, and that poison has to be thrown out. To throw it out, you have to go completely crazy; otherwise that craziness remains inside you and won’t allow you to get into silent, watching, witnessing meditation.So do some Dynamic Meditation, do some jogging, do some running, swimming and when you feel utterly tired, when you feel an intrinsic need to relax, you are free from Christianity. Then you can sit silently, then you can watch your mind – and not much is there. You have thrown out almost ninety-nine percent of it. Maybe here and there a few pieces are clinging because they are very old and have become glued to you – just watch them.Watching is a process of ungluing those small pieces hanging here and there in the mind. Once they also disappear, you don’t have a mind, you have a vast sky opening. That is the explosion, and that explosion will bring you to sat-chit-anand: to truth, to consciousness, to bliss.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 04 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I look at my life, it is richer and more fulfilled than I could have ever expected. I am filled with gratitude through all the love, understanding and sheer joy that being with you has brought me. Why then, Osho, do I think of death so longingly?Devageet, there are many things which have to be understood before you can see the answer to your question arising in your own consciousness. There are questions I cannot answer, but I can manage a situation around you, around your question, so that the answer arises within you. And only such answers are significant. It is a roundabout way. I could have given the answer directly, but then it wouldn’t be your answer. And I want every answer to be your own.Your question is yours: it has an individuality, a certain beauty, a certain aliveness. It comes out of your heart, just as a flower comes out of the juices of the tree. It is not something imposed from outside; it is something that grows from the very roots up to the top. Just as your question is yours, my whole effort here is that your answer should also be yours. So while I am answering you, this is the first thing to be understood: my answer is only a device to trigger your answer. I don’t want my answer to become your answer; then it will be borrowed and dead.Your question is very significant. It is not an ordinary question out of curiosity. Its significance also lies in its depth, in its existential meaningfulness. This question cannot be asked by each and everyone. Unless you have touched a certain depth within your being, only then is this question possible. Every question shows the heart of the questioner. Just by looking at your question, I can see what is happening within you. It must look very strange and absurd because you are saying, “When I look at my life, it is richer and more fulfilled than I could have ever expected.”This is the first thing to be remembered: whenever something beyond your expectations is fulfilled, you will always find a deep desire to die because, who knows, tomorrow may not bring the same contentment, the same joy, the same beauty, the same experience. It is better to die at this peak rather than in despair, in sadness, in misery. Why not die in a moment of celebration? Why not make death also a celebration? But that is possible only when you are at the peak of fulfillment; it is not possible when you are in the valleys and in darkness.So whenever you feel fulfilled, contented, more contented than you ever expected, you will find arising in you a natural, very spontaneous desire: this is the right moment to die, at the highest peak of my life. What more can there be? Why go on living? It is risky to live because one can always lose this height. It is risky to live because one can become accustomed to this joy, this happiness; one may start taking it for granted. It may become just an ordinary thing. One may forget that it is extraordinary and happens only very rarely to very, very few human beings. You may not be aware of all these considerations, but these are the reasons why the desire to die at such a moment arises.You are saying, “I am filled with gratitude for all the love, understanding and sheer joy that being with you has brought me. Why then, Osho, do I think of death so longingly?” It is one of those contradictions of existence, those mysteries of existence. For example, the poor man is never frustrated because he has something to hope for: tomorrow may bring good news. There is a possibility that tomorrow he may not be poor. It is the rich, the super-rich man, who becomes frustrated, because tomorrow is not going to be something different or new, something more than he has already. Tomorrow has become absolutely hopeless; hence the frustration.People in poor countries don’t suffer as much as far as the mind and consciousness is concerned. As the country becomes rich, logically one would expect that the people should become happier, more contented. Now the misery has gone: there is no starvation, there is medical care. Everything is good: you cannot expect more. But suddenly there is a sadness that starts settling in the rich countries, in rich societies. The sadness comes because they start forgetting the misery of starvation and they cannot see the future bringing any new meaning, any new flowers. Everything will now be static, routine.Hence more people commit suicide in rich countries than in poor countries. Logically it should be vice versa: in poor countries people should commit suicide, but they do not because they still have hope. Life today may not be meaningful, but who knows about tomorrow? Things change. They have seen poor people becoming rich, they have seen all kinds of changes happening. There is no need to feel hopeless because all the possibilities are open. They just have to make an effort. If they fail, it doesn’t matter; they must make more effort. But the idea of suicide does not arise at all.I have moved among the poor for decades. It is almost impossible to find a poor man asking about suicide, about meaninglessness, about frustration, about anguish, about angst. These are not their questions at all. These questions arise only at a certain stage of affluence, luxury, comfort. More people go insane in rich countries than in poor countries. The ratio is large, the difference is great.Even if in a poor country somebody does commit suicide or go insane – which is very rare – his reasons are totally different from the reasons of a rich man. The poor man may commit suicide, but not out of frustration, not out of meaninglessness, not out of discontent. He knows nothing of contentment and he is not tired of his discontent, because there is always a possibility that discontent may become contentment, the poverty may change. The people who commit suicide in poor countries are either retarded – they cannot manage to live, their minds are not able to cope with life and its situations – or they commit suicide because they are blind, crippled, paralyzed. But these are not the reasons in a rich society.The same is true of your spiritual life. You feel it as a question. I feel it as the sheer outcome of your joy, fulfillment, contentment. To me it is a beautiful experience, not a question, not a problem to be solved, but something to be understood. It is indicative that you are coming closer and closer to the ultimate sat-chit-anand, to the truth, to the explosion of consciousness, to the highest peak of bliss. Just before one is coming close to home, one starts feeling as if one has arrived. But it is only “as if.” It is so beautiful that one cannot think things can be even better.But I want you to still be discontented. I want you to still hope because I know there is much more that is possible for you than you can conceive. I can conceive it because I have known much more and I know that there is no limit to growth. But this point comes to every seeker and searcher at some stage. And this has to be passed, otherwise it can become a danger. It has to be transformed into an indication. It is simply an indication that you have come to the very limit of your mind.But you are more than your mind. Beyond the mind, there are no limits at all. Then there are skies upon skies, and as you move over one peak, you have another peak immediately confronting you. This existence is inexhaustible. And when I say this, I am saying it with absolute authority, because I have passed through the moment about which you are asking. I have also felt at one time, “What more can there be? Why go on unnecessarily breathing, why go on every day getting up, knowing perfectly well that what has to happen has happened?” Now it is sheer habit that every evening you have to go to sleep, every morning you have to get up. What is the point of it all?But I have lived through a very strange space. I have never accepted any limit to anything. When this moment came to me, I insisted that I could not accept that this is all. Life must be much more. And what is the harm in searching? You can die tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. What is the hurry? Why today?So the first thing is: you are free to die any time. There is no problem, but it is better to inquire more, to investigate more, to explore more. And I promise you that soon you will be surprised to find that at the moment when the desire to die was so strong, you were simply passing through the boundary line of your mind, going beyond the mind into the no-mind. In fact, once you have passed this point, you will know for the first time what real life is.Fulfillment, contentment, feeling richer are all irrelevant. Life is much more. It cannot be confined to these small words: gratitude, love, understanding, sheer joy. Once you have passed through all of them, you will be surprised that there is so much to existence for which no word exists in any language, and which mind has no capacity to understand. Certainly it is not contentment – contentment is a very poor word. It is not just joy, it is not just love. It is so much more that I can only say that these words are like a teaspoon, and with the teaspoon you are trying to empty the ocean.It happened…One of the great philosophers of Greece, Plato, was a contemporary of Diogenes. They were continuously in controversy because Diogenes was a mystic and he knew things which Plato could not even dream of, although Plato was a great philosopher. In the books and the histories of philosophy, you will find Plato, but you will not find Diogenes. But the real thing was with Diogenes not with Plato, who was a great thinker, a giant intellectual. Diogenes was a simple, childlike, innocent man, but he knew something which thousands of Platos together could not know.One day, when Plato was on a morning walk by the side of the sea, he saw a man. It was early in the morning, a little dark – the sun had not risen yet. He could not figure out who the man was. This man was Diogenes and in a spoon he was bringing… He would go to the ocean, take the water in the spoon – he had made a small hole in the sand – pour the water into the sand, and then go back.Plato, standing there, saw him doing it. He looked like a madman. For a moment he thought, “I should not interfere.” But such is the mind – it becomes curious. “Maybe he is not mad; perhaps he is doing something meaningful and I am not aware of it. And what is wrong if I ask him?” So he said, “Please forgive me for interrupting. I don’t want to interrupt you – you may be involved in some great work – but what is going on?”Diogenes said, “I am trying to empty the ocean.”Plato said, “My God, with that spoon?”Then the sun was rising. Diogenes started laughing and said, “Plato, are you doing anything else?” Then Plato recognized Diogenes. He used to live naked, but that day he was covered with a cloth, just to hide himself, so Plato did not know him at first. Otherwise he might not have interrupted.Plato was simply stunned, he could not answer. Diogenes said, “That’s what you are trying to do. Your mind is nothing but a teaspoon and with it you are trying to exhaust the oceanic existence. What I am doing is just to remind you. I know it is not possible. You should also remember that what you are doing is impossible.”It is fortunate to come to such a point when one feels so happy that one would like to die. But my suggestion is to wait a little, because I know something more than that. I have passed that point, and the day I passed that point, for the first time life opened all its mysteries to me. Since then, not for a single moment has the desire to die arisen in me, for the simple fact that now I know there is no death. There is more life and more life and more life – there is no end to this inexhaustible existence.Hymie and Becky are on holiday in Florida when one night a hurricane hits the coast. Becky gets extremely upset and cannot sleep a wink. Hymie, however, is sleeping soundly.“Hymie,” cries Becky shaking him awake, “the house is rocking as if it’s going to blow away.”“Relax,” says Hymie, “go to sleep. We are only renting it.”All the houses that you have rented have blown away many times. This time also you are renting a house, and it will blow away one day. But you are going to continue.You are an eternal pilgrim. Your pilgrimage is not going to end anywhere. The pilgrimage itself is the goal, there is no goal to the pilgrimage.The elderly man goes to visit a physician for a check-up. The doctor notices that his hands are shaking like leaves in the wind. “You must drink a lot,” says the doctor.“No, I don’t,” says the old guy, “I spill most of it.”Come to such a point when you start spilling most of it. Don’t be contented so early. It is not even the beginning yet.Osho,Once a week I cook unfertilized fried eggs for the whole commune's breakfast in order that everybody's brain becomes sharper and more intelligent. However, after cooking one thousand fried eggs, I don't feel like eating any myself. Is it okay for me to drop improving my brain and just enjoy its lack of activity?A writer had been out too late the night before, and in the wrong places. Nursing a magnificent hangover, he stops at a small restaurant for breakfast. “What will you have?” asked the waiter.“All I want is two fried eggs and some kind words,” says the bleary-eyed writer.Presently, the waiter returns with two pale-looking fried eggs. “Here are your eggs, sir,” he says. “And now for the kind words: don’t eat them.”Osho,The other morning in discourse I was overwhelmed by your clarity and your beauty and grace, and felt so grateful and vulnerable. Thank you, Osho. I also realize that I am still not seeing your total radiance and splendor. This brings sadness and frustration. Osho, is it true that without being enlightened we cannot see you as you really are – sat-chit-anand? Can we only catch a glimpse?One has to learn a little patience. Everything that has ever happened to any human being is going to happen to you because you have all the potential. You contain all the Gautam Buddhas, all the Jesuses, all the Socrateses. You contain the whole potential of humanity within you. And if you can see in me a certain clarity, beauty, grace, and if you can feel grateful and vulnerable, then you are on the right track. That’s how one starts growing slowly.It is true when you say, “Osho, I also realize that I am still not seeing your total radiance and splendor.” But you are fortunate even to see a glimpse; there are millions of people in the world who will not be able to see even that glimpse. On the contrary, they will only see everything evil that man has ever imagined but no glimpse of splendor, no glimpse of clarity, no glimpse of grace. They see only fear, danger – danger to their morality, danger to their religion, danger to all they think is valuable.There are millions of people who would like to destroy me. It is really a miracle that I am still alive in spite of those millions of people whose deepest desire is expressed by the United States Attorney General. He told a press conference, “Osho should never be seen by anyone, never be heard by anyone. In short, I want him to be completely silenced.” That’s all he wants.The way he said it was so absolutely violent that the journalist who was interviewing him asked, “Do you want him to be murdered or assassinated?”For a moment the Attorney General remained silent and then said, “Not exactly. But we have more sophisticated methods to silence him.” Now he is not simply speaking his own mind. He is expressing the minds of many.So you should be happy, not sad, that you don’t belong to those millions. You should feel fortunate, not frustrated, that at least you are capable of seeing a faraway glimpse of the Himalayas. Just a little patience, a little closeness, a little more love, a little more gratitude, a little more openness, and you will start moving toward the ultimate splendor. It is not my property. It came into existence when I was no more. It is the property of existence itself.So don’t be at all sad. There are many present here who have come far closer than you, who have looked into me more deeply than you. They are not in any way more special than you. They have just been patient – years of patience, years of silence, years of meditation, but this is nothing compared to the eternity of time. One day you will find that you have come so close that you can touch the beauty, you can touch the truth, you can dance in the music of eternal consciousness. You can be showered by flowers of bliss.Yes, sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss. All are possible to you. In fact, they are your birthright. You just have to claim them; the claim needs a little patience.There is a Sufi story…A king was passing by a nursery that belonged to a poor gardener. He looked at the poor gardener and stopped his horse. He had stopped for a special reason. He had wanted to stop many times. He used to pass through that beautiful place where the poor gardener’s nursery was because it was the most beautiful way to the palace.Today he could not contain his curiosity. The curiosity was that the man looked so old; certainly he had passed a century. Perhaps he was one hundred and twenty or even more. He looked so old and yet he was preparing small plants and working the whole day on those plants – plants of trees which take at least one hundred years to grow to their full height.Their life span is long; they live at least four thousand years. After one hundred years they are still children. They can count on a life span of four thousand years, but only after one hundred years do they start flowering – not before that. And after one thousand years, they start giving fruit.The king was puzzled: this man seemed to be at least one hundred and twenty years old. “Is he mad, or what? He cannot expect to see the flowers of those trees, to say nothing of the fruit. And he is working so hard in his old age, the whole day in the hot sun” – it was a desert land.He stopped and went close to the old man and said, “I watch you every day, and I see how hard you work, but a question… Every day I go on repressing it, not wanting to interfere. But you will have to forgive me – I want to ask one thing: Do you think you will be able to see the flowers of these plants?”The old man laughed. He said, “No, I will not be able to see the flowers of these plants. But do you see, just behind my hut, those huge trees, thousands of years old? They are the same trees. They are giving me fruit, they are giving me flowers.”The king said, “I can see them, but I still don’t understand. What do you mean by talking about those trees?”The man said, “If my parents or my forefathers had also thought that they would not be able to see the flowers, to say nothing about the fruit, those trees would not be there. I am not thinking about myself. I am thinking about my forefathers and about future children. I owe them something.“If my forefathers were so patient that they could be happy that some children whom they could never know would enjoy the fruit and the flowers of those beautiful trees… Do you think I am a worse human being than my forefathers? Can’t I think also of someone, far away in the future, being thankful to me?”The king wrote in his biography, “The old gardener has shocked me with his patience, with his infinite love and compassion and trust.”Somebody, someday, is bound to see the flowers, and as far as your inner growth is concerned it is not a question of somebody else seeing the flowers – you are going to see them. Can’t you be patient – just a little patient?Just today I received a letter from Amrito, one of my old sannyasins in Holland. He is a famous Dutch writer, with all possible qualifications, degrees, honorary degrees. He has written many books, including at least eight books on me. Today I received a letter saying he is writing another book on me and in just a few days is coming here for my blessings. The title of the book is Ten Years of Preparation. Ten years ago he became a sannyasin, and still he calls those ten years just a preparation.This patience is needed. In a hurry, you can get only seasonal flowers. They come and go. The deeper your patience, the greater will be your growth, there is no need to be frustrated or to be sad. Not even a single sannyasin, if he is honest and sincere in his search, is going to fail. Success is absolutely sure and guaranteed.But you have to remember that it is not the path of the curious, it is not the path of information gatherers. It is the path of those who are ready to go through the transformation, who are ready to drop their personalities, their defense measures, who are ready to open their hearts to receive the light that is rising on the horizon. It is simply a case of receptivity, sensitivity, sincerity, and an honest search.Your success is sure.Miss Bradshaw, a comely high school teacher, had saved money for several years and was finally aboard a sleek ocean liner for her long-anticipated trip to Europe.Aboard ship she wrote: “Dear Diary…Monday: I felt singularly honored this evening – the captain asked me to dine at his table.Tuesday: I spent the entire morning on the bridge with the captain.Wednesday: the captain made proposals to me unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman.Thursday: tonight the captain threatened to sink the ship if I do not give in to his indecent proposals.Friday: this afternoon I saved one thousand, six hundred lives.”Just wait. It is only a question of saving your own life, not the lives of one thousand, six hundred people. Here I am not the savior; here everybody is a savior – not of anybody else, but of himself. For the first time in the whole history of mankind we are making a new effort to give the respect, the dignity and the responsibility to every person to save himself.For centuries this dignity was not given to human beings. Krishna was trying to save Hindus and Christ was trying to save Christians. Everybody was trying to save somebody else. And they have not been able to transform the world. Krishna failed, Buddha failed, Jesus failed, Moses failed. When I say they failed, I don’t mean they failed in their own enlightenment, I mean they failed in their promises to humanity. They were absolutely successful as far as they were concerned.But the moment they started telling people, “I will save you, I am the savior, I am the prophet, I am the messenger, I am the incarnation of God,” then they misled people. People stopped seeking, searching on their own. They just hoped that if they believed in Krishna, in Buddha, in Jesus, then it would not be their responsibility to transform themselves into a new and higher state of consciousness. This has not happened. It is in this sense that I say that all the saviors of the past have failed. And I don’t want to belong to the failures. I am not a savior. I have saved myself – I think that’s enough. Now you save yourself.Osho,I have never been near so much authentic laughter as I have here in your presence. As I make myself available to the laughter happening around me, I notice myself withdraw and become serious. Inside I long to let go and to become a part of the laughter around me, but my mind and body resist.Why do I feel incapable of authentic laughter? And, is there a way for me to regain my natural capacity to let go in a belly laugh?Anurag Saleen, you are a victim, but you are not alone. Almost the whole of humanity is a victim: victims of pretensions, victims of having to wear masks, victims of not being natural. Being unnatural pays because society gives respect to the false; society is not respectful to the authentic and to the real. The false can be controlled, and society is deeply interested in controlling everybody. But the authentic cannot be controlled, so society is very much afraid of those people who are authentic, real, themselves, because they cannot be enforced into slavery, into obedience, into being oppressed or exploited.The desire for reward keeps society respecting the false and because the false is respected, each small child slowly starts following the false. Parents teach this, teachers teach this: the whole effort is to mold you in a certain way that is acceptable to everybody. The end result is a phony world, where nobody is real, where smiles are false, where love is only a word.Just today I received news from England. A survey has been made of people aged between five and twenty-five. A single question was asked, “What two values do you think are the most significant and important in life?” And it is shocking to see the answers from the five-year-olds right up to the twenty-five-year-olds. The answers are: money and success. These two things are the most important in life: not love, not laughter, not meditation, not blissfulness, not even God – money and success.But in a world where money and success are everything, you cannot be authentic – it is dangerous. You will have to repress your individuality and compromise at every step for success, compromise at every step for money.I am reminded of a young man. His name was Subhash Chandra. He became a great revolutionary and I have tremendous respect for him because he was the only man in India who opposed Mahatma Gandhi. He could see that all this mahatmahood is simply politics and nothing else. Indians believe themselves to be very religious. It is just a belief – nobody is religious. Mahatma Gandhi was playing the role of a saint simply to become the leader of the majority in the country as all those who thought they were religious were bound to be in favor of Mahatma Gandhi. Just one single man, Subhash, opposed him and immediately the phoniness was apparent. What happened was this:Mahatma Gandhi used to say, “I am beyond love and hate. I am beyond anger, violence.” That was his whole philosophy to go beyond violence and become nonviolent, become so loving that you love even your enemy.Subhash was well-known for not being in agreement with Mahatma Gandhi, although he was in the same party. There was only one party which was fighting for the freedom of the country, so all freedom lovers were in that party. Subhash stood as a candidate to be the president of Congress, and immediately Mahatma Gandhi’s phoniness was revealed.On the one hand he was teaching that you have to love your enemy, but on seeing that if Subhash became the president of Congress, he would be dangerous to his philosophy and to his leadership, he became a totally different kind of man. Subhash did not believe in hypocrisy, and there was a possibility of his winning. The only man who could defeat him was Mahatma Gandhi himself, but that would bring him down, right down, from his great saintliness.So what he did was this: he supported a certain man, Doctor Pattabhi Sitaramayya, as his candidate. He thought that because he was declaring him as his candidate, the doctor would certainly win. Subhash was very much loved by young people, by the young blood, but this fellow, Doctor Pattabhi, was absolutely unknown. He was an obedient follower of Mahatma Gandhi, so he would serve him, but he was not known to the country.Subhash was almost a lion. He fought and, unbelievably, he won. Gandhi forgot all his philosophy. He did not participate in the gathering where Subhash was declared president. In fact, Subhash proved to be a far greater man. Seeing that Gandhi was trying to create a split in Congress – which would be a split in the movement for the liberation of the country – he resigned from the presidency, just so that the movement would remain united. He sacrificed himself completely and not wanting to get into a fight, he moved out of the country.He had shown this sincerity from the very beginning. He was educated in England, belonged to a very rich family of Bengal, was going to be one of the top bureaucrats. He was trained for the Indian Civil Service in Britain, as were all top bureaucrats, most of whom were English. Very rarely was an Indian chosen – not more than one percent. Otherwise, on some small excuse, Indians were rejected.Shree Aurobindo was rejected and you will not believe on what grounds. He had come first in every subject, he was one of the geniuses of this century. Only in horse riding he could not succeed. But what has horse riding got to do with being a top officer? This was the strategy: he was a scholar and he became world famous, but he was rejected. Every method was tried to reject Indians.But they could not manage to reject Subhash. He managed to overcome all their strategies, so very reluctantly Britain accepted Subhash for the Indian Civil Service. One thing more remained, which was a formality: every ICS officer had to appear for a personal interview before the governor-general. It was just a formality once you had passed the examination. Subhash entered the office of the governor-general.Bengalis always carry an umbrella – no one knows why. Whether it is raining or not, whether it is hot or not, even in winter when there is no need. They may just carry it by their side, but they will carry it – an umbrella is absolutely necessary for a Bengali. If you see anybody carrying an umbrella, you understand that he is a Bengali. Now, there is no need to carry an umbrella into the office of the viceroy; at least you should leave it outside. But Bengalis will not leave their umbrellas anywhere.Subhash kept his hat on, carried his umbrella into the office, and took a chair. The governor-general was very angry. He said, “Young man, you don’t understand manners. Who passed you in the ICS examinations?”Subhash said, “What manners?”The governor-general said, “You have not taken off your hat and you have not asked my permission to sit down.”The governor-general was not aware what kind of man Subhash was. He immediately picked up his umbrella and hooked it round the governor-general’s neck. They were alone in the office, so…Subhash told the governor-general, “If you want manners, then you should also learn manners. You remained sitting; you should have stood first as I was a guest. You did not remove your hat, so why should I remove mine? You did not ask my permission to go on sitting, so why should I ask your permission? Who do you think you are? At the most you can reject me for the ICS, but I will not leave it in your hands. I don’t want to join the service.”And he went out of the office, leaving the governor-general almost in shock – he had never dreamed that anybody could do such a thing.Society is afraid of anyone who has dignity, self-respect. Society wants you to be obedient, to be servile, to be compromising, to be always ready to surrender in every situation. It does not want you to be rebellious. But individuality is intrinsically rebellious; you cannot do anything about it. The only way is to keep it under a blanket of personality, to cover it from every nook and corner, and not allow it even a window to breathe.So everybody is suffering inside. A closed, invisible wall of personality is surrounding you that does not allow you, Anurag Saleen, to gain your naturalness, your spontaneity, to have a belly laugh, even though here nobody is preventing you. In fact, here it is impossible to go on holding yourself, controlling yourself, and not be spontaneous and relaxed. This is not your usual society. All these people are rebellious individuals. But even here, you are carrying your mind, your unconscious, your conditioning. You will have to put it aside. Others may not be able to help in your ultimate salvation, but others can help you have a belly laugh.So whoever is sitting by the side of Anurag Saleen, please help her. Tickle her! It is just a question of breaking her barriers. So tonight, I am telling this joke for Anurag, wherever she is. If she does not want to be helped by others, she should relax and have a good laugh. Otherwise, if you see anybody who is not joining in, tickle. There may be others besides Anurag who will be helped.Hymie Goldberg is drafted to fight in Ronald Reagan’s latest war with Iran. However, he manages to convince the draft board officer that he is half blind and is sent home.That evening, Hymie goes to the cinema and when the lights come on he notices that a member of the draft board is sitting next to him. Without a moment’s hesitation Hymie taps him on the shoulder and asks, “Excuse me, madam, is this the train for New Jersey?”Now look for Saleen. And if you find anybody who is not laughing, tickle them. Don’t be shy.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 05 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Finally I have come home to myself with a silence and serenity never known before. I feel like a flower bud ready to open, yet I do not feel in touch with the energy of love and joy that would allow this flower to bloom. It is almost as if I have not yet fully opened my heart to myself.Osho, am I missing something, or is it just a matter of time?Flowers don’t open to themselves – otherwise they could have opened in the middle of the night. They open to a rising sun in deep welcome, in gratitude and prayer. They open to the songs of the birds.You are trying to do something utterly stupid. You are trying to open your heart to yourself. Do you understand what it means? How can you open your heart to yourself? Who are you other than your heart? If you are trying to open your heart to yourself, it will close more and more. You are the center of the heart. The petals will have to come close to you, become a bud; even the open flower will start closing.This is something very significant to understand: you can open to existence, but not to yourself. You are the one who is the barrier. But you seem to be accustomed to the old human habit of making somebody else responsible.I will read your question: “Finally I have come home to myself with a silence and serenity never known before.” Remember – underline the word myself. When one really comes home, no self is found. Gautam Buddha has to use a negative word, anatta. Anatta means “no-self.” When you really come home, you are not to be found at all. If you are still finding yourself, you have not come home. Your absence is the home. Your ego is taking you astray, and just to prevent you from coming home it will give you the sense that you have come home, it will give you some false substitute of a home. But this has to be remembered as a definitive criterion: when you come home you never come to yourself. You come to the ultimate. You come to sat-chit-anand. You come to truth. You come to consciousness. You come to bliss.But in the world of truth, consciousness, and bliss, where are you going to find this rat you call “myself”? I knowingly use the word rat because rats have been found, scientifically, to survive under any conditions. They eat almost one-fifth of humanity’s food. One-fifth – twenty percent – is a large portion, while half of humanity is starving. And rats grow fast; their birthrate is higher than India’s. They don’t believe in birth control at all; they are all followers of the Vatican Pope; they are all Catholics.There has been a very revealing result of an experiment somewhere on a small island in the ocean where both America and France have been testing atomic weapons, nuclear weapons. The whole island has no population, except rats. All the trees have died. There is a tremendous amount of atomic radiation there which can kill any human being – but the rats have not died. They quickly became immune to any radiation. It was thought that in the Third World War all life would disappear. Now it is known that rats will live on, Third World War or no Third World War. All kinds of poisons have been used on rats to save crops. The rats did not die, but the people who ate those crops died.Your ego is just like a rat. It has the immunity and the ability to adapt to any situation. You want serenity? You want silence? You want to come back home? Whatever you want, just name it and your ego will give it to you. But anything that is centered on “myself” is going to be wrong.Remember: no-self is your reality, your authentic reality. And how can you be silent with yourself? The self is the cause of all chaos in you, the self is the cause of all anxiety and misery in you. How can you be silent and find serenity? Your ego is deceiving you. If one has to beware of any enemy, it is the ego, it is the self. You have not come home yet.You say, “I feel like a flower bud ready to open, yet I do not feel in touch with the energy of love and joy that would allow this flower to bloom.” From where are you going to be in touch with the energy of love and joy? From yourself? Yourself is a false entity; it has no energy and no love. If you want energy and love for the nourishment of the bud that you feel, then you have to be open to all dimensions of existence and allow existence to reach to you: in the sunrays, in the songs of the birds – just listen to their chit-chat – to the trees, to the mountains, to the moon, to the stars, to all living beings, particularly to human beings.You have to become a receptacle. The ego never wants to be a receptive entity – it goes against the egoistic structure, it goes against its pride. The ego can give, but it cannot take. But it has nothing to give. Unless you take from existence, you have nothing to give. Before giving you have to learn getting.Be open to existence, to the starry night, to the day full of flowers, full of the rays of the sun, to human beings, who are all potential buddhas. Throw open all your doors and windows and the bud will start opening on its own accord. Do you think any gardener goes to a bud and tries to open it? If you try to open a bud forcibly, it will be crippled, distorted, something aborted. If you do not allow it to open on its own accord, you will destroy all possibility of having a beautiful flower. Every bud opens on its own accord. It just has to grow and be ready when the sun rises. Just wait for the sun.Again, you are saying, “It is almost as if I have not yet fully opened my heart to myself.” I wonder that you could not see your question and its utter stupidity. To open to yourself? That is almost like trying to fly by pulling on your shoestrings. Rather than opening the bud, you may destroy it. You will fall flat on the earth and forget all about buds and flowers.The ways of the ego are very subtle and very clever. Then you say, “Osho, am I missing something” – you are missing everything – “or is it just a matter of time?” Don’t throw the responsibility on time. What does poor time have to do with you? Time will not open your bud.You need to be aware that the simple process of opening is always toward the beyond. Opening cannot be toward yourself – that’s an absurdity. If you understand what I am saying, then you will be aware that you are full of words which you don’t understand.The question you have formulated has not arisen in your being. You have tried hard to make it very beautiful. You have used good words, but words are empty unless they have content. You cannot deceive me; in your question I can read your whole biography – not only the past but something of the future too. If you go on this way, you will never reach what you call your home and you will never blossom. You will never know what spring is.You will have to change your whole approach. Right now you seem to be very knowledgeable. But knowledge is all rubbish. You don’t have any experience of anything, even of the bud you are talking about. There is nothing like a bud in you. In this wrong situation which surrounds you, there cannot be. Your ego is too strong – it would crush any bud. Your ego is just like a bulldozer. Poor rosebuds cannot stand against a bulldozer.If you change from all this knowledgeability and accept your ignorance about the path, about the workings of your mind, then meditation will still be missing – and meditation needs patience.Right now, without meditation, you are already a bud. You are already hoping to open unto yourself, which is really unique because in the whole of history, no mystic has talked about opening unto “yourself.” Everything is possible – you just have to remove the hindrances: the greatest hindrance is the ego; the second hindrance is knowledgeability without experience; the third hindrance is imagination without seeing clearly that there is no bud yet. I can see this. I don’t know where you are, who you are, but I can see through your question – the bud cannot be there. Your question is very revealing. You have not reached home, perhaps some caravanserai – an overnight stay – but in the morning you have to move on.Home is when everything stops – time and mind – and nothing moves. Home is an eternal moment which begins but never ends. Home is when there is absolute nothingness: no self, no I. Only in this nothingness can buds of silence and serenity grow. And if you are open toward the universe, then it showers nourishment, and all buds start opening on their own accord.Meditate, so that you can go beyond mind and self. Certainly meditation will take a little time because you are so full of bullshit. First you will have to clean the ground. Your misunderstanding is tremendous.Chiang Kai-shek, the dictator of China before Mao Zedong came to power, was one of the most powerful people on the earth. When Mao removed him from power he escaped to Formosa, a private resort for the dictator.He changed the name of Formosa to Taiwan and made it the capital of China. The whole of China was gone, but he made this small island the capital and continued to remain the dictator. There was no China in his hands, yet because of American support, Mainland China was not represented in the UN. Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan represented China in the UN for many years – you cannot believe what kind of politicians are sitting on your chest.This man Chiang Kai-shek when he was dethroned in utter desperation, old age, sickness – he had passed ninety – was being interviewed in Taipei by an American reporter from Newsweek.“And when was the last time you had an election, General?” the reporter asked.Chiang Kai-shek winked and said, “Just before bleakfast.”People’s egos are such, even at the age of ninety. That idiot is saying he had an erection just before breakfast.There is a loud knock on the door and the psychiatrist hurries to answer it. “Doc,” says a frightened voice, “I must talk to you about my brother. He breaks thermometers, drinks the mercury and throws away the glass.”“What?” shrieks the horrified shrink. “He throws away the glass? That’s the best part!”There are psychoanalysts who are far more insane than their patients but because they have qualifications, certificates, the ego goes on playing its games. The ego enjoys degrees – PhD’s and DLitt’s – very much, but psychoanalysts never look at the fact that they are either neurotic or psychotic themselves. It is a known fact that they go mad four times more often than any other profession. It is strange. These are the people who are supposed to help humanity out of all kinds of neurosis, psychosis, but they themselves go to the mental asylum four times more than any profession in the world.And every psychiatrist – it is hilarious – once in a while goes to another psychiatrist to be psychoanalyzed. After six, eight months, they themselves need psychoanalysis. Now on what grounds can these people help those who are in real need of help? But the ego never even suspects that something may be wrong. It always pretends to be right.The meditator is the only person in the whole world who begins his first step with a deep feeling of “I am ignorant. I don’t know anything.” With this ignorance, innocence comes side by side. With this ignorance, all the crap of your knowledge and words and imagination drops away. With this ignorance, slowly, slowly you settle into being just like a child, with a clarity, a purity, a silence, an alertness.All that is needed is a deep recognition that you know nothing, a recognition that your ego is not you. You are simply the silence which has been taken over by the ego. You are a land conquered by an enemy and you are being identified with the enemy.Everything is possible, but you have to begin from the right point with humbleness, with openness, with receptivity – and a silence and a patience and a trust will arise on their own accord. Yes, many, many flowers will blossom in your being too, but first you have to put things right.Osho,Some people do things instinctively. Is instinct the same as intuition? Or is instinct animal-like and intuition only human?Osho, please comment on the difference, if there is a difference.Instead of two words, you will have to understand three words, because you have a past and you have a present and you have a future. Instinct is what belongs to your animal past. It is very old, very solid. It is the inheritance of millions of years. And when I say it is animal-like, I am not condemning it. With the word animal the priests of all religions have associated some condemnation, but I am simply stating a fact, no condemnation at all.Our past was an animal past. We have passed through all kinds of animals. Our evolution has been from fish to man, passing through all the species of animals. It has been a long, long journey to arrive at mankind.Intellect is human: it is our present. That’s how we function, through intellect. All our sciences, all our businesses, all our professions, whatever is going on in the world – our politics, our religion, our philosophy – are all based on intellect. Intellect is human.Instinct is almost infallible because it is so old, so ripe, so mature. Your eyes are blinking; are you doing it? They go on doing it by themselves. Your heart is beating, your breathing is going in and out: this is instinct. It is not up to your intellect to look after all these essential things of life. They are in the hands of instinct because instinct is absolutely infallible. It never forgets to breathe, it never forgets anything.But intellect is very fallible; it is very new, a very recent arrival. It is just groping in the dark, still trying to find out what it is, where it belongs. And because it does not have roots in experience, it substitutes experience with beliefs, philosophies, ideologies. They become the focus of intellect, but they are all fallible because they are all man-made, manufactured by some clever guy. They are not applicable in every situation. They may be right in one situation and in another situation they may not be right. But intellect is blind, it doesn’t know how to deal with the new. It always brings the old answer to the new question.Paddy and Sean are sitting opposite the local whorehouse in Dublin, discussing the virtues of the Catholic faith. Suddenly Gideon Greenberg, the local rabbi, approaches the door, looks left and right, then hurries up the stairs.“Did you see that?” roars Paddy. “I’m glad I am a Catholic.”Ten minutes later, the Anglican priest approaches the door, looks around quickly, then dashes up the stairs.“Another hypocrite,” laughs Paddy. “Thank God I am a Catholic.”A few minutes later Sean nudges Paddy and says, “Hey, man, look! Father O’Murphy is coming this way.”The two men watch in stunned silence as the Catholic priest disappears up the stairs into the whorehouse. Suddenly Paddy jumps to his feet, crosses himself and shouts at Sean, “Where is your respect? Stand up and take off your hat. There must be a death in the house!”Now the whole thing has changed. Intellect lives through prejudices; it is never fair. Just by its very nature it cannot be because it has no experience. Instinct is always fair and shows you exactly the natural way, the relaxed way, and the one that the universe follows. But strangely, instinct has been condemned by all religions and intellect has been praised. Of course, if everybody follows instinct, there is no need of any religion, no need of any God, no need of any priest.Animals don’t need God and they are perfectly happy. I don’t see that they are missing God. Not a single animal, not a single bird, not a single tree is missing God. They are all enjoying life in its utter beauty and simplicity, with no fear of hell and no greed for heaven, no philosophical differences. There are no Catholic lions, there are no Protestant lions and no Hindu lions.The whole of existence must be laughing at man, at what has happened to man. If birds can live without religions and churches, mosques and temples, why can’t man? The birds never fight religious wars, neither do the animals nor the trees. But if you are a Mohammedan and I am a Hindu, we cannot coexist. Either you have to become converted to my religion or – be ready – I will send you to heaven immediately! The fact is, if instinct is praised, religions lose any rationality, any reason to exist. Hence they praise intellect.And the third thing, which is your future, is intuition. These three words have to be understood.Instinct is physical. Your past – based on the experience of millions of years, infallible – never commits any mistake and does miracles in you of which you are not even aware. How does your food become blood? How does your breathing go on functioning even when you are asleep? How does your body separate oxygen from nitrogen? How does the instinctive world of nature go on giving to every part of your body what it needs? How much oxygen is needed in your head for the mind to function? The exact amount is sent through blood running all around the body, distributing fresh oxygen, taking out the old, used, dead cells, replacing them with new ones and taking them back to places from where they can be disposed of.Have you ever thought why you don’t feel pain when you cut your nails, or why you don’t feel pain when you cut your hair? They are dead cells of your body and this is the way instinct disposes of them. If they were living, then they would hurt just as if you had cut your finger. You would feel wounded and you would feel immense pain. But when you cut your hair, you don’t feel anything because the hairs are already dead.The scientists say that what instinct does for man, we are not yet capable of doing. And in a small body the instinct does so many miracles. If someday science is going to do the work of a single human body, it will need at least one square mile of factory space for a single human being and tremendous machinery. And still it will not be infallible. Machinery can break down, stop, or the electricity can go off.But for seventy years continuously, or even one hundred years for a few people, or even one hundred and eighty years for very few people, the instinct goes on functioning perfectly well: the electricity never goes off. Not a single mistake is committed; everything goes according to plan. The plan is in every cell of your body. Scientists are trying to read it, but because it is in code language, nobody knows how to read it. They are still trying to figure it out.The day we can read the human cells, we will be able to predict everything about a child, even before it is born, even before it is in the mother’s womb. The father’s sperm has a program and in that program your age, your health, what kind of diseases you will have, your genius, your intelligence, your talents, your whole destiny is contained.On the other polarity of your being, beyond the mind – which is the world of intellect – is the world of intuition. Intuition opens its doors through meditation. Meditation is simply knocking on the doors of intuition. Intuition is complete; it does not grow. Just like instinct, you have inherited it from existence.Intuition is your consciousness, your being; intellect is your mind; instinct is your body.Just as instinct functions perfectly as regards the body, intuition functions perfectly as far as your consciousness is concerned. Intellect is just between these two – a passage to be passed, a bridge to be crossed. But there are many people, many millions of people, who never cross the bridge. They simply sit on the bridge thinking they have arrived home.The home is on the further shore, beyond the bridge. The bridge joins instinct and intuition. But it all depends on you. You may start building a house on the bridge – then you have gone astray. Intellect is not going to be your home. It is a very small instrument to be used only for passing from instinct to intuition. So only the person who uses his intellect to go beyond it can be called intelligent. Intuition is existential, instinct is natural. Intellect is just groping in the dark. The faster you move beyond intellect, the better.When Billy Graham sang “All I want is Jesus,” five thousand people joined the Protestant church.When Pope the Polack sang “Ave Maria,” ten thousand people joined the Catholic church.When Frank Sinatra sang “There’s a gold mine in the sky,” one hundred thousand Jews joined the Air Force.Intellect functions that way. And Jews are intelligent people – if there is a gold mine in the sky, why waste time here? Immediately join the Air Force!Intellect can be a barrier to those who think there is nothing beyond it. Intellect can be a beautiful way to those who understand that there is certainly something beyond it. Science has stopped at intellect. That’s why it cannot figure out anything about consciousness.Intellect without an awakened intuition is one of the most dangerous things in the world. And we are living under the danger of intellect because intellect has given science immense power. But the power is in the hands of children, not in the hands of wise people. Intuition makes a man wise. Call it enlightenment, call it awakening; those are simply different names for wisdom. Only in the hands of wisdom can intellect be used as a beautiful servant. And instinct and intuition function together perfectly well: one on the physical level, another on the spiritual level.The whole problem of humanity is getting stuck in the middle, in the mind, in the intellect. Then you will have misery, you will have anxiety, you will have agony and you will have meaninglessness. You will have all kinds of tensions that seem to have no solution anywhere.Intellect makes everything a problem and knows no solution at all. Instinct never creates any problem and does not need any solution because it simply functions naturally. Intuition is pure solution. It has no problems, whereas intellect has no solution, only problems. If you rightly see the division, it is very simple to understand: unless instinct is available, you are dead. Unless intuition is available, your life has no meaning – you just drag on. It is a kind of vegetation.Intuition brings meaning, splendor, joy, blessings. Intuition gives you the secrets of existence, brings a tremendous silence, serenity, which cannot be disturbed and which cannot be taken away from you. And with instinct and intuition functioning together, you can also use your intellect for right purposes. Otherwise you have only means but no ends.Intellect has no idea of any ends. This has created today’s situation in the world. Science goes on producing things but it does not know why. Politicians go on using those things, not knowing that they are destructive, that they are preparing for a global suicide. The world needs a tremendous rebellion that can take it beyond intellect into the silences of intuition.The very word intuition has to be understood. You know the word tuition. Tuition comes from outside, somebody teaches you – the tutor. Intuition means something that arises within your being. It is your potential; that’s why it is called intuition. Wisdom is never borrowed, and that which is borrowed is never wisdom. Unless you have your own wisdom, your own vision, your own clarity, your own eyes to see, you will not be able to understand the mystery of existence.As far as I am concerned, I am in absolute favor of instinct. Don’t disturb it. Every religion has been teaching you to disturb it. What is fasting but disturbing your instinct? Your body is hungry and asking for food, and you are starving it for spiritual reasons. A strange kind of spirituality has possessed your being. It should be called simply stupidity, not spirituality. Your instinct is asking for water, it is thirsty; your body needs it. But your religions…Jainism does not allow anybody to even drink water in the night. Now as far as the body is concerned, it may feel thirsty, particularly in summer in a hot country like India – and Jainas exist only in India. In my childhood, I used to feel very guilty because I had to steal water in the night. I could not sleep without drinking at least once a night in hot summers. But I used to feel that I was doing something that should not be done, that I was committing a sin. Strange and stupid ideas are being forced on people.I am in favor of the instinct and this is one of the secrets I want to reveal to you: if you are totally in favor of instinct, it will be very easy to find the way toward intuition. They are the same, just functioning on different layers: one functions on the material level, the other functions on the spiritual level.But intellect goes on creating repressive methods for the instinct. Celibacy, for instance, creates perversions – homosexuality, sodomy – because it is not part of your instinctive program. To accept your instinctive life with absolute joy, without any guilt, will help you to open the doors of intuition. They are not different, just their planes are different. Instinct functions beautifully, silently, without any noise. So does intuition, but even more silently, far more beautifully.Intellect is a disturbance. But it depends on us whether we make it a disturbance or use it as a stepping-stone. When you come across a stone in the street, either you can think it a hindrance or you can use it as a stepping-stone to a higher plane. Those who really understand use intellect as a stepping-stone. The masses are under the control of religions which teach them to use their intellect as a repressive force for instinct. They get involved in fighting with instinct and forget all about intuition. Their whole energy becomes involved in fighting with their own life force. And when you are continuously fighting with your instinct…A Jaina monk is supposed to remain naked all the year round, even in the winter months, even in the cold night. He cannot use a mattress, he cannot use a blanket, he cannot use anything to cover his body, day or night. He has to fast. The longer he fasts, the greater a saint he becomes in the eyes of the same kind of conditioned people – thirty days, forty days…Jainism is the only religion in the world which allows you to leave the body if you want to, but you cannot do it quickly by jumping into a river, or by cutting off your head, or by drinking poison. These methods are too simple. Jainism believes in austerity, arduousness. No shortcut is allowed; you have to fast to death.If a healthy young man fasts, it takes ninety days for him to die, ninety days of utter agony. He can neither sleep nor can he be at ease for a single moment. And every day he goes on becoming thinner, every day two pounds disappear. By the time ninety days have passed, he will be just a skeleton. Only then will he die. These ninety days he suffered hell unnecessarily – but this is thought to be spiritual: this is fighting against the body; this is conquering the body and the material. This is the spirit conquering the body.Just a few months ago a Jaina monk committed suicide like this: they call it santhara. I wonder why a government that is against suicide takes no notice of these people. They should be prevented. They should be put in jails with others who attempt suicide. What does it matter what means you use for suicide? Whether you die within nine minutes or ninety days does not matter. If you allow the Jaina monks, then why should you prevent others?The prevention is also very beautiful. If someone is caught committing suicide – if he has already committed it, then nothing can be done – then he will be sent to the gallows. Strange punishment! That’s what he was doing himself, so why waste unnecessary years in court cases, judges, advocates before finally sentencing him to death for trying to commit suicide? The poor fellow was doing it himself, without any expense to the country.After that Jaina monk, one of his disciples, an old woman, started… Because her master had gone, she did not want to live. And these people are surrounded by thousands who respect them because this is the greatest sacrifice and the greatest victory of spirituality over materialism. From all over the country, thousands of people will come to touch their feet – and all that they are doing is simply committing a crime. But they are not criminals, they are saints!It is the same situation in all the religions, with different superstitions. They turn the energy of your intellect against your instinct and that spoils all possibilities of opening the flower of your intuition. That is the mystic rose that will lead you to the ultimate ecstasy and to immortal life. But people seem to be absolutely in the hands of the dead past. Whatever the old scriptures have told them, they go on doing it, without ever considering the whole science of man.These three are the layers of the whole science of man. Instinct should be allowed a relaxed flow. Never, for any reason, disturb it with the intellect. Intellect should be used as an opening for intuition. It has just to give way for intuition to take over your life. Then your life is a life of immense light, of luminosity. It becomes a constant festival.But it seems the majority of the world consists of very retarded people. They never think about their life themselves. Whatever they are told, they do. They never bother whether it comes from right sources or wrong sources. You may be born a Catholic or a Hindu or a Mohammedan, but your birth does not ensure that your religion is right; your birth and your religion have no connection. But right up till now, wherever you are born decides your religion. The child has not chosen the religion; the religion is imposed on him. And the constant repetition of all kinds of lies makes him more and more unintelligent, superstitious, retarded, idiotic.Paddy and Sean are eating their lunch on the construction site. Suddenly Paddy says, “Yuck! I just ate a worm with this apple.”“Well,” says Sean, “drink some water and wash him down.”“To hell with him,” replies Paddy, throwing away the apple core. “Let him walk himself.”All over the world you are surrounded by these kinds of people. You have to stay alert and not get trapped in the same imprisonment as everybody else.If being with me you cannot be unimprisoned, unfettered, then you will not find any other place on the earth where you can be free. To me, freedom is the most fundamental value. Only in freedom can you grow to the highest peak, can you become an Everest. Only in freedom will your intuition blossom and bring immense treasures to you.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 06 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sitting with you in discourse a feeling of magnificence and utter luxuriousness, which feels so different from material luxury, keeps on arising in me. Would you like to talk about the luxuriousness of being with a living master?There are two worlds side by side: the world of matter and the world of consciousness. The world of matter is known to the mind, but the world of consciousness is only known when the mind disappears. We are all born as a mind, but existence gives us every opportunity and every challenge to go beyond it. Very few dare, but those who dare are the only people who have known life in its immense beauty, its luxury, its joy, its music, its harmony, its eternal silence and peace. Only those few people have really lived; the others are somehow just dragging themselves from the cradle to the grave.The mind can never know what authentic luxury is. It cannot know anything of the real; it knows only about the unreal, about the world that is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. The mind has its own limitations, but there is no question of condemning the mind. Your eyes can see but your eyes cannot hear; there is no reason to condemn the eyes because you cannot hear the music. “Why can’t you hear the sound of the running water? Why can’t you hear the songs of the birds and the tremendous silence of the stars?” Eyes can only see, there is no question of any condemnation. Ears can only hear. It is absolutely absurd to condemn the ears because they cannot see the light of the sun and the moon, because they cannot see the rainbow and its colors, the flowers and their tremendous beauty.All five senses have their own windows to existence, and our mind is all five senses combined. These five senses are the five doors or windows of the mind into existence. But because these five senses only go outward, you can see what is outside you but not what is inside you. You can touch what is outside you but not what is inside you.All senses are doors opening to the outside world, but the world of consciousness is within. The mind has no way to even have a glimpse of the world that is hidden inside you. They are side by side; there is not a difference of miles or even a few steps. They meet on a boundary line, they are running parallel – and just as parallel lines never meet, they never meet. You would have to jump from one line to another line.The mind hankers for luxury, for comfort, for joy, for love. It tries to make things that it longs for happen, but they are bound to be just outward things: a beautiful house, beautiful furniture, a beautiful garden. Everything that you can think of, the mind can manage – but only on the outside. It is only a very faraway echo of the inner beauty, of the inner luxury, of the inner richness. But the inner, which is so close, remains almost closed to millions of people. Their whole lives they are playing with toys and never come to know the real. And the real was not far away. It was just a change of gestalt.This word gestalt is German. No other language has exactly the same word, hence it is used in all the languages without being translated. But it can be explained so that you can see what it indicates.Just thirty or forty years ago a psychology came into being and became very fashionable. It was Gestalt psychology. It has faded now, but there is some significant meaning in the very word gestalt. The psychology may prove true or untrue – that is not my interest. My interest is in the simple word gestalt. That psychology has contributed a tremendously beautiful word.In Gestalt psychology books, you will always find a picture to explain the meaning of gestalt and sometimes you will find that kind of picture in children’s books: a line drawing of a beautiful young woman. What is expected of you is to go on staring, without blinking, at the beautiful face of the woman. And suddenly you see something has changed. Nothing has changed: you are the same, the book is the same, the picture is the same. But in a strange moment, in a strange way, something has transpired between your vision and the lines of the picture. Instead of a beautiful young woman, you see a very ugly old woman. You cannot believe it when it happens for the first time.Then go on staring – it will happen again: the old woman will disappear and the young woman is there. You cannot see both together. That is a very significant point to understand. You can’t see both together because they both consist of the same lines. When you start to see the beautiful woman again, the gestalt has changed; you are seeing the same lines in a different combination. But because they are the same lines, you now cannot see the old woman. When you then start seeing the old woman, once more the gestalt has changed, your vision has changed. The same lines that were making the beautiful woman, the young woman, are now constituting the old woman.So you can see both, but only separately. Why does it happen? It’s because your mind is in a constant change; it cannot remain at the same point for long. It is not accustomed to being static; it is a dynamic force. So when you are staring at the beautiful woman, the mind gets bored. It wants some change, but you don’t allow any change. You go on focusing, staring, then the mind finds a way of its own. It changes the gestalt, it changes the combination of the lines until suddenly you see an old woman.I think you will understand the meaning of gestalt: the meaning is a sudden change in your vision. That which was not in front of you, that which you were not seeing, suddenly becomes visible. And that which you were seeing suddenly disappears – and you can’t see both together.I would like you to understand something parallel, a gestalt, in the history of world philosophy. There have been philosophers like Shankara, in India, Bradley in England, Hegel in Germany, and many more all over the world. These three can be said to be the most representative of a certain gestalt. They all say that the world is illusory, it is only an appearance. It is not a reality, it is no more than a dream. The real is experienced only in your innermost being. Except for your inner being, everything that you see is just ephemeral.In India they call it maya. The word maya means: as if you are seeing a magic show in which nothing is real. Or it can also mean a mirage – what happens in a desert when you are very thirsty, tired. Suddenly you see far away a beautiful small oasis, trees, a lake. You see not only the lake, you see the reflection of the trees in the lake. It is impossible to deny the reality of an oasis. But as you come close the oasis goes – simply where, you cannot say. It simply disappears. There are no trees, there is no lake and there is no reflection of the trees.The people, the travelers, the caravans that have been passing through deserts know very well where the true oases are and where there are only ephemeral oases. But to the new traveler, it is impossible to make a distinction; they look exactly the same. The desert creates such an illusory reality, and because of your thirst you tend to believe in it. If you hadn’t been thirsty, you might not have believed. You would have suspected, doubted, you would have questioned. But you were so thirsty that this was not the time to disbelieve in the oasis.To disbelieve in the oasis is simply to accept death because of thirst. You are so thirsty you start trusting, believing in that which is just created by the rays of the sun, reflected from the sand of the desert. When the rays reflect back, they move, they shimmer – just as water shimmers. Those shimmering rays going back to the sun create the illusion of water. In those shimmering rays a kind of mirror effect is created, and because of that mirror effect anything that is around it is reflected. This mirage is another meaning of maya. The world as seen by Shankara, by Hegel, by Bradley is rejected as only appearance, not authentically true. It is as true as a dream, but not more than that.There is another school of philosophers. In India, the greatest of that school is Brihaspati. In Greece, the greatest of this other school is Epicurus and in Europe, Karl Marx. These three are representative of materialism. They say just the opposite. They say matter is the only reality and consciousness is illusory: what you see as objects, material – that is the only true world. Your body is true, but you are not true. Your consciousness is only an ephemeral effect, a by-product, just like the mirage in the desert.It’s strange that these two philosophies have always existed side by side. And strangely, neither a single materialist has ever crossed the line to become a spiritualist nor vice versa – they remain parallel. Not a single person has been convinced by the arguments of the other. My own standpoint is beyond both. I can see that both are too attached to one gestalt.One is saying that the young woman is real and the old woman is just false. The other is saying the old woman is real and the young woman is just false. But as far as I am concerned, the young woman and the old woman are not separate. Either both are true or both are untrue, because they are made of the same lines. If you deny that the old woman is real, take away all the lines that make the old woman and you will find the young woman has also disappeared. Or vice versa: if you think the old woman is real, then take away the unreal young woman’s lines and the old woman will disappear. They are really two ways of seeing the same reality.To me there is no division. To me it is a question of transcending the duality of parallel lines, of not getting caught up in any gestalt, but going beyond both gestalts and seeing, as a witness, the matter and the mind – and that you are far away from both. Then a new world of luxury, a new world of grace, a new world of magnificence opens up.What you are saying is immensely important. Your question is one of those few questions which everybody has to understand because everybody will have to encounter the reality implied in the question. You are saying, “Sitting with you, a feeling of magnificence and utter luxuriousness, which feels so different from material luxury, keeps on arising in me.” Trust in it. Settle more and more deeply in it because you are on the right path. What is happening to you, sitting here with me in communion, is just your own inner world opening.If you love me and you trust me, then there is no need to keep your heart closed. There is no need to keep your defenses up, there is no need to keep a distance, there is no need to have any fear. If love cannot destroy your fear, if trust cannot take away your security measures, then it is not worth calling it love, it is not worth calling it trust. The whole experience of being with a living master is that the disciple slowly, slowly relaxes, drops all his defenses – there is nobody who is going to hurt him – and because there is no fear, he starts coming closer.The whole world lives in fear, in such deep fear that we have created hidden defense mechanisms. For example: in the West, people shake hands and it is thought to be a friendly gesture. It is not! It was basically out of fear that people started shaking hands with the right hand. The right hand is dangerous – you may be carrying a weapon. It is better to shake hands and be completely sure that the other is not carrying any weapon. It is a very strange world – shaking hands was a gesture of enmity not of friendship. That’s why the left hand is not used in shaking hands because the right hand is your active hand. If you are carrying something dangerous, it will be in your right hand.In the East, people were more alert and conscious because they were more cowardly than in the West. The whole philosophy of nonviolence has made them cowardly. They have found an even better way. When you shake hands you come too close. Coming too close is dangerous, as even the left hand can be used to wound you, to shoot you.Unfortunately there are “leftists” and their number is not small – ten percent of the whole population. Most of them have been forced to use their right hands. That’s why you don’t see so many left-handed people because in school the teachers force them saying, “Write with your right hand; the right hand is right and the left hand is wrong.” And they become a laughingstock. So the children start using their right hand, although it is difficult for them because they were born “leftist.” But slowly, slowly, if you try, the right hand starts working. It will never be as good as that of the born “rightists.” It will always remain secondary. But in a right-handed world, what can you do?Ninety percent of people are right-handed. Only ten percent of people are left-handed. They are such a small minority that most of them disappear into the right-handed crowd. Very few remain left-handed their whole life. It needs a little individuality, it needs a little courage to declare, “If my left hand is active, I am not going to unnecessarily force the right hand on my nature.” But there are very few people who will take that stand against the whole of society.Coming too close is dangerous, but still the left hand is left out. It can carry a small knife and that may be enough to kill you. The East has found a better way. Rather than shaking hands, it puts both hands together, to show you that both hands are empty, and there is no need to come very close. You are there, I am here, you are showing that both your hands are empty, I am showing that both my hands are empty.Slowly, slowly in the East it took on not only a meaning of friendliness, but even a meaning of spirituality, “We are bowing down with folded hands to the godliness within you.” But the reality was just the opposite. It was a defense measure to make you aware, “I am not your enemy, I also want assurance that you are not my enemy.” But you still keep your distance. Who knows? The person may be hiding a knife in his clothes, he may not show it in his hands. And it has happened; it is not that it is only a fear.Even great kings, hugging another king – as if in deep friendship and love – have killed. When they were hugging, they were also carrying a knife, a small knife in their hands. And it was enough – if you wound the person in the right place, you can kill him even with a small knife. There are many cases on record. So-called great emperors and kings have behaved in such an ugly way, inviting another king as a friend and then killing him. If emperors can do that, what about ordinary people?I am just telling you one example – there are of course many more – of a defense that you use without knowing it, which has just been handed down by the older generation.My grandfather used to have a dog and he never went anywhere without the dog. Even if he was going to a marriage ceremony, to a party, he went with his dog. His dog would be sitting by his side. I would be sitting by his other side.I said, “This looks very bad: I am reduced to the category of your dog! When you want me to come with you, at least you can leave your dog at home.”He said, “You are too young to understand.”I said, “When will I be old enough so that I can understand? Just tell me. I have been listening to everyone: ‘You are too young.’ Always too young. When will I be able to understand?”He said, “That’s a good point. In fact, we use this strategy just to avoid unnecessary inquiries.”So I said, “Just tell me today. I’m old enough to understand.”He said, “The reality is I always take my dog with me if I am invited to eat food anywhere. First I give it to the dog. Unless I’m sure that there is no poison…”I said, “You are taking it too seriously. Who is going to poison you?”He said, “You don’t know. I have seen people poisoned.”I now realize that he was right. After I was poisoned myself, I remembered the old man – he was right. If I had had a dog with me… But I am not allowed to have a dog. That is the difficulty, my doctors don’t allow it. They say I am allergic. No defense at all!And then when I read that Gautam Buddha was poisoned, and it was food poisoning… My grandfather was dead, but I thought if he had been alive, I would have gone to him and asked his forgiveness for laughing at him. If Gautam Buddha had had his dog with him…You are living in a very murderous society, where every kind of crime is happening. Naturally man has learned to close himself from every side, out of sheer defense. But when you come to a master, there is no need to have any defense. And slowly, slowly, as you become more and more in tune with the master, your defenses drop – windows open, fresh breezes and fresh sunrays enter.The master is not a master if he is not a fresh breeze. A master is not a master if he is not a sunrise to your being. A master is not a master if he does not come into your heart as a song, as a dance, as a celebration – there cannot be anything more luxurious, more graceful, more delicious.Slowly, slowly you start learning a new lesson. It is not only to the master that you have to be open, you have to be open to the trees too; they are not going to harm you. You have to be open to the stars too; they are not going to harm you. This vast universe is here. You have just to be open to this whole universe and suddenly all the stars descend and come close to you, dancing within your heart. The trees start having a certain communication with you – and the flowers smile.There are strange stories – I used to think they were only stories, but slowly, slowly my own experience told me that they were not stories.About Mohammed the story is: when he was in the desert of Saudi Arabia, wherever he went a cloud always moved over his head. It seems to be very unlikely that clouds would be so sensitive. But every contemporary source… Mohammed is not very ancient, only fourteen hundred years have passed, not long. All contemporary sources of Mohammed describe this fact. Even people who were opposing him have described the miracle: “We may be in disagreement with his philosophy and religion but we cannot deny the fact; we have seen it with our own eyes. Wherever he goes in the desert, a cloud is always moving with him, giving him shade, always keeping him in the cool shade.”About Gautam Buddha there are stories. Perhaps they are historical facts. Perhaps one day – sooner than you think – science is going to authenticate these stories, which up to now have been thought to be only mythological. It is said that when Gautam Buddha sat under a tree – just to rest – even if it was not the season, flowers would immediately blossom, and many flowers would shower on Gautam Buddha.As scientists understand more and more about the sensitivity of trees, it seems possible that the openness of Gautam Buddha may have had a deep effect on the very heart of the tree. Even the poor tree could not resist the temptation to welcome Gautam Buddha with a few flowers, although it was not the season.This whole existence can become a luxury. You just have to learn the art of being open.In the university where I was teaching for almost nine years, there was a long row of trees between two university buildings: one for the arts faculty, the other for the science faculty. Between these two buildings there was this row of very beautiful trees. They gave deep shade, and in the summer they had so many flowers – red flowers – that the trees seemed to be on fire. When there are hundreds of these trees, it looks as if the whole forest is on fire. So many flowers come to them simultaneously that you cannot see the leaves anymore, just flowers, such beautiful flowers.There were at least two dozen trees between the two buildings and just a small road joining them. The idea must have been to cover that small road with these lush, green, beautiful trees – cover the whole road between the two buildings – so that there would be shade, even in the hottest summer.No one knows what happened. When I joined the university all the trees were alive. I had chosen the most beautiful tree to park my car under. Nobody was parking their car there because a parking lot was available on the other side of the building. I was even told that this was not the place to park.I said, “Unless you show me any ordinance from the university that I cannot park my car under this tree, I am going to park my car there. Even if I have to leave the university, I will leave, but I’m going to park here as long as I am part of the university.”The vice-chancellor understood, “It is unnecessary to quarrel with this man. He may resign just for this reason, and there is no harm. Let him park there.”It was just outside his office – he could see me and my car from his window. My idea to park the car there had a reason. Because I was mostly out of town without leave, I told my chauffeur, “Every day at eleven thirty, before the vice-chancellor comes to the university at around twelve, park my car under the tree. That will keep him thinking that I am in the university. And just after he leaves you can drive the car back home.”It was because of his window that I had chosen that tree. He was not aware of the fact that it was really the window not the tree. I kept insisting, “I love this tree and I will keep my car under this tree as long as I am in this university.” And he used to look out of his window and remained happy, thinking that I was in the university.Slowly, slowly some kind of disease happened to those trees. All the trees died, except the tree I was parking my car under. All the other trees died completely: they were without leaves, barren, and new leaves never came. The vice-chancellor was very much surprised.One day, when I was parking the car, he came to the window and called me, waved to me and said, “It is very strange. I am sorry I was preventing you from parking your car. Not only me, but many people feel that it is just because of you and your car that this tree has remained alive. All the other trees have died, not a single exception, just your tree.”It had become known as my tree. Nobody else dared to park his car there; everybody knew that it was my tree. And the vice-chancellor himself said, “I am sorry that I was preventing you. If you had listened to me, this tree also would have died. And it is the only tree I can see from my window.” I myself did not think that it had anything to do with me.Then I left the university. After two years I went back again, just to meet the vice-chancellor, my friends and colleagues. I was passing through the city and I thought…When I went there, I saw that my tree had also died. I also became a little suspicious – perhaps the vice-chancellor and those other people were right. When I reached his office he reminded me. He said, “I knew it would happen. The day you resigned I looked at the tree and I felt that it was going to happen. And within three months – just three months – the tree died.”I had left the tree absolutely young, a luscious green, full of flowers. Perhaps there was something happening in the being of the tree: some love, some trust, some opening, some friendliness.Modern researchers say that trees are more sensitive than human beings. They go through the whole range of emotions: fear, love, anger, compassion. They go through all these emotions far more deeply than human beings.So it is not only a question of being open to a master. It is really a question of being open. The master is only an excuse. Use the master as an excuse, so that you can learn the language of trust, the language of openness, the language of communion with existence. Then you will find that your life will become inwardly rich – every day more and more. And you will find a grace in your being that you were never aware was possible.I am in favor of this luxury, this richness. People have always misunderstood me – perhaps that is my destiny. I have been condemned all around the world as the guru of the rich. If understood in my sense, I am certainly the master of the richest, the most sensitive, the most loving, the most luxurious people in the world. But those who have been condemning me, they are condemning not in my sense. They cannot even understand that inner luxury is possible. To them luxury means outside things; richness means money. But to my people it has to mean the inner, always the inner. Whatever I am saying is for the inner, not for the outer.On the outside, there is nothing of much value, just the mundane world, with all kinds of greed, struggle, competitiveness, violence. The outside is ugly. I would like the outside also to be beautiful and rich and luxurious, but it can happen only when the inside has changed. The first and the foremost change has to be inner. The outer will follow.A shipwrecked sailor, who has been living alone on an island for five years, wakes up one morning to see a ship anchored close by and a small boat coming toward the shore.He races to the beach and is greeted by an officer who steps out of the boat and hands him a packet of newspapers.“What are these for?” he asks, amazed.“With the captain’s compliments, sir,” replies the officer. “He suggests that you read what the newspapers say about the world first and then tell us if you still want to be rescued.”What do you think: did the man decide to be rescued or not? I have been thinking about him, but I cannot imagine that he decided to be rescued. If you read five years of newspapers, the only conclusion will be to get rid of this world. It is not worth living. It is not worth being with these people. As far as I am concerned I have forgotten the world of the newspapers completely.I have found my people. I have found my world. I have found a small planet of my own, where love is the only law, where laughter is prayer, where dancing is divine, where every moment is sacred, and where to be natural is the only spirituality. Because I could manage to find my people, I am alive. Otherwise, I would have managed long ago to be crucified by all kinds of idiots, who are always willing… They would have been very happy and I would have been very happy because it does not seem to be worth living in this world. And what I have done is very difficult, is almost unprecedented: finding my own kind of people who can understand me, who can have a rapport with my innermost being. Otherwise there is nothing but misunderstanding in the world.A very proper Englishman goes into a bar one night, sits down, but does not order a drink. The bartender, an unusually friendly guy, asks him if he would like a drink on the house.The Englishman shakes his head.“I tried liquor once,” he said. “Did not like it.”Still trying to be friendly, the bartender asks him if he would like to join a couple of the boys for a few hands of poker.The Englishman shakes his head. “Tried gambling once,” he says, “didn’t like it. In fact, I would not be sitting in this place at all, but I promised my son I would meet him here.”“I see,” says the bartender. “Your only child, I assume.”Because he tries everything only once and then – finished!Osho,Watching your people arrive in larger numbers every day makes me feel so humble, and full of joyful tears, knowing that we all have this one thing in common: our love for you.It is such a gift to be just one of all these loving smiles who sit at your feet each day in Chuang Tzu.Osho, again and again, thank you for being here.Jivan Mary, I am reminded…Mulla Nasruddin was coming home. The sun had set. There was still some light, but it was getting darker every moment. He was passing by the side of the graveyard when he saw, far away, a few people coming on horses. He could make out that they had swords. He immediately concluded that there was danger: “It seems my last moment has come.”So he jumped over the wall of the graveyard and there was a freshly-dug grave. To avoid the dangers that were coming, he lay down in the grave, closed his eyes and stopped breathing.But those people had already seen this fellow, and they also saw him jump over the wall. They thought, “He seems to be a thief or something.”It was a marriage party, and in many places in the East – particularly Mohammedan countries – when people go to a marriage party, they go on their horses and carry their swords.This again reminds me of shaking hands. In the beginning, the marriage party was really a party of enemies who were going to force some family at the point of a sword to give their daughter to their son. It was not a friendly affair. In the beginning, marriage was an invention, a question of conquering, forcing a certain family, whether they were willing or not; it was a power struggle. This must have happened thousands of years ago, but even now the marriage party still carries swords.In India, being a very nonviolent country, the whole marriage party does not carry swords. The man who is going to be married doesn’t carry a sword, but a small knife – just symbolic.I have asked many of my friends when they were getting married, “Why do you go on carrying that small knife? I don’t see any point in it.”They said, “Neither do we see any point in it, but traditionally…”I said, “At least you should have inquired. There must have been some reason, some time back.”Then I told them, “This is just the last remnant of a historical fact. Thousands of years ago, women were thought to be commodities and they had to be conquered. There was no other way except force. It is ugly to carry these knives because they are symbolic of that old, primitive, barbaric stage.”They said, “But our parents, family, everybody will be very annoyed and even the other party will not like it. They have also forgotten that this is a symbol of antagonism, not a symbol of any friendship or love.”It was a marriage party, but Mulla thought, “So many swords, there is danger.”And those people thought, “This man seems to be a thief or something. Suddenly, when he saw us, he jumped over the wall.”So they all came nearer, jumped over the wall and looked all around – “Where has that man disappeared to?”Mulla was looking at them silently. Because one cannot continue to stop one’s breathing, once in a while he was breathing and then watching to see what would finally happen.Finally they walked all around the grave and they saw that this was not the way a man had to be buried. He was uncovered, fully dressed, had his shoes on, even his umbrella with him. They had never seen a dead body carrying an umbrella, wearing shoes, and then lying like this. The cold night was coming… Who were the people who had left the body uncovered?Mohammedans don’t make graves like Christians, their graves are just pure mud. They just pour the mud on top of it, that’s enough. They are poor people. They cannot manage to have marble – at the most a small stone on which they put the name of the person, that’s all.But what kind of thing was this? When they looked closely, they saw that once in a while the body was breathing. When they were all surrounding him silently, Mulla opened one eye. They could not believe what kind of fellow he was, and they were very angry.They asked him, “Why are you here?”Mulla said, “I can ask you the same question. Why are you here? Perhaps you don’t know the answer, so I will answer from both sides. I am here because of you! You are here because of me!”Jivan Mary, I am here because of you. You are here because of me. It is absolutely irrational, but truth is truth!You have not asked any question, so I decided that, since for many days I have not given you any sutras to meditate on, I should use this great opportunity that Jivan Mary has given me.A few sutras for her, for all of you, to meditate on…A woman who looks like a dream usually gives a man insomnia.Some people sleep with one eye open; others wake with both eyes shut.If at first you don’t succeed, try someone else.Two is company, three is the result.The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.Sometimes the best way to liven up the party is to leave.It is better to be in the missionary position than never to have any religion at all.The only time most people look like their passport photographs is during a hijack.In these days of jet travel, the only journeys that take a long time are the ones from your house to the airport.A husband who gets his breakfast in bed is in hospital.Married life is like sitting in a bathtub – after a while, it is not so hot.Marriage is like a violin. After the beautiful music is over, the strings are still attached.Nobody is ever satisfied. Poor men wish they were rich, rich men wish they were handsome, bachelors wish they were married, and married men wish they were dead.The fastest way to discover your bad habits is to move in with your lover.God gave black men rhythm because he made such a mess of their hair.And the last:Sex is the most fun you can have without laughing.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 07 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Sat-chit-anand… Meaning or no meaning, just the sound of it touches my heart deeply.Sat-chit-anand is one of those few expressions in all languages of the world which have descended from the highest peak of consciousness. They are pure music, they are absolute poetry; they are no ordinary words. If they touch your heart without even knowing the exact meaning, the reason is that they are re-echoing the soundless sound of those who have entered that space. Sanskrit can be proud that it has never been a living language used in the marketplace.Sanskrit lovers try to prove just the contrary. They try to prove that once it was a living language which people spoke, just like any other ordinary dialect. But I insist on my difference. I want to know why they insist on Sanskrit being a living language used by ordinary people. They think if a language is not used by ordinary people, then it loses something of importance, it is a dead language. Certainly it has never been used by the people, but it is not a dead language. It is the language of the mystics. It is the language of those who know.It is not worldly, that’s true. It is something otherworldly – and this is not a criticism. In fact, the extraordinariness of the language is that it was only used by very few people of tremendous understanding. Their every word has immense significance because it is coming out of a deep experience of the reality of their own being. The so-called living languages are mundane. They are for the marketplace, for day-to-day use: naturally, they cannot contain something of the beyond. Perhaps Sanskrit is the only language… It is also the mother language of all the civilized languages of the world.Sanskrit is rare in the sense that the people who formulated it were not thinking of the material side of existence, but were more concerned that the words used would reflect something of consciousness, heights of consciousness, of love, of compassion, of ecstasy. Their words are mantras, sacred, they are coming from the very source of our life. This is possible.You say, “Sat-chit-anand… Meaning or no meaning, just the sound of it touches my heart deeply.” It is a soundless sound; or, in other words, the sound of silence, the sound of the ultimate experience, the sound when you are no more – only the universe remains.Certainly you can avoid meaning. You can say “meaning or no meaning” because meaning is of the mind. But sat-chit-anand has a significance which goes far higher than meaning. It is just a fragrance which has left the flower. The flower is visible – part of this world, part of matter – but you cannot catch hold of the fragrance. You can feel it, it can touch you deeply, it can reach your innermost core – but still you cannot figure out the meaning of it. You cannot figure out what it is in reality.The meaning is irrelevant here; significance becomes the relevance. Not that it has no meaning, but basically it has only significance. And the significance is that the very sound, sat-chit-anand, penetrates the heart, breaking down all the barriers, all the bars and all the defense mechanisms. It resounds within your being, creating a subtle harmony, a deep peace, a strange feeling of fulfillment, of being at ease with the world, with the universe, with existence itself – at ease not only with existence, but with yourself too.It is a pure silence, as if water can be condensed to ice, and the ice can be again melted into water. That is the reality of such beautiful sounds. They can be condensed to meaning, but their basic reality is to melt within you and to reach each fiber of your being, to each cell, to give it a dance.These are the mystic sounds. They are very few. I have talked to you about satyam-shivam-sundaram, sat-chit-anand, hari-om-tat-sat, om-mani-padme-hum, om-shantih-shantih-shantih. These five I have chosen as the most significant, as the most deep-going. I will try to give you the meaning also, because that meaning will help the significance to become deeper. That meaning will not only touch your heart, it will also touch your intelligence – and you have to be touched in your totality to be transformed.I will begin with the last one. That is the sound every Eastern scripture ends with: om-shantih-shantih-shantih. It means “The soundless sound, or the sound of silence, peace, peace, peace” – just giving you the sense of the whole scripture in these few telegraphic words. Every scripture in the East ends the same. It may be Hindu, it may be Buddhist, it may be Jaina – it doesn’t matter. They are all different in their philosophies. They are all different in their theologies. They are different religions, continuously in controversy for at least ten thousand years. But strangely, they all end their scriptures with “the sound of silence: peace, peace, peace.” It seems they are all different roots of this experience.They may differ about their roots, about the description of their roots. They may quarrel, they may contradict each other, but as far as the end is concerned, when they reach the highest peak of consciousness, all that is found is the sound of silence and utter peace, so deep that they have to repeat it three times: peace, peace, peace.The fourth is used by the Tibetans, although it takes almost all the words from Sanskrit: om-mani-padme-hum. It is a very mystic statement. It says: “The sound of silence, the diamond in the lotus.” You cannot conceive a more beautiful thing than a beautiful diamond in the most beautiful flower on the earth, the lotus. They are trying to convey to you the beyond in some way comprehensible to the mind: the sound of silence – om – the diamond in the lotus. I have loved it from my very childhood. Just the words “the diamond in the lotus” have managed to express the beyond in the most beautiful way.The third is hari-om-tat-sat – “the sound of silence, this is the only truth.”The second is sat-chit-anand – “truth, consciousness, bliss.”And the first is satyam shivam sundaram – “truth, godliness, beauty.”These five, I can say to you, belong to the universal religious consciousness, not to any organized religion because they have come from individual mystics. They have poured their heart, they have poured their enlightenment, they have poured their awakening into these five mantras.There is no word in English to translate mantra. It means a sacred word, not of any use in the day-to-day life experience, but only significant when you go beyond this visible world and enter the invisible consciousness. A mantra is a secret key. It opens the door to the ultimate.But the meaning is also significant because you are in the mind. The sound may have gone deep into your heart, thrilled you, but still it is good not to leave the mind completely out of your experience because it can become a disturbance; it can become very vengeful.Don’t antagonize your mind. It can disturb everything. Have you watched how it disturbs your body? When you are in anger, your whole body is disturbed: your stomach is disturbed, your blood pressure goes up, suddenly you start perspiring – even in an air-conditioned place. There have been many cases of heart attacks in intense anger. The heart suddenly stops. The mind can disturb the body on the one hand, on the other hand it can disturb the heart. Very few people know its disturbances in the heart because it is not a common experience.But if you don’t know the meaning, if the mind is not satisfied, soon it will start creating suspicion, doubt, skepticism. Soon it will start saying to you that you are being irrational – and you will be affected. If the mind is not in cooperation, the impact of sat-chit-anand on your heart will start disappearing. My whole effort is to transform your total being, not leaving anything outside because nature does not intend it so. When the mind can be persuaded to go along with you, there is no need to create an opposition. I am against any kind of unnecessary conflict and split in your being. It is better to create a bridge between mind, body and being.And the meaning is also tremendously beautiful. Sat means truth. Man’s longest search has been for that, because without knowing the truth, we know nothing. Truth is the very meaning of our existence. Without knowing truth we are just accidental, we don’t have any meaning.Perhaps something has gone wrong in nature and we are the product of it – freaks. Unless you know the meaning of yourself you cannot have a deep relationship with the cosmos. The meaning is going to become a bridge with the cosmos. Unless you feel some meaning, some truth in your being, you are not yet aware of a deep communion with the whole.Truth is the experience of being in deep communion with the eternity of existence, with the wholeness and the perfection and the grandeur and the magnificence of that which is. Truth simply means that which is. It is pure isness – and the revelation of this truth to you is only possible if your chit, your consciousness, rises to its ultimate flowering.It is consciousness that is going to discover the truth. Hence, meditation is emphasized. Meditation will not give you the truth, but it will give you more and more consciousness, and, finally, consciousness gives you two things: on one hand, truth, and on the other hand, a tremendous bliss. You become almost like a bird with two wings. Truth is your one wing, bliss is your other wing – and you are pure consciousness.In this experience you can fly like an eagle across the sun into the unknown. Then this whole universe belongs to you; then wherever you are, you are at home; then whatever you are, you are in utter peace – whatever happens is beautiful and brings tremendous gratitude to you.Prayer becomes your very heartbeat. You don’t pray in synagogues, in churches, in temples or in mosques. Those are for the irreligious; those are for the hypocrites; those are for the pretenders. The authentic religious man has prayer in his heartbeats. He is continuously feeling a tremendous gratitude to all that existence has made available to us – life, love, laughter.Osho,Is man really the most hilarious animal?Would you give us a few more examples?Devageet, this is more like you. The other day you were asking about death. That is not at all a reflection of your individuality. You are a man who can understand laughter as one of the most religious qualities. It has never been accepted by any religion as a religious quality. But I am never in agreement with any superstition, however old and ancient it may be. And I don’t care at all what others have believed, lived. I trust my own experience more than any holy scripture, more than any great saint or sage.My experience about laughter is that it is the most purifying, the most healthy, the most rejuvenating, the most refreshing, and the most total experience. It can be your first experience of totality. You can laugh totally. And there is another beautiful thing about it: it is not only of the mind. The mind may trigger it, but soon it spreads all over you. It is overwhelming. There are beauties upon beauties as far as laughter is concerned. When you are laughing, one of the greatest things is that the mind cannot think. If you are alert, you can experience a space of no-thought, which is the experience of meditation.Laughter gives you a childlike innocence. It helps to unburden you of unnecessary seriousness which all the religions have been burdening you with. They have even taken away the smiles from your lips – what to say about laughter? They have been preaching seriousness. They are afraid, as if God will feel offended if you laugh. And I cannot conceive of God in any other position, in any other posture, than laughing. If he exists at all, he must be laughing twenty-four hours a day at the hilariousness of humanity. We don’t know the whole of humanity, we know only a few people here and there. God must be watching all over humanity, and so many circuses going on.Friedrich Nietzsche said, “God is dead.” But the question is, “Who killed him? Or, if he died naturally, what was the disease?” Sometimes I have this idea: perhaps, laughing since eternity, he just popped off as there is a limit to everything. You must all feel compassionate toward poor God. But in another way, he enjoyed more than anybody else.He may have been disturbed once in a while – “What kind of man have I created?” It is a well-established fact that after man he stopped creating. Seeing man, he must have become aware – “I have committed a mistake. Now it is time to stop creation.” He did not stop at horses, he did not stop at buffaloes, he did not stop at millions of species of birds and insects and animals and trees. But suddenly, since the day he created man, nothing has been heard of him. He became so worried about what he had done, he either died from too much laughter, or, seeing what these creatures he has created in his own image were doing, he committed suicide.A beautiful young woman is strolling through the zoo, and finally stops in front of the monkey cage. Seeing no monkeys around, she asks the keeper, “Where are all the monkeys today?”“They are inside their house, miss,” he replies. “It is the mating season.”“Will they come out if I throw them some peanuts?” she asks.The keeper scratches his head and says, “I don’t know, miss. Would you?”The great novelist has been locked away in a mental asylum for years. But at last there seems to be some hope of recovery. For three months he sits at his typewriter in his room, writing a new novel. Finally he announces that it is complete and brings it to the top shrink who grabs it eagerly and starts to read, “General Jones leaped on his faithful horse and yelled, ‘Giddyap up! Giddyap! Giddyap!’”Then the shrink thumbs through the rest of the book. “Why, there is nothing here but five hundred pages of git ups!” he says.“I know,” says the writer. “Stubborn horse.”Lord Dottingham returns home from fox hunting a little earlier than usual and finds Lady Dottingham in bed with his best friend, Sir Arthur Carpley. His lordship stands stiffly in the bedroom doorway and loudly berates his wife for her unfaithfulness.With thunder in his voice he reminds her that he had taken her from a miserable existence in the London slums, given her a fine home with servants, expensive clothes and jewels.As Lady Dottingham is by this time crying loudly, his lordship turns his wrath on his supposed friend. “And as for you, Carpley,” he shouts, “you might at least stop while I am talking!”Osho,The other day I fell in love with Milarepa. It was so beautiful, but after ten minutes it was gone.Osho, is this the way things really go?Lolita, I wonder that the love affair continued for as long as ten minutes. With Milarepa, things are more speedy. Of course, this is the way things really go. But with Milarepa they go with express speed. His love affairs are just hit and run.He is really a great guy – my musician. Only music seems to be his really permanent love affair. Everything else is just in the margin; ten minutes are more than enough. And he never repeats any mistakes; he commits mistakes every day, but always new ones.I have sometimes thought about the word mistake. Who made that word? That’s what he goes on doing. Take this Miss, take that Miss. He understands exactly the meaning of the word miss-takes.For you I feel really sad, but there is no problem. Here almost all are Milarepas. My people are the misfits of the world; this is a gathering of the misfits. But they fit with each other perfectly well, so don’t be worried: fall in love again. Remember the American motto: “Try it again, and again, and again.”I don’t know if it is ever going to happen, but the trying is beautiful in itself. Hoping that it is going to happen keeps you alive, keeps you young. The day a woman thinks it is not going to happen, she becomes old – and no woman wants to become old.I have heard…A politician was asking a friend at a meeting of women, “How do I keep them quiet just for five minutes? Because I feel so embarrassed – I am delivering my election campaign speech and they are all talking. Nobody is listening. But they are voters so I have to talk to them, but how to keep them quiet?”The friend said, “It is not difficult. The first thing is: you should shout loudly ‘Who is the oldest of you all?’ Then there will be utter silence, and in that silence deliver your speech.”They say that a woman takes at least six years passing from thirty-five to thirty-six. So don’t be worried. You are young and you have the tremendously beautiful name of Lolita, a romantic name. I think some other Milarepa is going to meet you after this meeting. Many Milarepas may already be thinking, “Who is this Lolita?” Even Milarepa himself may be thinking, “Have I committed a mistake?” But this is the way things happen.During the geography class, the teacher looks at little Ernie and says, “What is the matter, Ernest? Why are you looking so unhappy?”“I didn’t get no breakfast,” Ernie replies.“You poor dear, but to get on with our geography lesson” says the teacher pointing to the map, “where is the Mexican border?”“In bed with Mama,” says Ernie. “That’s why I didn’t get no breakfast.”Mrs. Applebottom becomes angry with the French maid, and after a series of stinging remarks about her abilities she dismisses her. But the French girl will not allow such abuse to go unanswered.“Your husband,” she cries, “considers me a better cook and housekeeper than you, madam! He told me so himself.”Mrs. Applebottom looks at the girl scornfully and makes no comment.“Also,” says the angry girl, “I am better than you in bed!”“And I suppose,” snaps Mrs. Applebottom, “my husband told you that too!”“No, madam,” says the maid, “the chauffeur did.”But in a way, Lolita, you are fortunate that you got rid of Milarepa in just ten minutes. I know a few other great lovers who got into trouble with Milarepa and for years they went dragging on. And Milarepa is not one to look back.A man pinned under his wrecked car is being questioned by a policeman.“Are you married?” asks the cop.“No,” replies the man, “this is the worst fix I have ever been in.”You are out of the worst fix. Rejoice. But never stop falling in love, because unless you fall in love, how are you going to rise again? Falling is a strategy of rising again and again. Finally, when you are risen the way Jesus Christ has risen, there will be no need to fall again with any Milarepa. Love is good, love is nice – even for ten minutes. Don’t count the minutes. A single minute of love is equal to eternity; ten minutes is equal to ten eternities.Try my other Milarepas, Lolita. It is a little difficult because other Lolitas have already made them so fed up that the moment they see anybody coming closer to them to fall in love, they escape. Any excuse and they fly away.I receive letters every day from my sannyasins asking, “What has happened to your male sannyasins? In the whole world it is the man who hangs around a woman, chases her. In your commune it is just the opposite. It is the woman who has to chase the man and the man seems to be utterly enlightened.”But the men are enlightened because of you all – poor sannyasins have never been chased by so many women. So rather than getting into another hell of an affair, they simply close their eyes.Even a man like Devageet is thinking of dying. I did not tell you the real reason that day, but I cannot keep secrets!

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 08 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is misunderstanding?Misunderstanding is obviously the mother superior of mistakes. Man lives almost half awake, half asleep. Hence whatever he understands is only half. With each of his understandings there is a shadow, a deep unconsciousness which continues to misinterpret, to distort, to confuse whatever small light, whatever small consciousness he has got.His consciousness is certainly very small – just a thin layer, not more than skin-deep, but his unconsciousness is thick, deep, nine times larger than his consciousness. That dark night is within you; it has never seen the light of the day. So whatever your consciousness tries to see, to hear, your unconsciousness, which is nine times larger – its weight, its pressure is tremendous – distorts it.You think you have understood something, but finally it is always a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding is not coming from outside, neither is it coming from your conscious mind. It is coming from your darkness within. Unless that darkness disappears, there is no way to get rid of misunderstandings. Understanding is almost equal to wisdom, almost synonymous with awakening. It is a transformation of your whole unconsciousness into consciousness, as if suddenly the sun has risen and the whole night with all its darkness has disappeared.Ordinarily we think that we sometimes misunderstand, but that most of the time we understand. I want to emphasize: all the time you misunderstand. It is not your fault, it is just the very situation. Because you are only a very thin consciousness with such a thick layer of darkness, you cannot do anything else than perhaps sometimes understand something.Almost all the time, everything is distorted, but not distorting it is not under your control. What is under your control is to start getting deeper into your being, bringing more awareness to the dark parts of your being. Awareness is just like light. As the light goes deeper into you, the darkness, the unconsciousness, will disappear. The moment you are fully conscious, no misunderstanding will be possible.People who are awakened have been asked again and again, “Can the awakened one misunderstand?” And the answer has always been “No.” It is impossible for the awakened one to misunderstand. It is just not possible. Just as the man with eyes goes through the door, not through the wall, a man of fully enlightened being naturally understands everything as it is, its true nature. In other words, the moment you are your true self you will be able to understand everything in its true authenticity. Before that, you cannot avoid misunderstanding.It is good to understand that you cannot avoid misunderstanding. That will help you in many ways: it will make you humble; it will take away your arrogance; it will take away your so-called knowledgeability; it will put aside your ego, which depends on all kinds of misconceptions. It will bring more innocence to you – and in innocence, meditation becomes easier.When the ego is not there a great barrier is removed. When you are humble you can see that by the very nature of your being – as you are now – in ten situations, nine times there is misunderstanding. Perhaps one time there may be understanding. But you cannot figure out when it is understanding and when it is misunderstanding. Your light is so dim; everything is vague. One moment, just like a flash of lightning, you see something, but the next moment all is darkness.What you have seen seems to be just like a dream. Perhaps it is right, perhaps it is not. In fact, if you are alert enough, you will start using the word perhaps more. If you are asked about anything, you will not be so deterministic, you will not be so definitive, you will not be so arrogantly certain. You will not talk in terms of absolutes, you will become more relative, you will say perhaps. “Perhaps it is so. It is very difficult…”For example, you feel you are in love with someone. It is very difficult to say “Perhaps I love you.” But it is true. In the state man is in, more than that is not possible. Your love is only a perhaps, because what is love today can turn into hate tomorrow. Or maybe tomorrow is too far away. What is love this moment may disappear the next moment. Just a moment before you were so absolutely certain, but a moment afterward you yourself cannot believe what has happened to you. Have you gone mad? What made you so certain?You trusted too much in the one-tenth part of your mind. You completely forgot about the unconscious mind, which is so vast, so dark, that you don’t know what is going on there, what is cooking there. Just on the surface you are thinking of love and deep down there is hate, anger, jealousy, and all kinds of wild sentiments, emotions, prejudices. And you are sitting on the volcano. If you are alert…One great enlightened man, Mahavira, even after his enlightenment – when he could be absolute in his statements without any conditions – continued to use the word perhaps about every question that he answered. He was the first man in the whole history of mankind to bring in the concept of relativity. All that we can say is only relatively true – perhaps for the moment, but we cannot say it’s forever. We cannot make any unconditional statements.His perhaps is one of the reasons why he could not gather a very big gathering of disciples – one of the greatest enlightened persons. But people want certainty; they are living in uncertain lives. People want beliefs; they are drowning.Their situation is like that of the old Jew who had fallen on the street with sunstroke and was almost dying. A Christian priest saw the crowd. He entered the crowd and he said, “The old man needs me. Just let me come through. He is dying!”He went by the side of the Jew, not knowing that he was a Jew, and whispered in his ear, “This is the moment! Remember God, God the Father, the Holy Ghost, Jesus Christ the Son, the only begotten Son of God. Remember.”The old Jew opened his eyes and he looked at the crowd and said, “Who is this crazy man? I am dying and he is talking in puzzles. What God? What Holy Ghost? Who is the only begotten son? I am dying here and this idiot…”People do not want puzzles. People want clear-cut belief systems. But Mahavira never gave a single belief system to anyone. If you ask him if God is, he will say “Perhaps.” But a God who is a perhaps is not much of a God. You cannot worship a God who is a perhaps. Then your prayer will be perhaps. You cannot create a religion out of the idea of relativity. Ifs and buts are prohibited from religious systems. People don’t want anything that will create more confusion in their minds, however great the source from which it may be coming. They are searching for some small belief that can give them a kind of security, safety, a God who will be their protector, to whom they can pray in difficult times – and almost all the time is a difficult time!If you don’t even have a God to pray to, you are left in deep aloneness. And a man like Mahavira, rather than giving you some comfort, some consolation, tells you perhaps about everything. No consolation. But he has a great insight about you. He knows even if you believe in God, your belief is only an if. It cannot be more than that, because your unconscious knows nothing about God. Have you ever dreamed about God?I have asked many, many people, “Have you ever dreamed about God?” They say “No.” The unconscious has not even heard the word God. Nobody has repressed God so deeply in himself that he becomes part of the unconscious and uncoils in his dream, like a genie coming out of a bottle. And you will meet neither Jesus Christ nor Buddha there. It is very strange.Your unconscious is your greater reality, and Mahavira is correct when he says perhaps about everything. He is making you aware that in your situation nothing can be more certain than that. Change the situation, make your whole being full of light. It does not mean that you will become absolutely certain. It simply means all questions will disappear; there will be no answer. In authentic totality of consciousness, there is no question. You don’t ask about God or hell or heaven. You simply don’t ask about anything. You are so silent. Out of your silence, questions cannot come. Questions grow in the mind, and you are so far away and beyond the mind – in your innermost center – where there is no question and there is no answer. You are tremendously fulfilled, contented, at ease: with existence, with yourself, with everything.Questions mean that you have some kind of tension, some kind of not-at-easeness; some trouble is there that brings the question. Something is haunting you and you are incapable of figuring it out. But when your whole being is full of light, when all darkness has disappeared, you are so in tune with existence that even to say you are in tune with existence is not right. It will be right to say that you are one with existence. Or it will be even better to say: you are existence. All separation has disappeared.There is no questioner. There is no quest. You have arrived home.In that state there is understanding but there is nothing to understand. This is the strange situation of man. When he wants to understand, he cannot. When he is capable of understanding, there is nothing to understand.The newlyweds walk up to the hotel desk and ask for a suite.“Bridal?” asks the clerk, noticing the “Just Married” signs on their luggage.The young bride blushes and says, “No thanks. I will hold his shoulders until I get used to it.”This is misunderstanding.Old man Finkelstein was brought to court on charges of sexually molesting a teenage girl.The judge dismissed the case because the evidence would not stand up in court.Mendel Kravitz returns home one day to find a stranger on top of his naked wife, his head resting between her ample breasts.“Hey!” yells Mendel. “Just what are you doing?”“Why, er, I’m listening to music,” replies the stranger.Mendel puts his head beside the stranger’s head and declares, “I don’t hear any music.”“Of course you don’t,” replies the stranger. “You’re not plugged in!”Osho,Finally it has hit me too!Sex and relationship have dropped me. Just when I felt that I was in the juiciest relationship, enjoying sex like never before, suddenly I couldn't stand it anymore. All the longing for the other, for sex and intimacy, has gone. I am feeling so good and relaxed by myself, with a lot of love in my heart, but without any direction.Osho, can you explain what is happening? How come it is hitting so many of us all at once? Is it contagious? Has it to do with the star constellation? Or are you cooking something?Nandan, you are here not as a separate ego, but as part of one phenomenon. So when anything starts happening, it is bound to happen to many others simultaneously. It will have a chain effect. It does not happen in the world because people are not in any way deeply connected with each other. There is no communion. There are communities, but there is no communion. This is a commune. The whole purpose of your being here is to melt and merge with all who are present here. There is no friend, no enemy. All are in love with me. Their sole purpose is exactly what somebody said the other day, “Our whole purpose here is one, we all love you.”It is a loving commune where you are all equal, where you are no longer competitive, where there is no struggle of any kind going on, just a tremendous music and a silence drowning you all into oneness, without your even knowing it. You are slipping deeper into a whole.This wholeness brings a new health and a new joy and a new kind of love. Sex is a very primitive thing. It is an animal heritage. Nothing is wrong in it, it is just very old. As you grow more and more mature, you start searching for something new and greater, something better and higher, something superior. Sex seems to be something below you – a little childish, a little immature.It is good. There is a time when you can fool around. While you are meditating, your maturity comes sooner, your centering comes sooner, your awareness about things becomes clearer every day. Sex is going to be the first victim of your awareness – other things will follow – because sex is the very root of your animality.Once sex drops, it’s as if a tree has lost its roots. Then the branches cannot remain green any longer; the flowers cannot remain alive any longer. In fact, the tree has died with the roots. For a few days, perhaps, it may manage to remain standing; for a few days the leaves will remain green, and perhaps for a few days the flowers will remain apparently alive. But basically the tree is dead the moment the roots are cut.Your anger, your jealousy, your violence, your inferiority complex, your superiority complex – all kinds of neuroses, psychoses – are just branches. They will start dying by themselves. Once you have gone beyond sex without fighting with it…That’s my basic difference to all religions. They have been trying to drop sex. I am not telling you to drop it. I am telling you to be more mature, to be more meditative. While you are not mature, sex is perfectly right. Nothing is wrong in it, there is no condemnation. Be playful and rejoice in it. Here, for the first time, a totally original experiment is going on: sex is accepted with deep respect. It is our heritage; we are born out of it. It is in our every fiber and every cell. To condemn it is to condemn oneself.Trying to drop it means only repressing it into the unconscious. Then things become more and more complex and perverted. Once you start repressing sex into your unconscious… There is no other place in you – whatever you repress goes into the unconscious. The unconscious is your basement where you go on throwing all that you don’t want, that you don’t want to show to the world. But whatever you throw into the unconscious creates a very strange problem: you start becoming afraid of your own unconscious. You cannot go there, even with a lamp in your hand, because you know what you are going to encounter.I was staying in a friend’s home. They were a little old-fashioned, so their bathroom and their toilets were not attached to the house but at a little distance behind the house. There was a small lawn, and beyond the lawn were their toilets and bathroom.They had one small boy, just one child. His mother said to me, “While you are here, somehow help us to teach this boy that there is nothing to fear. Each time he has to go to the bathroom or to the toilet, somebody has to follow him. While he is inside, the doors have to be kept open and the person has to stand there – if it is night, with a lamp. And the doors have to be kept open so that the person who is standing outside does not disappear.”I talked to the boy. I asked, “What is the problem?”He said, “I am very much afraid of ghosts.”I said, “How did you become afraid of ghosts?”It was the parents themselves who had made him afraid of ghosts.He said, “When I don’t want to go to sleep, they force me to go to sleep. When I don’t want to get up early in the morning, they force me to get up early. And to make this happen, they frighten me with ghosts saying, ‘If you don’t go to bed early, ghosts may trouble you in the night. And if you don’t get up early in the morning… Remember – we are warning you – there are ghosts all around sitting in the trees, invisible people.’“They have convinced me, so I am afraid of going to the bathroom or the toilet, particularly in the night. Now they want me to go alone, and nobody is interested in standing outside while I am inside. Because of this I have to keep the doors open.”I said, “Why don’t you do one thing: take the lamp yourself. And when there is light, you can see if a ghost is anywhere.”He said, “Please don’t tell me such a thing. I can go in darkness but I can never go with a lamp.”I asked, “What is the reason?”He said, “The reason is clear. In darkness somehow I can dodge the ghosts. But when I carry a lamp, they all see me. Don’t suggest that idea. If I have to go, I will go in darkness. At least then they can’t see me. And if I feel that something is there, I can run, I can dodge, I can shout, I can do something. But with a lamp, all the ghosts in all the trees will see me and say ‘He is going now. This is a good time.’”I said, “This is right. Your logic is perfect.”I have always remembered this whenever I have talked about your unconscious and your repressions. If you repress all that you have been told is ugly, then there is no possibility of your ever becoming a meditator, no possibility of your ever becoming enlightened. That is the reason why in the West enlightenment has not happened. Half the world has remained absolutely unaware of the greatest experience in life, for the simple reason that Christianity is the most repressive religion in the world. It goes on forcing… And other religions are not much different, just a little more lenient.It is not surprising that all the psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists are born in the West, not in the East. It was a necessity in the West. Christianity has created the necessity because it has created the disease. It has created the repressive mind. It was absolutely necessary for Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and Alfred Adler to somehow help the Western part of humanity become acquainted with the unconscious. Christianity has completely cut off humanity from the unconscious. Unless the unconscious becomes part of the conscious, becomes conscious itself, there is no way of your ever being beyond the animal you are repressing within yourself.Sex should never be repressed. Sex should be lived in its totality, with joy, without any guilt. Then what you are saying – and what so many sannyasins have been feeling – comes one day. You were rejoicing in it so much, and suddenly it drops away.Now all the religions have been against me, are still against me, and they will remain against me for at least five centuries. Such is the stupidity of humanity. They cannot see that this simple experiment is so successful. Nandan, who is saying that she is having the juiciest affair of her life, enjoying sex like never before, is not aware that this is how sex drops.I don’t tell you the real secrets because then you may become afraid and you may not enjoy. You will remain a little less juicy, just to prolong the journey a little longer. But when you are enjoying sex at the highest peak, that’s when it suddenly slips out of your hands. It is a beautiful experience, one of the most beautiful experiences: the moment sex drops on its own accord.It happens only to those few people who have lived with intensity, have loved with intensity, have not felt guilty at all, have not listened to any religion or any tradition or any past, who have lived almost like Adam and Eve – as if they are the first people on the earth and they don’t know anything of repression. No priest has been able to pollute them; no religions have poisoned their minds. If you can be… And that’s my whole effort here: to make you into Adam and Eve, as if you are the first people on the earth, fresh, just driven out of the Garden of Eden.What Nandan is saying is tremendously important. I will read it to you. “Just when I felt that I was in the juiciest relationship, enjoying sex like never before, suddenly I could not stand it anymore.” One can get free from sex only when one has seen the whole scene in its totality and there is nothing more to be discovered, when one has inquired, lived all the possibilities of sexual relationships. Then what can you do except let it go? You are finished with it. You have come to the end of the book.You are saying, “Suddenly, I could not stand it anymore. All the longing for the other, for sex and intimacy, has gone. I am feeling so good and relaxed by myself, with a lot of love in my heart, but without any direction.” The disappearance of sex does not mean disappearance of love. It really means appearance of love. Sex was a very primitive phenomenon. There was not much love in it, only biological infatuation. If you have observed animals making love, you may have noticed one thing: they don’t look happy. They look almost as if they are in torture. In fact, that is the reality: it is a biological slavery, just a biological, hormonal, chemical slavery. It hurts those who have a little more consciousness.As your meditation grows, you will see more and more that it is not a sin; it is simply stupidity. There is no need to be forgiven for it because it is not a crime and there is nobody to forgive you. And you have not committed anything for which you should feel guilty and ashamed.But the moment you are free of it, suddenly you will feel a tremendous relaxation, because sex is a tension. You may not have felt it before. It was constantly there, so one becomes accustomed and immune to it. The moment it disappears, suddenly a great relaxation. Sex is the need of the other. In the very need of the other, there is dependence.That’s why no wife can really respect the husband nor can the husband respect the wife. They hate each other. Psychologists are perfectly right when they say that husbands and wives are intimate enemies. And the reason? The reason is: you cannot love someone on whom you have to depend. The man has to depend on the wife; he has a sexual need and the wife takes every opportunity to torture him. That is her only opportunity to torture him. The man tortures her in many other ways. She is dependent financially. She doesn’t have the freedom to move in society; she doesn’t have the freedom to feel independent, liberated. Even the women who think they are liberated are not liberated. They are only reacting. They are still in the same old grip, only they have gone to the other extreme.The moment you feel you are no longer dependent on anyone, a deep coolness and a deep silence settles inside, a relaxed let-go. It does not mean you stop loving. On the contrary, for the first time you know a new quality, a new dimension of love: a love which is no longer biological, a love which is closer to friendliness than any relationship. That’s why I am not even using the word friendship, because that ship has drowned so many people.Your love becomes more like an aura around you which can be shared with anyone, even with a stranger. In fact, it is not a question of doing anything when you are sharing; it simply becomes your nature. You are just loving. In the past you used to fall in love with some individual. Now you don’t fall in love with anyone – you are love. Wherever you are, you carry your fragrance. Wherever you are, you carry your fresh breeze, your relaxed coolness. You will feel tremendous freedom.This is true liberation of women, of men, because both are slaves of each other. The women’s liberation movement does not take account of the fact that she is not alone in bondage. Man is also in bondage because both are dependent on each other. After the whole day at work, the man comes home, and the woman immediately lies down and has a headache. The whole day there was no head, no headache, nothing. The moment she hears her husband’s car driving into the car porch, immediately, strangely, the headache comes with the husband; they both come simultaneously.Just a few days ago I was telling you…One day Hymie Goldberg came home and just shook his wife awake and gave her two aspirins.She said, “What for?”He said, “Take them!”She said, “But I don’t have a headache!”He said, “That’s great. So let’s go!”Now he has tricked the woman. Now she cannot say she has a headache. She has refused the aspirin, not knowing Hymie Goldberg’s subtle logical strategy.Once this longing for the other – the dependence on the other – disappears, your life takes off onto a new plane of existence. It is beautiful when you are in a commune like this, where life is accepted in its totality without any condemnation, where there is no god except life. Naturally this experience will go on spreading because you are so close to each other. Not that somebody is your husband, somebody is your son, somebody is your mother and somebody is your father – no, but for the simple reason that in the center you have someone who disappeared a long time ago.But your love is still directed toward that same entity which has become only a presence, is no longer a person. The closer you come to me, the closer you will be coming to each other, but it will not create any relationship. It will be simply freedom: freedom to love, freedom to be friendly, freedom to rejoice in each other’s happiness, freedom to dance, not even knowing with whom you are dancing. There is no need. It is perfectly beautiful to dance with a stranger.Here, nobody knows from what country you come, nobody knows with what religion you have been conditioned, nobody knows to what caste you belong. Nobody bothers about all these stupidities humanity has been burdened with for centuries. Suddenly just a pure humanness, a pure consciousness, a song that goes from heart to heart, a rhythm that spreads like ripples in a lake. So if something happens to one of you, it is going to happen to many.Certainly I have been cooking it for many years. I am waiting for that day when you are free of all kinds of slaveries – and sex is the greatest slavery. Your greatest anxiety, your greatest jealousy, your greatest violence – all are rooted in sex. But still I want you to live it, not repress it. One day it will disappear.It is joyful, Nandan, that you have not become afraid or worried, because people who are coming from the West are in a difficulty. They have become accustomed to think of life and sex as synonymous. They are not. Life is vast; sex is a small thing. In the West when sex drops, the person may think of committing suicide. Now, what is the point anymore?Just the other day I heard you all had an evening with my therapist, Veeresh. Neelam may have suggested to him… Being my secretary, it was her duty to suggest that Veeresh not talk about sex and drugs. Veeresh said, “My god, then what is there to talk about? These are the only two things, that’s all, the whole of life!”In the West, the idea has become very settled – in a subtle way, deep down in every being – that the moment your sex is gone… Now, what are you doing? Just take your gun and shoot yourself. I have heard a statement: “You know you are getting old when you have been with a boy all night and all that comes is the morning.” It seems to be almost a tragedy in the West. In fact, there should be rejoicing that all that comes is the morning. Now Nandan, all that will come will be the morning! Start enjoying the morning.A tremendous harm has been done to humanity by the people –whether in the West or in the East – who have been against life, against sex, because they are the ones who keep people filled with sexuality for their whole lives. They are the ones who are responsible for so much sexuality, so much pornography, so much obscenity in the whole world. But nobody blames them, nobody even thinks there is a relation, or thinks about who has made humanity so stupid that even an eighty-year-old man thinks only of sex. A tremendous misunderstanding…Sex certainly has to disappear, not by force but by a deep understanding that only comes through experience. Then a celibacy which has a beauty of its own arises. The Hindu celibate monks, the Jaina celibate monks, the Catholic celibate monks cannot understand the beauty of the celibacy that will happen to my sannyasins. Just the word will be the same, but the levels will be so far away from each other. The celibacy of a Catholic monk is nothing but perverted sex. It will create all kinds of complexities in his being.The celibacy that is happening to you and to all my people is a freedom, freedom from all complexities. It is a growth beyond biology. Because the enlightened people and the sages of the past went beyond sex, the ordinary man misunderstood the whole thing. He thought perhaps they have attained that great wisdom because they have left sex behind, so if we leave sex, we will also attain wisdom. It looks logical, but it is fallacious.People like Gautam Buddha have not repressed sex. They have lived it in its totality. I don’t think anybody in the whole world has lived a life of sex so totally, so intensely, as Gautam Buddha. By his twenty-ninth year he had come to the situation you are in: sex simply became meaningless, just an old game. How long can you go on playing it? And it’s not a very clean game either.The misunderstanding has continued for twenty-five centuries in the East, even with his own monks. They thought that because he had left sex… They could not see the difference between leaving sex and sex leaving you – from the outside it appears the same. One thing was certain: sex was no longer part of his interest, his longings, his desires, but sex was not repressed by him.But those who were seeing from the outside the great wisdom that arose, the great radiance, the great beauty, the explosion of sat-chit-anand, their simplistic logic was, “This man has left sex. That’s why he has attained truth, consciousness, bliss. So if we also leave sex, we too will attain the same state of being.” For twenty-five centuries the monks have been doing that, but not a single Gautam Buddha has been produced.I have been condemned my whole life, so much so that I have started enjoying it. When for a few days nobody condemns me for something, I start thinking “What has happened to the world?” And the condemnation has been basically on a single point. I was telling people, “Live sex joyously and it will leave you one day, so silently that you will not even hear the footsteps when it is going away. You will suddenly see yourself on a totally different plane of existence.” But that old fallacy persists; not only persists, all the vested interests of all the religions of the world want it to continue.A big, tall Cherokee Indian named Brown Bear comes into the bar with a six-shooter tucked in his belt. He is a giant of a man, so no one asks him why he is carrying a bucket full of horse manure in one hand and a black cat in the other. He puts down the bucket.“I will have a whiskey!” he roars at the bartender.After drinking it, in one gulp, he orders another and then another.All of a sudden, Brown Bear pulls out his gun and starts shooting the bucket, drops the cat and chases it around the bar on his hands and knees. When Brown Bear finally catches it, the trembling bartender raises his head above the bar and asks, “What the hell was that all about?”Brown Bear replies, “My father told me to be more like a white man, so I came here to have a few drinks, shoot the shit and chase a little pussy.”A little French boy comes to England in order to learn English. As his plane leaves Paris he learns the word take-off. During the flight he is looking through a magazine about Africa and learns the word zebra. When he arrives in England, the family he is staying with have a new baby and he learns the word baby.The next day he comes to the school and the pretty young teacher asks him if he has learnt any English words yet, and the little boy replies, “Take-off ze bra, baby.”Little Ernie took his paper up to the teacher for marking and as she bent over the desk, he looked down the front of her blouse and said, “Teacher, I see something.”The teacher was extremely embarrassed and said, “Ernie, that is very rude. Tomorrow, don’t come to school.”The next week Ernie was sitting in the front row when the teacher was writing on the blackboard. She dropped her chalk and, with her back to Ernie, bent down to pick it up.Ernie got up and without a word headed for the door.“Where are you going?” asked the teacher sternly.“Teacher,” said Ernie, “my schooldays are over.”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 09 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The beautiful statement sat-chit-anand has truth first, consciousness second and bliss third. Is there some inevitable sequence among them?There is no sequence among truth, consciousness, and bliss. They are not steps of a hierarchy, but they come one after another. Neither of them is higher than the other two, so – in the way we understand it – there is no sequence. The actual experience of sat-chit-anand happens simultaneously. In fact, these three words, sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss – do not indicate three experiences. It is just the poverty of language that we cannot contain the whole experience in one word. Our words are so poor. The experience is absolutely an organic whole: whatever happens, happens simultaneously.But perhaps as far as the human mind is concerned, a very different kind of sequence may be needed to comprehend what happens. In the statement sat-chit-anand, truth comes first. The natural tendency of the logical, rational mind is that truth must come first in experience and then consciousness and then bliss. In actual experience you start with meditation, which brings you wider and wider consciousness. At the ultimate peak, when the explosion happens, suddenly you find yourself fully conscious. Then on the one hand you find truth and on the other hand you find bliss. This all happens in a split second. Perhaps it is better to say it happens in no time. Even a split second takes some time. It happens in timelessness.But for the mind’s understanding – which is not the ultimate understanding but only a relative understanding – you can say the enlightened person experiences consciousness. As the consciousness comes into existence, suddenly he becomes aware of the truth that was hidden in the unconscious – because now there is no unconscious – and the bliss that was also hidden in the unconscious. I have told you it is almost like a bird, a single unity. The bird has two wings: truth, bliss, and the bird’s own body can be called consciousness. But you cannot divide them: you cannot say what comes first and what comes second; the whole bird comes. Without the wings, the bird cannot come and without the bird, the wings cannot come.Or take another example: you suddenly switch on the light in a dark room. Do you think that first you see the table, then you see the chairs, then you see the wall and then you see this and that? – so many things are in the room. But when the light comes on, they all suddenly become clear to you without any sequence – nothing is first, nothing is second. They were all hidden in darkness. Once light is there, darkness is no more. You immediately become aware of the existence of everything that is there.Your being is certainly a bird. The ancient seers have called it “the golden bird” – consciousness as the body, truth and bliss as the wings, and the whole sky full of stars is yours. Not only this sky; the mystics have been aware of skies beyond skies. Now even the scientist agrees that this sky cannot be the only sky.The expansion of scientific consciousness has also brought a vast universe. There was a time in the Middle Ages when it was thought the earth is the center and the sun and all the stars are moving around it. It was a very small, cozy world, and nobody bothered about what was beyond it. As scientific exploration goes deeper and deeper, they become more and more mystical in their statements. Now they know existence has no limits.And what we think of as stars are not stars. Each star is a bigger sun than our sun. Our sun is a very mediocre sun, although it is very big in comparison to the earth. It is over one hundred times bigger than the earth. It looks vast next to the earth, but only in comparison to the faraway stars, which look so small that we call them “twinkle twinkle little stars.” They are not “twinkle twinkle little stars”; they are far greater suns than our sun.Our sun has its own solar system, made up of Earth, the moon and all the other planets. Each sun has its own solar system, and up to now they have counted at least three million suns. Among these millions of stars, the most mystical experience that has been encountered by the scientists is that they all are moving away from the center – as far as possible, at tremendous speed. It means the sky is available for them, they can go on… They have been going on for billions of years and their speed is the same as the speed of light.The speed of light is the ultimate speed, physicists have concluded. There is no higher speed according to them. It is tremendous. You will have to work it out. In one second, light travels 186,000 miles. You have to multiply it by 60 – that will be the distance light travels in one minute. Then you have to multiply it by 60 again – so you will have one hour of the light’s travel. Then 24 – that is one day’s travel of light. Then 365 – that is one light year. And that is the lowest unit of measurement as far as light and its speed is concerned.One light year is just like one meter, one yard, one foot. There are stars thousands of light years away. The nearest star is four light years away. Even to reach this star seems to be impossible. Four light years – we don’t have any vehicle, any rocket, that can go at the speed of light. And the trouble is intrinsic. The trouble is that at the speed of light, everything melts. Because it is so fast and the friction is so great, everything burns out and melts into light. We don’t have any metal, artificial or natural, that can remain intact at the speed of light. And without the speed of light, there is no possibility of reaching to those stars which are millions of light years away.Scientists say that this earth was separated from the sun about four million years ago. There are stars which will never know that this earth ever existed because the day this earth was born, their light started coming toward it, but has not yet arrived – even at that tremendous speed – and scientists reckon the earth may go out of existence before those light rays reach here. Just in-between two light rays the whole of the earth’s life begins, comes to a peak and ends. Those stars have infinite space available – that is the sky. And now it is absolutely certain that there is no limit. Those stars can go on forever, as far as they want. We are citizens of an unlimited universe.Existence is always in balance. Just as there is this vastness outside, the same tremendous expanse is within you. The within will be exactly as vast – as infinite – as the without, because the within and without should be in balance.Physicists are the mystics of matter and the mystics are the physicists of consciousness. In this small statement of sat-chit-anand, the mystics are saying that a whole infinite universe within you becomes available simultaneously in an explosion of consciousness. The explosion of consciousness only brings light. Everything is there already – has been there forever – waiting for you to be awake.There is no sequence the way we understand sequence, but there is a certain secret to be understood: without consciousness coming to its peak, you will not become aware of either truth or bliss. But once you have become aware, you know they are all one. This is a far more meaningful, significant, trinity than the Christian one. Their trinity seems to be fictitious: God, the Son, the Holy Ghost – it is good for children’s books because they cannot understand sat-chit-anand. They say they can understand the Holy Ghost, they can understand the father, they can understand the son. But that is a very stupid fiction. With no rationale, with no evidence, Christianity goes on claiming it. Its whole structure depends on it.The mystics’ trinity seems to be based far more on experience, on truth. It is not a fiction – and it is available to you without any prayer, without any holy scripture. Just you are enough because you contain that infinity. All that is needed is to look inward. Allow your consciousness to grow so that it fills you with light and dispels all darkness, and you will find the most precious treasure within yourself. In that experience, there will not be any division between truth, consciousness, and bliss. It will come all at once, showering on you.But the moment you bring that experience into language, you have to make one into three – so as not to be unfair to the tremendous experience that has happened. No single word can say anything about it. It will be a very partial statement, and any partial truth is more dangerous than a lie. At least the lie can be detected. The partial truth is very dangerous because it may not be detected; it gives you the feeling that it is true.These three words contain almost three universes. Each is a sky unto itself. There is no limit to your consciousness. You can go in the inner world just as far away as stars are going in the outer world. Neither does bliss have any limits, nor does truth have any limits – and when three things don’t have any limits, they cannot be three. Three unlimited things are bound to become one. So the experience is of one organic whole, not in sequence. But in language the difficulty is that we have to write words in sequence.Languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean – Far Eastern languages – are far better than alphabetical languages because alphabetical languages have to put everything in a sequence, in a sentence. One thing will be followed by another and then by another, one word by another word, one line by another line, one paragraph by another paragraph, everything in sequence. The nonalphabetical languages have disappeared from the world, except in the Far East.In the beginning, all languages in the world were nonalphabetical, they were pictorial. For example, if you see an elephant, you see the whole elephant as one unity. But if you have to describe the elephant, you cannot describe it as one unit. You will have to tell about its legs like pillars, you will have to tell about its ears like big fans and so on and so forth. It is a big animal. And in reading your sentence about the elephant, one who has never seen an elephant is bound to think that there is a sequence. In Chinese, the situation is different. The elephant is not described the way we write about it. There is only a symbol of the elephant.I remember one symbol I cannot forget: a symbol of a roof of a house, just a plain roof – anybody can understand the roof – and two women sitting under the roof. One of my friends was learning Chinese. I asked him, “What is it?” He said, “This symbol means fight, war.” Two women under one roof? There is going to be a Third World War without any doubt. Whoever made the symbol must have been a great psychologist. Knowingly or unknowingly, he has expressed so much in such a small symbol. If you have to write about it in an alphabetical language, you will have to use a few sentences to say the whole thing.The mystic has always been in tremendous difficulty: how to say the unsayable? But he has tried, and he has tried his best in the East, because the East has known the mystic for almost ten thousand years. Ten thousand years is the minimum time that I am talking about.The whole genius of the East has been concentrated on only one point: the discovery of oneself. That discovery – whether the mystic was in China, or in India, or in Arabia, or in Japan, makes no difference – the mystery has brought them to the same point, has always culminated in sat-chit-anand. They have all found tremendous bliss. Their lives have become absolutely authentic and truthful, and their beings have become absolutely conscious. There are no longer any unconscious parts lingering in them.This can be seen by people who have receptivity, sensitivity and intelligence – who have eyes to see it, who are not standing with closed eyes saying “There is no light.” You will have to open your eyes. Any mystic belonging to any age, to any country, to any part of the globe, reveals the same truth because truth is the unchanging, unmovable center of the whole of existence.If you can find yourself in company with a mystic, and you can be unafraid, and open your heart so that he can pour his experience into you, he can only give to you. You need not be worried. He is not going to take anything from you. You don’t have anything in the first place – and what you have, you are unaware of. The mystic can pour his light into you and can make you aware of all that is hidden in you – your hidden splendor. This is the authentic relationship between the master and the disciple. The master does not teach anything. He simply pours his light into the heart of the disciple. There is no philosophy to be taught, there is no teaching that the student has to be converted to – there is only an experience that has to be transferred.For centuries it has been known as the transmission of the lamp. It is a beautiful expression: transmission of the lamp. The master simply allows you to have his fire, to make your dark house also light. He loses nothing, but you gain tremendously. Hence the great gratitude that has been felt by the disciples for the master, because you cannot repay him – there is no way. What he has given to you is invaluable. All that you can do is feel a heartfelt gratitude. This gratitude is the only authentic connection between the disciple and the master. And as the disciple also becomes aware, he rises to the same status as the master.A beautiful story…When the master of a great seeker, Rinzai, saw that the moment had come when Rinzai was going to be of the same status as the master himself, he called Rinzai and slapped him hard. Rinzai said, “But I have not done anything, I have not even said anything. You have been beating me for years.”It is a very loving gesture, this beating. Only Zen has come to understand that it is out of sheer love that the master slaps the disciple.The master said to Rinzai, “This is my last slap to you. I could not resist the temptation of enjoying it once more, because from tomorrow you will be a master yourself.”So playful. Both laughed, both enjoyed it. Rinzai remembered it his whole life. He became a much better-known master than his own master, but he never forgot the last slap that the master had given him. He continuously remembered, “My master loved me so much that there was not a single day that he would not beat me – on any excuse.”It looks very strange to the logical mind, but logic has nothing to do with the inner world. Rinzai said, “Now I understand how much effort that old man was making in slapping me. In fact, his hands were hurting more than I was hurting because I was young, healthy. He was very old, but he did not miss. As I was reaching close to my enlightenment, he knew it before I knew it.”Naturally, the master knows before the disciple that you are just on the brink. And that slap was not just a slap. To the outsiders it was a slap, but to both the master and the disciple that slap was a push beyond the boundary that was making him still think of himself as a disciple. With the last slap, he was recognized as a master, not with certificates – they are so inhuman, so dead – but with a living contact.Then both the men, the old man and the young, laughed late into the night, and the whole monastery thought, “What is happening?” People were looking from every window and door – “What is happening?” And both were laughing tears of joy.The next day, the master did not appear for his morning sermon. He sent word to Rinzai, “Now you can go. Now, you can do what I have done to you. You can transmit the lamp to others. I am too old – just take the whole responsibility of the monastery.”Rinzai said, “When you said you were hitting me for the last time, I immediately understood that now I have to be responsible for this whole monastery. With your last slap, you have retired. That’s why I was crying, because you are retiring. Without you, I do not want to be enlightened. Let me remain a disciple. Don’t retire. But you have done it already. I was perfectly happy and I was not thinking that it was going to happen so soon.”What had he experienced, when the master slapped him the last time? Just a sudden explosion: sat-chit-anand.There is no sequence. It is all simultaneous. It is all together. It is one without any order.Osho,Last night, I noticed your beard. It is really a magnificent thing; it reminds me of a lion's mane. Does a beard like yours come with enlightenment? Or do you have to be born with it?Such a beard comes with your birth. Enlightenment cannot give you such a beard – don’t be fooled!You can see it: Gautam Buddha has no beard, not only no beard, no mustache either. Great masters of the Jainas, called tirthankaras, are without any beard, without any mustache. In fact, both traditions – the Jaina and the Buddha tradition – have a strange idea which their scholars have not been able to explain, which has been questioned for twenty-five centuries at least. But I don’t belong to any tradition. That’s why I have a certain objective insight into things. I can give the reason.It was not that they were shaving themselves twice a day – just that they had no beards and no mustaches from their very birth. They never grew them. In fact, in Jainism, it has become a part of the definition: unless a master is without a mustache and beard, he is not a master, because their twenty-four great masters are all without beards, without mustaches. I cannot believe that all these people were missing some hormones which create the beard, which create the mustache in man and not in women. Once in a while some women may have – particularly in old age – a little mustache, a little beard. Sometimes it happens in young age also.I knew a very beautiful young girl. She was the daughter of the principal of one of the Leonard Theosophical Colleges of the Christians. The principal was very much interested in me – that’s how I came to know the girl. She was very intelligent, very beautiful. She got married in America, got a DLitt from America and now teaches in America – but all her beauty was in trouble because of a beard. She had to shave it twice a day, but still there was a black spot. If you came close to her, and she was so beautiful… That black spot was making her feel very inferior.When I saw her last with her husband, they had both come for six months to teach in the Leonard Theosophical College in Jabalpur, and then six months in some other theosophical college in America. The last time I saw them must have been thirty years ago.I told her, “You will suffer unnecessarily your whole life from inferiority because of this beard. The more you shave it, the bigger it becomes and you are in America. It is a simple thing – just a little change in your hormones and it will disappear. You need some more female hormones. You have too many male hormones. The balance is not right.”She said, “I never thought about it and nobody ever told me.”Then I received her letter a few months after she had gone to America saying, “I am very grateful that my beard has disappeared.”It is a question of hormones. In old age, women start growing beards because their female hormones are finished, but their male hormones are still there, active. They have lived the life of a woman, but they have not used their male part, so the balance has changed. In old age, many women start growing a beard. But in old age, nobody takes much notice.I cannot believe that all these twenty-four tirthankaras, spread over five thousand years, all had unbalanced hormones. What could be the reason? And the same was the question about Buddha. I don’t believe that they did not have mustaches or beards. My own understanding is that it is only a symbolic expression, that as you become more and more aware, you become more and more delicate – as graceful as a woman. Instead of having male qualities, which are the qualities of a warrior or a soldier, you start having the qualities of compassion and love and grace and beauty of a woman.Those statues, the twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas, don’t represent the people exactly; they represent only a metaphor. They are not photographs. They are very objective pieces of art. You can go into any Jaina temple. If it is big enough, it will have twenty-four tirthankaras. If it is not big enough, then they place three statues and mirrors on both the sides and small windows for you to look through.When you look into those mirrors, they go on reflecting each other. So instead of three, you see a line of hundreds, as far as you can see. The first mirror reflects the second mirror, then that mirror reflects the other mirror, and this goes on and on. So as far as you can see and strangely, you can see exactly twenty-four tirthankaras – a great artistic device. But if the temple is very poor, then you will find only one statue of Mahavira.But one thing is – it is striking that Jainas have also not been able to explain this – all the statues look similar, exactly similar. The only difference is a small symbol underneath their legs – a line represents Mahavira. Even the priest cannot say which is Mahavira. First he has to look. You may not understand how he manages to tell that this is Mahavira, this is Abhinava and this is Meminaka. There are different symbols for each master, but their statues are exactly the same.That too is impossible. Twenty-four people exactly the same? The same height, the same nose, the same eyes, the same face, the same body – it is not possible. For centuries they have been at a loss to answer because they have been looking at those statues as factual. I look at those statues as symbols. Those statues say nothing about the bodies of those twenty-four masters. They say something about their having exactly the same experience. Their same faces, their same eyes, their same heights indicate only one thing: what has happened within them is the same.Now, how to say it in a sculpture? The great artist must have found a tremendously beautiful way to say through their statues, “We are not making their portraits; we are not photographers. Through the statue we are trying to represent their inner experience.” And because the inner experience was the same – sat-chit-anand – there was no need to make any differences in the bodies.You are a little bit crazy, but not more than me. I insist: if you want this kind of beard, you will have to be born with it. It does not come with enlightenment. Enlightenment has no concern with your beard. Even a woman can become enlightened but that does not mean she will have a beard. This kind of beautiful beard comes only with your birth.I was very reluctant to listen to my parents. They were all insisting that this does not look right, “You should cut off your beard.”I said, “I want to keep the original hairs just as existence has given them to me. I am going to return them to existence in exactly the same way. I am not going into this stupid business of shaving every day. Moreover, I am so lazy – someday I may shave off half, and the other half…”The priest had been invited to preach at a mental hospital. During the sermon he noticed that one of the patients was paying very close attention, his eyes fixed on the priest’s face, his body bent eagerly forward. Such interest was most flattering. After the service the priest noticed that the man was speaking to one of the attendants. So, as soon as possible, the priest asked him, “Did that man speak to you about my sermon?”“Yes,” said the attendant.“Would you mind telling me what he said?” asked the priest.“Well,” said the man reluctantly, “what the man said was, ‘Just think, he is out, and I am in.’”We are all in. There is no out. We have dropped out. You are my people – insiders.Osho,Standing in the queue for breakfast this morning I overheard two German girls talking, “Who the hell is this guy Milarepa anyway? Osho gives him so much juice!” The other replied, “Oh, he's no one really! Don't you know? Osho just invented him as a joke!”Just then, Lolita walked up, put her arms around me, looked deep into my eyes and said in a sexy voice, “Hi, schnooksy, did you hear the discourse this morning?” One look in her eyes and I knew I was in trouble again. I forgot all about my breakfast, excused myself, and ran back to my room. I closed my eyes and began repeating, “Vimal, Vimal, Vimal.”Osho, am I having what psychologists call an “identity crisis?” I am also wondering, who the hell is this guy Milarepa?Milarepa, you have created more trouble than you are aware of, because Jivan Mary committed a mistake in typing the name of Lokita. She typed the name Lolita. And then such a chaos began; the boyfriend of Lolita was immensely freaked out. He suspected that this Lolita was having a love affair with Milarepa. And Lolita was crying and weeping and trying to convince him.Hearing about Lolita’s beauty, many new lovers started knocking on her door, saying “Don’t be worried. If Milarepa has left you after ten minutes, we are here. For what are we here?” And the boyfriend freaked out even more. Lokita was enjoying immensely. She changed her name to Lolita. She dropped her own name, Lokita. So many were following her.Milarepa, the girl who hugged you was not Lolita; it was Lokita who has changed herself into Lolita. But you are such a fool that you have forgotten completely who this woman is. And naturally, just a ten-minute love affair – who remembers the name or the face?I have heard about a man who married ten times. And when he married the tenth time, after three months he discovered that he had married this woman once before. When you marry ten times, memory has its limitations. You are not a computer.Milarepa changes girlfriends ten times every day. So naturally, when Lokita hugged him again, telling him that she was Lolita, he thought, “My God. I am again in trouble.” You will remain in trouble always, Milarepa.Now these two girls were asking “Who the hell is this guy Milarepa anyway?” and “Osho gives him so much juice.” I have to give it to him because the poor fellow has to distribute his juice all around. If I don’t give him juice, you will find him lying flat on the bed, finished. I have to keep him alive. Do you have any objections?It is too much that the other replied, “Oh, he’s no one really.” He is one of my craziest disciples and I will not tolerate such insulting remarks. And she said, “Don’t you know? Osho just invented him as a joke.” He is not a joke, although his whole life is full of jokes. But he is a real person, just sitting here, keeping his head down, avoiding the girls.He is becoming a little old – I may take him out of the circus. But I never take anybody out of the circus unless he requests it, and Milarepa has not requested it yet. So I feel he needs a little more experience, a little more anxiety, a little more tension, a little more trouble. Let him have it to his heart’s content.The old bull’s active days are over – soon Milarepa’s days will also be over – but the farmer permits him to stay in the pasture with the cows. Of course, the farmer lets a young bull loose in the field as well, and he goes to work immediately.Watching this, the old bull starts snorting and pawing the ground with his hooves. “You are wasting your time,” says the farmer. “You are too old for that sort of thing now.”“I know,” says the old bull, “but I can show him I am not a cow, can’t I?”Poor Milarepa is not a joke, just an old bull that I am keeping in the pasture with the cows. Not to be caught, he finishes his love affairs quickly – ten minutes. That must be the minimum time in the whole world. A love affair finished in ten minutes! Perhaps three minutes honeymoon, two minutes married life, five minutes trouble, and it is finished. The fact is: now he is getting old. Everybody is getting old. But he has to go on proving that at least everybody should know he is not a cow.And as for you, Milarepa – you need not be afraid of the cows. You need not go to your room and lock it and feel that again another crisis has arisen and start repeating “Vimal, Vimal, Vimal.” Vimal is not a transcendental meditation; it is not going to help. And don’t be so afraid of women – just a little longer.I came across a statement just the other day: “There is nothing in the world better than the love of a good woman unless, of course, it is the love of a bad woman.” Here you will find the greatest women in the world – fed up with the world. They have come here to meditate. But a woman is fundamentally love. Her meditation cannot be without love. A woman is not much interested in sex. She is much more interested in warmth, in cuddling, in friendliness, in love. Man is much more interested in sex.These are the fallacies which show that God never created the world, because nothing fits together. He does not seem to understand that man and woman have to live together. They should be made in such a way that they fit with each other, but they are absolutely misfitting. Man’s sexuality is genital and local. It’s like local anesthesia.When my personal physician took my blood, in the beginning he used to tell me, “Now, the prick.” Finally he understood that what he is doing is nonsense. It is not the prick. Now he does not say that. I have been watching while he changed his idea. Now he does it silently without saying anything.But man is nothing but the prick. Women have a totally different kind of being. Her whole body needs love. It is not sexuality. Her whole body is orgasmic. That’s why there is tremendous trouble. Man comes to orgasm quickly – within two minutes – and the woman has not even started. The woman takes a little time. Her whole body has to become ready, ecstatic. Her whole body has to join the dance. Only then can she feel orgasmic joy. So she is not actually interested in the prick. She is more interested in hugging, in being close to you, in the warmth of your body. She wants to be surrounded by your love, she wants to surround you with her love.More and more people will be feeling that sex is dropping away, but that does not mean that you have to escape when you see a woman approaching you, shut yourself in your room and repeat the transcendental mantra: Vimal, Vimal, Vimal. You have to change your old idea of love. It was not love, it was pure sex. When sex drops, you can meet the woman on a higher level for which she has always been longing and suffering.For millions of years women have suffered because man has not been able to give them what they need. Man has simply used them for his sexuality. They feel almost like a commodity to be used, and then the man turns over and goes to sleep and starts snoring. This is so ugly and the woman has tears in her eyes, is crying. After each lovemaking the woman cries because she has not got anything. Her standard of love is higher than the standard of man.As more and more sannyasins will be dropping out of sex, they should start learning the language of love, of warmth, of friendliness. No woman is going to feel offended that you have dropped sex. In fact, she is going to be immensely happy that now love can move to a higher level, which was always her deepest longing.This difference between women’s and men’s orgasmic capacities has been one of the causes of the greatest misery of humanity, and nobody has ever tried to bridge it. Either the woman has to be brought lower – which is impossible, because her whole body is orgasmic; she cannot become locally orgasmic. Or – the only way possible – the man learns the language of love and becomes the same as the woman, his whole body needing a shower of love. That will take almost ninety percent of the misery from the world.But it can happen only if the man comes to a point where sex drops by itself, because this is the deepest reason for man’s and woman’s conflict. But they are not aware of it, so they fight on any other excuse – continuously misunderstanding. Man says something, the woman understands something else. The woman says something, the man understands something else. It is almost impossible to have an intelligent conversation between two lovers. I have never heard of anything like that. You can have an intelligent conversation with somebody else’s woman, but not with your own woman. With your own woman you can only fight – or you can read your newspaper.Two Italians meet each other in the pizzeria.“Are you going to Goa?” asks the first.“No, I’m-a going to stay-a,” replies the friend.The pope was giving another of his speeches to a lively crowd of Italian youngsters. He was trying hard to make his point. “You must not use-a the pill!”A young, pretty signorina stepped forward and said, “Look, Polack! You no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules.”This goes on, this misunderstanding. But with my people I hope to create a very deep understanding of all that is hidden in the darkness inside. I am trying to bring it out in every possible way, so that you can become aware of your whole being and what the real authentic cause of your misery is. And if you are thinking of some false causes for your misery, you are not going to get out of misery.Nancy Reagan comes back from her medical examination with a smile on her face.“Why the grin?” asks Ronald Reagan with a sour face.“Because,” she boasts, “Dr. White told me I have the figure of a woman half my age.”“Oh, yeah? And what about your seventy-year-old ass?”“Come to think of it,” replies Nancy, “he didn’t say a thing about you.”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 10 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is not the inquiry into sat-chit-anand the same as Badarayana's “Athato brahman jigyasa”?Badarayana’s statement, “Athato brahman jigyasa” is one of the most potential statements ever made. It means, “Now begins the inquiry into the ultimate.” It is the first statement in his Brahma Sutra – Maxims about the Ultimate – one of the greatest mystic books in the world. This is the first sentence of that strange book, but one of the most significant books that has ever been written.I call it strange because Badarayana is not well-known around the world, although in India he is the only mystic on whose maxims thousands of commentaries have been written. Each of his statements is so pregnant with meaning that you can go on commenting on it in a thousand-and-one ways. Still it seems something inexhaustible has remained. This is the only book which has commentaries, then commentaries on commentaries, then again commentaries on those commentaries.For almost two thousand years, all the great geniuses of this great country have been in some way or other connected with Badarayana. And still his name is not known in the world. Perhaps the reason is that nothing is known about him except the book. About his personal life absolutely nothing is known. Whether he was a historical person or not is very difficult to say. But one thing is certain: whoever wrote the book – whatever his name was – was certainly one of the greatest mystics of the world. So what is the problem in calling him Badarayana?Whoever wrote the book, one more thing is certain: the book is historical. It has existed for two thousand years and is one of the books – the only one – which has spread due to so many commentaries. It has so many complexities that almost every philosopher in India became involved in some way or other. There is no other book in the world which has been commented upon so much. It can mean only one thing: his statements are almost mines of meaning. You can go on digging and you will go on finding more and more – fresher sources of water, fresher sources of meaning and significance.Sat-chit-anand is not equivalent to athato brahma jigyasa. Athato brahma jigyasa – now begins the inquiry into the ultimate – is the first step and sat-chit-anand is the last step. What begins as an inquiry… Sat-chit-anand is not an inquiry, it is the ultimate result of the inquiry: you have come to the conclusion. The statement of Badarayana is the beginning and sat-chit-anand is the end. They are not synonymous, although they are deeply connected with each other. Without the inquiry, there is no possibility of realizing the conclusion. Hence Badarayana comes first. This small statement has to be understood because it is for every beginner.As far as the ultimate is concerned, one is always a beginner. One is always coming close to it, closer and closer and closer, but something always remains inviting you, calling you forth, challenging you, a higher peak. You were thinking you have arrived but still there is something left. And this pilgrimage continues. I have started saying that there is no goal, only the pilgrimage. In other words, the pilgrimage in itself is so divine, so holy, that to be bothered and to be anxious about the end of it can only mean one thing: you are not interested in the journey, you are interested in the end of the journey. You are not enjoying each moment of your pilgrimage. You are looking forward, ahead, for the time when you will have reached and then you will celebrate – and that is a wrong approach from the very beginning.Each moment is the journey and each moment is the goal. You have to live as if you have already arrived, although there will never be a moment when you can say “I have arrived.” You can only say “I am coming home. I can see the home coming closer and closer.” But it is good that you never come. Once you have come, you come to a full stop, and life knows no full stops. Yes, colons, semicolons, commas, everything is allowed – but a full stop? – absolutely no, a hundred times no, because a full stop will mean that life has come to an end, life has come to the grave. Life never comes to an end. It never terminates in death. It is an ongoing process.Hence, Badarayana’s statement has to be understood very lovingly and very deeply. Each word of it is pure gold.First, it has been commented on by different commentators, giving different colors to it. You are not accustomed to this because in the West the very phenomenon of commentaries has not happened. Nobody comments on Kant, nobody comments on Hegel, even on Socrates nobody comments, nobody comments on the Bible. The very phenomenon of commentaries is absolutely Eastern. The reason is that the great philosophers of the West came into existence after writing had arrived, when it was no longer a question of memorizing – you could write a treatise.When philosophers like Kant or Hegel or Feuerbach write, they write with all the possible implications, complexities, meanings. They keep in mind what the points are if somebody is going to contradict them. They also keep in mind what the arguments of the opposite philosophy can be, and they are already replying to them – although nobody has opposed them, nobody has even understood what they are writing about. So their writings are very complete in a way, full and entire. They have not left anything for anybody else to add.In the East, commentaries started for a certain historical reason. It is at least ten thousand years old – that is the very orthodox view about the history of philosophical development in the East. There are people who think it is far more ancient than ten thousand years. Because there was no writing – writing had not yet been invented – every master had to speak in small maxims, not elaborate treatises but in small sutras. The word sutra means the thread.They are giving you the very minimum to remember, because to remember a vast amount of a great philosophical treatise will not be possible. And there is a danger of forgetting something, there is a danger of adding something of your own. So the way of the sutras was the only possibility – to write in such a condensed way that every disciple of any master can remember the small, seed-like maxims.But they are only seeds. They indicate the way, they indicate a certain direction. Unless your heart becomes a soil for those seeds, they will not sprout into leaves, into branches, into flowers, into fruit. Those seeds contain everything that is going to happen, they have the whole inbuilt program. If you allow that seed to enter your being, as it sinks deeper and deeper, you will realize all that is contained in it. It will become a reality in you. But because individuals are different, because individuals are unique, each individual heart is not the same soil, not the same territory, not the same land. The seed will have to grow according to the soil.Somebody’s heart may be very fertile, creative. The tree may become very huge, the foliage may be very green, and when the spring comes there will be thousands of flowers and fruit. But somebody else’s heart may be very hard. The seed is the same, but the soil is not going to help the seed much. The seed has to grow against all odds, against all hindrances. The heart is not going to help, on the contrary it will hinder. It is just a seed which has fallen onto ground full of stones. It may grow, but it won’t be the same as in a fertile creative heart. It may not attain the same height; it may even be a bit crippled; it may not have much foliage; only a few flowers may come. But the uniquenesses are such…Somebody is a poet and the seed may become poetry, somebody is a musician and the seed may become music, and somebody is a sculptor and the seed may become a beauty in stone. It will all depend in which kind of heart the seed falls. There are many more implications.It is possible that one heart may be very fertile and it may bring forth thousands of flowers and one heart may not be so fertile and it may not bring forth thousands of flowers but just one flower – very huge, very big. Those thousand flowers will not be in any way competitive to this one flower. In number they may be many, but the beauty of this one flower has almost accumulated the whole beauty of thousands of flowers.For many years, while I was teaching in the university, I had one gardener. I had a beautiful garden. And this old man I had chosen for a certain reason – he was somebody else’s gardener, some army officer’s gardener. Every year, he had won the competition for growing the biggest roses. I used to go to see it because the whole city was involved in the competition. All the rich people – officers, bureaucrats, professors, doctors, those who could afford a garden – were participants.But I was not interested in the people who were participating. I was interested in finding out who the gardener was. The poor gardener was not even mentioned when the trophy was given to the winner; it was given to the owner of the garden. I was looking out for the gardener – this army officer could not be a gardener himself – but the poor gardener was not even there.I followed the army officer’s car. I looked around his house, I watched, and I found the gardener working. When the officer went in, he did not even tell the gardener, “I have won the trophy because of you. In fact, it belongs to you.” He simply went into his garage and then into his house.I went into his garden. The old man, a poor man, was working. I asked him, “Have you heard that your roses have been chosen as the best for this year?”He said, “Nobody has told me yet.”I asked, “How much is this army officer giving you as salary?”He said, “Not very much.”I said, “Whatever he is giving, I will give you double. You can tell me later how much he is giving you. Just bring whatever you have into my car and come with me.”He said, “But he is a dangerous man. He will search for me with his gun.”I said, “Don’t be worried, I am no less dangerous. Don’t you worry.”So I brought him into my own house and I told him, “You start working, and every year I will not be going to the competition, you will be going. And all the trophies that you win will be in the house that I have given to you.”He could not believe it. He asked, “But what about the army officer?”I said, “I will take care of him. You need not be worried about it.”Then I saw how he was winning. His whole art was never to allow any rosebush more than one flower. He would cut off all the buds and leave only the biggest bud.I asked him, “What is the secret of it?”He said, “The secret is simple. The rosebush has a certain amount of juice. It can be distributed to one hundred flowers, but if you don’t allow it to be distributed, it is bound to assert itself into one flower.”I remained nine years in that university. For nine years continuously he was the winner. And his secret was just to allow one flower to grow.So it is possible. These are the uniquenesses I am talking about – that the same seeds in different hearts will bring different manifestations.That is how commentaries begin. The master dies. He had thousands of disciples who have listened to him. Now they start thinking – what is the significance of a certain statement or of a certain word? In the East, it has been a very delicate affair – not brutal logic, but a very subtle, very feminine art.The word athato can mean now, it can mean here now, it can mean from now, it can mean from this point onward. Because of these different meanings growing in different hearts, the whole meaning of the sentence will change. Just the first word will change the whole meaning. For example, to a man or a woman whose heart is the heart of a devotee, the heart of a lover, athato will mean “Enough of love; now begins the inquiry into the ultimate. Enough of this world and its pleasures, now begins the inquiry into the ultimate.”To the logician, the same word will mean “Enough of logic, enough of rationality, enough of philosophy; now begins the real inquiry into the existential” – not into words, not into philosophical investigations, but into an existential experience. To a poet it may mean “Enough of poetry, enough of all that life I have lived up to now; the time has come to enter the path in search of light, in search of the truth. I have sung songs of joy, I have sung songs of beauty.”But a time comes when you are tired even of your own creativity. How long…? Just as you become tired of the woman you loved so much, of the man you loved so much, you become tired of your creative dimension for which you would have sacrificed your life. A moment comes when it seems that you have been playing like a child, collecting seashells on the sea beach, or making castles of sand. Beautiful utopias – but it is enough.You have not gained anything of the eternal, of the timeless, of the immortal. How long are you going to wait? Now is the moment to change the direction of all your genius and intelligence. Then athato will mean something different, different from what it can mean to a businessman, to what it can mean to a king. He has been on a power trip, he has conquered as much as he wanted, he is tired.I am reminded of one of the greatest emperors, perhaps in the whole of world history.His name was Ashoka. He could have become a world conqueror far more easily than Alexander the Great. He had far bigger armies, far more developed technology, far more riches. He was on the way to becoming a world conqueror, but the first victory was enough. He conquered what is now the state of Orissa. In his days it was called the land of Kalinga. He conquered the country of Kalinga.Millions of people had to be killed, massacred, because the people of that place were ready to die but not to be conquered. The situation was such that the fight would have continued until not a single man remained and Ashoka would have been victorious only over millions of corpses. Halfway, Ashoka trembled, seeing millions of people massacred, and seeing the point that these were not the people who were going to give way. Either life in freedom or death – there was no other alternative for them. They would not accept any kind of slavery.When he became absolutely certain of it, he thought for a moment – just in the middle of millions of corpses – “Is it worthwhile? What is the point? Killing these brave people and just becoming victorious over a country of the dead. You will feel repentant your whole life because you have destroyed so much life. And not the life of ordinary people, but people of tremendous courage, who have given you absolute alternatives: ‘Either we will live in freedom or we will die in freedom. Slavery is not acceptable. You may be a great king, you may have great power, but at least we have the power to die – you cannot take it away from us.’”The country was poor. It was not in any way comparable to the vast empire of Ashoka. Ashoka’s empire was the biggest India has ever seen – from Afghanistan, which is now a separate country, Pakistan, which is now a separate country, Sri Lanka, which is now a separate country, Burma, which is now a separate country, to Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim, Ladakh… India has never had so large a map as it had at the time of Ashoka.Just this small country of Kalinga was independent, and they were poor. They did not have an army or the technology, just courage – such a courage that they had only two simple alternatives: “We will live in freedom or we will die in freedom; we don’t know any other alternative.” In fact, Ashoka had become challenged in a way – he had to see how, for centuries, these people had been free without an army, with just human courage and dignity and pride. It was a great challenge to the great emperor, who could have crushed them without any effort. He had already killed half of the country.But then suddenly a turn came to his consciousness, and he saw that this was simply being stupid, “You are destroying a beautiful, proud people and you are able to destroy them because you have bigger armies, you have more weapons, better weapons, you have better horses, but you don’t have better human beings than those you are destroying. Your people are simply servants who are fighting because they are being paid. These people are fighting without arms, without horses, just because they love freedom. It is ugly to destroy these people – this will be destroying a beautiful variety.”He returned home. His generals asked, “What is the matter? We are winning.”Ashoka said, “This is not victory, this is simply murder. And I am not a murderer. If I cannot conquer them alive, I don’t want to conquer them. I don’t want to be called in history a conqueror of corpses. Forget about it.”The whole thing became such a nightmare in Ashoka’s mind that the moment he reached his palace he came to a transformation point: he renounced the empire. He said, “Of what use is this whole empire? Enough of it! I don’t want any conquering or anybody to conquer, anybody to invade, and I don’t want any empire.”Ashoka became a disciple of Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha had died two hundred years earlier, but his disciples were alive, his enlightened disciples were still there. It may have been the third or fourth generation, but there were people who had the same flavor and the same charisma, the same magic.Ashoka became a disciple, renounced the world, started living like a beggar in his own capital, begging for his food every day in his own capital. And because he became a sannyasin, this word athato would bring to his mind a totally different meaning than it could bring to the mind of a poet, or to the mind of a creative artist, or to a painter.And the meaning of brahma jigyasa will be like the meaning of athato. To the theist, brahma will mean God; to the atheist, brahma will mean the ultimate reality – not a personal God, but an impersonal reality. Jigyasa, inquiry, will also take different forms. To somebody it may become meditation, to somebody else it may become yoga, to somebody else it may become prayer. It will depend on your potentiality – and according to your potential the seed will take form.This simple sentence has been commented upon by almost one thousand commentators. I have gone through so many commentaries and it has been such a joy to see the same small sentence – just three words – take such different meanings. And the whole commentary on all other sutras, all other maxims, will depend on the different meanings of this first sentence.It is not equivalent to sat-chit-anand, but it is the beginning. And sat-chit-anand – truth, consciousness, bliss – is the ultimate realization of this small beginning that becomes deeper and deeper and bigger and bigger, and sooner or later becomes your whole life. Badarayana’s sutra is only a hint that it is time to change. It is time to become a seeker; it is time to behave like a mature person; it is time not to waste your life anymore on mundane activities. It is time for the pilgrimage. Your boat has arrived. It is time to go into the unexplored seas, to the untraveled path; to be alone and to go within; to be alone and to be absolutely free and independent; to find your roots in existence.The day you start finding your roots in existence will be the moment when you have touched the edge of your very life spring. That will be the time of a certain conclusion. Your life is no longer a question, but becomes an answer. And that answer is sat-chit-anand. Those three words are irrefutable.God can be argued against. In fact, half of the world is now communist and does not believe in God. Buddhism, which is the third-greatest religion after Christianity and Mohammedanism, doesn’t believe in God; Jainism, which is a minority religion, doesn’t believe in God either. In fact, if you accumulate all the numbers, there are more atheists in the world than theists. It has never been so before. The world was always a theist majority and an atheist minority. The balance has reversed. Today there are more atheists in the world than theists.And the theist is not much of a theist either. He is theist just by name; scratch his skin a little and you will find a doubt inside. He believes in God, he goes to church, he goes to the temple, but his is not a faith which has no doubt within it. It is a faith which has been sitting on repressed doubt. It is a belief – just underneath is doubt. I have never come across a single theist who really believes. He may say “I really believe,” but the more he says “I really believe,” the more he exposes himself. When you say to someone “I really love you,” what do you mean? Is not love enough? This emphasis of “really” makes the whole thing bogus. It is like in a movie – it is not true, it is a Hollywood love affair.Truth cannot be denied either by theists or by atheists or by agnostics. These are the only three possibilities, the only three alternatives. The agnostic is the most intelligent of all three. The agnostic says, “I don’t know, I am still trying to know. I am on the path, but I have not come to any conclusion yet.” He is the most honest of the three – not really getting into either belief or unbelief. Keeping himself neutral so that he is not prejudiced, so that he is not carrying a certain opinion already. Just keeping himself without any prejudice, without any opinion, so that when he comes across the truth, he can realize it as it is, not as he wants it to be. An opinion will give color, distortion; an opinion will create its own illusions, hallucinations.The agnostic is the most significant seeker of truth. But there are very few agnostics in the world. Perhaps most of them are here, going onto the path with open eyes and with a clean heart, ready to accept truth as it is, with no desire to project anything onto the truth. The agnostic cannot deny the beauty of sat-chit-anand. He can say “I am searching,” but he cannot say anything against it.Neither can the theist deny it. He may say “This is what I mean by God: my God is truth, my God is consciousness, my God is bliss.” There is no problem – it is just a question of words that only idiots fight about. If this is what you mean by God, then it is perfectly okay. But then don’t pray, because there is no person who is going to listen and say hello to you.Sat-chit-anand is just an experience. If you want it to be synonymous with your idea of God, there is no harm, but remember, there is no need to create temples and mosques and synagogues and churches for it. It is an experience that is going to happen within you, not without.Nor can the atheist deny it. He can deny God as a creator. He can laugh at the very idea of a personal God because there is no evidence and no proof for it. It is simply pure fiction invented by cunning priests for the gullible, for those who are still childish and have some father fixation – they need somebody to protect them, a great father.Not even the atheist can deny the reality of truth, nor can he deny the reality of consciousness because he is already a little bit conscious. If this much consciousness is possible, what is the problem? Why can’t more grow? This small consciousness that we have is enough proof that there is a possibility of growth, of expansion.We may not know bliss, but we have known moments of peace, we have known moments of silence, we have known moments of joy. Bliss is altogether something tremendously vast. But if you have seen a dewdrop, you have seen all the oceans: a small dewdrop is enough proof that water exists. And if there is a dewdrop, what is the problem? There may be oceans. The formula that makes the dewdrop, H2O, makes all the oceans. It is the same formula, the same foundation.These are the three kinds of people in the world. None of them can deny sat-chit-anand. That’s the beauty of mystical experiences. Theological belief systems don’t have this greatness. They can be denied, refuted, laughed at. There is no way to defend them. There is no way to prove them. But the mystical experiences belong to a totally different category.It is something that would be absolutely inhuman for anybody to question, because to question it is to question the very meaning of life. To question it is to question your very existence, your very consciousness, your very experience of pleasure, peace, silence, joy. It is not possible.Just a few days ago the records of the Nobel Prize committee were made available; the public is allowed to see them every fifty years. Fifty years of records: how many people were considered for the Nobel Prize; why certain people were rejected for the Nobel Prize; why it was given to certain people. All those records were opened just a few days ago. And I came across the strangest thing. I could not believe that they could have done such an ugly and nasty thing: Leo Tolstoy was denied the Nobel Prize on the grounds that he was a kind of mystic.I have never thought that it can be a crime that one of the greatest creative artists… His novels are incomparable – perhaps no one will ever be able to write such a great novel as War and Peace. The man was not only a novelist, but a man who lived whatever he was preaching. His preaching may be under dispute, you may not agree with him – that’s another thing. I myself don’t agree with him because he was preaching poverty.He was a very rich man, he was a faraway cousin of the Czar. He belonged to the royal family of Russia and he had immense land, thousands of slaves. Everything that was possible in those days was available to him, but he did not use anything, he lived like a poor man. His whole family lived like a royal family, but he used to live in the servants’ quarters, not in the palace. At least he was a sincere man: whatever he thought was right, he did.The Nobel Prize committee mentions it – he was a Christian. He has written the most beautiful books on Christianity. I don’t think there has ever been any theologian who has written so beautifully about Christianity. But the Nobel Prize committee declared that the Nobel Prize was not to be given to him because his ideas about Christianity were not orthodox, they were very much his own.Tolstoy believed in a mystical Christianity. He did not believe in the orthodox, traditional Christianity. He had his own ideas about Christianity – as if to have one’s own ideas about religion is a crime. He was not accepted because his Christianity was a kind of mystic Christianity. This mysticism became the barrier. His name was proposed and rejected. There have been many other names which have been rejected on strange grounds – and even politicians have been given the Nobel Prize.It is very strange. Leo Tolstoy is as important a person as Jesus Christ himself, but I think Jesus Christ would also have been denied the Nobel Prize because he was not an orthodox Jew. He was proposing his own ideas about religion – mystical Judaism. Naturally, you cannot give a Nobel Prize to a man who was finally crucified. He cannot be accepted as a respectable, prestigious person. He was hanged on the cross just like any other criminal. On each side of him there was a criminal. He was treated exactly like any other criminal, or even worse. No other criminal was forced to carry his own cross.It was certainly difficult. I know this from my own experience. When I was in America, against their own constitution and all their own laws, they handcuffed me, they chained my legs. Not only that – they were not satisfied – they put another chain around my waist. Even that was not enough: they put both my hands in handcuffs and chained them to the chain on my waist so I could not even move my hands. I could not wave to the crowds who were greeting me. That was their strategy – that I could not even wave my hands to the crowds who had come to greet me. And they chained my feet so close together that walking was impossible.So I know how difficult it must have been for Jesus to carry a cross in such a situation, a heavy cross. Perhaps because he was only thirty-three, young, healthy, and a son of a carpenter, accustomed to carrying big logs from the forest to his father’s workshop, continuously working with wood, he was able to somehow carry the cross. But three times on the way, he fell, and whenever he fell with the cross, they hit him hard with their sticks, lashed him, and forced him to get up and take the cross on his back. Certainly a Nobel Prize cannot be given to such a man! It will be very insulting to the Nobel Prize committee.We are living in an insane asylum. Mysticism is the highest flowering of human consciousness. To deny Leo Tolstoy the Nobel Prize on the grounds that he is a mystical person is so absurd but so indicative of the insanity of humanity and of the people who are powerful because they are members of the Nobel Prize committee. The King of Sweden is the chairman and all the others are highly respectable, prestigious people. I don’t think any one of them is even worth the dust under the feet of Leo Tolstoy. But they are denying that man who has created novels which are sheer poetry. The beauty of his novels is so alive that if you want to choose just ten great novels of all the languages of the world, you will have to include at least two novels by Leo Tolstoy in those ten.It is a strange phenomenon that Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Maxim Gorky, Turgenev – five great novelists – were contemporaries. If you are going to choose ten novels, five will be from these five people. Perhaps all ten will be from these five people, because they have all written such great novels: The Mother by Maxim Gorky has no comparison in the whole world; or Fathers and Sons by Turgenev; or The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky; or Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Perhaps these five people will cover almost all ten places – they will not leave room for anybody else. But none of them received the Nobel Prize – not only Leo Tolstoy, none of them, and each was better than the winner. It is very difficult out of these five to vote who is the best.They were all friends. They lived in the same city – Moscow. It was a strange combination, it had never happened before: five such unique geniuses in the same city, creating novels such that you cannot choose which is better. And defeating the whole world – past, present, and perhaps future – because there seems to be no possibility to improve on The Brothers Karamazov or Maxim Gorky’s The Mother. But none of them got the Nobel Prize.I have come to know only about Leo Tolstoy. I don’t know why the others were refused. Perhaps Maxim Gorky was refused because he was pro-Communist; Turgenev may have been refused because he was an atheist. These are just my assumptions. I don’t know their records. But these names must have come before the committee. It is impossible that they were not proposed and rejected.But the same grounds will do for all. They were all mystics in their own ways. They were all seekers of the ultimate in different directions, but they were all moving toward sat-chit-anand. They had all come to the point of athato brahma jigyasa – now is the time to begin the inquiry. And their novels reflect their inquiry.They are not ordinary novels, the way that novels are written today. Today novels are written to be read just once and thrown away. You cannot read a modern novel twice unless you are utterly stupid. I have not come across a single modern novel that can be read twice by any intelligent man. But these five people – their novels you will have to read many times to grasp the meaning. The first time you will be simply acquainted with the superficial story, but you will become aware that there is much more that you are missing. You will have to read them twice, and suddenly you will become aware how much you had missed the first time. Perhaps the third time you may be able to touch their depth.It is a constant joy, once in a while – after two, three, four years – to read them again. In these three or four years your consciousness has developed, your experience has developed. You are no longer the same. The novel is the same, but you are no longer the same. Now you can see better, now you can understand more, now you can dig deeper. These are novels which have to be read all your life, again and again. Every time you will find something new that you had missed, something great – and you will be shocked that you missed it.That is the beauty of all the ancient sutras. They are so condensed in meaning that you can go on reading again and again and you will find new meanings. And as your consciousness grows, those meanings will become deeper and deeper. As your experience on the path becomes richer, those sutras will have a new music, a new dance for you.I have been thinking of speaking on Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras, but I am keeping that for the last. Once I speak on Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras, then I will not speak again because there is nothing that can be better than Badarayana’s Brahma Sutras – that is the end. So I am keeping it aside. If you want me to continue to speak, don’t let me speak on Badarayana! If you allow me to speak on Badarayana, then remember… Just once in a while, here and there, you can ask questions, but the whole sutras I have kept for my last communion with you, my last transmission of the lamp.Osho,The musicians are playing. We are waiting for you to be with us. There is a moment when the auditorium is filled with silence. Then you come. Osho, what is this magic of waiting?There is certainly a deep magic – almost a miracle – when you are in silence, in trust, in love, just waiting. The moments of waiting are moments of meditation. Because you are waiting, expectant, your mind stops functioning. You are so concentrated in your waiting that there is no energy left for the mind – that is the secret, the magic.Waiting for me is just a taste of the ultimate waiting for truth. If just waiting for me you feel so much that it is inexpressible, so much that you can only call it magic, learn something from it. The same waiting is needed for the ultimate to happen to you. It also comes like a guest.People have a wrong idea, and the wrong idea is created by people just like me, without any intention of creating it. In fact, nobody wants to create it, but somehow language interferes, distorts, and creates something which was never intended. The difficulty is: How to say the right thing? Language seems to be perfectly good for saying the wrong thing. The moment you start saying the right thing, it doesn’t fit with language, with grammar, with…For example, everybody thinks he is going in search of truth. The reality is that you are not going anywhere, you are just going to remain here-and-now. Truth and consciousness and bliss are going to come to you. They are going to be your guests. You are the host. All that you need is an open door, waiting, just like one waits for one’s friend, or for one’s beloved, looking far away, as far as the eyes can see, looking toward the faraway horizon, waiting.I am reminded of a Sufi story. It is not just a story, it is a historical fact.Another great emperor of India was Akbar. Mohammedans pray five times a day and Akbar was very particular. One day he had gone hunting in the forest with all his friends, and they all got lost.Evening was descending, the sun was setting, and it was time to pray. So Akbar stopped under a huge tree, tied his horse to the tree, and sat on the ground to do his last prayer of the day. As he was praying, a woman, a young woman, ran just by his side, giving him such a shock – it seemed as if she was mad or blind – that Akbar fell down. Still, she did not look back.Naturally Akbar was very angry. Mohammedans in prayer are very particular; nobody should disturb them. It can become a very dangerous thing and for the emperor… An ordinary village girl, not caring at all, was running like mad and hitting the emperor. The emperor fell down. Mohammedans pray sitting on their knees, so it is very easy just to push them a little and they will fall down.It is very difficult to push a Buddhist or a Hindu when he is praying because he is sitting in a lotus posture. It is a very locked posture – you cannot just push him. He is very strong in his posture. But to push the Mohammedan is very easy, however strong he may be – his posture is such, sitting on his knees.Akbar finished his prayer quickly because he wanted to catch hold of the girl. She could not be allowed to do such things. If she could behave with the emperor in such a way, what to say about other people? But it was getting dark, so he could not figure out where she had gone. He waited, thinking she had to come back to the village. He was just outside the village. Finally she came.Akbar stopped her and said, “Do you remember what you have done?”She said, “I don’t remember anything. Do you?”Akbar said, “You seem to be very strange. You don’t understand. You are talking with the emperor of the country.”She said, “I understand, but I don’t remember anything of what you are talking about.”He said, “What I am talking about? I was praying here and you ran in such a way that you pushed me, and I fell down. You disturbed my prayer.”She said, “Perhaps if you say so, it must have been so, but you have to forgive me. I was going to wait for my lover just on the road which runs through the forest. I wanted to greet him – he is coming after many years – just outside the village. I could not remain sitting in the house and waiting. It is just one mile distant, but he will be waiting, thinking that I must be standing just by the side of a tree where we used to meet when we were young. That’s why I was concentrating so much that I did not know I had committed any mistake. Please forgive me, it must have been committed without my knowing at all.”She was so innocent and tears came to her eyes because she had hurt her own emperor. “You can give me any punishment, otherwise it will remain heavy on my heart. But just one question before you punish me: you were in prayer – still you were not so much in concentration as I was, because I don’t remember it at all. It cannot be that I hit you; it cannot be one-sided. Your body must also have touched my body, but I don’t remember having seen anybody on the way – praying or falling or anything. I don’t remember that anybody touched my body. So I am puzzled, and I would like to be clear about it. Is your prayer not as strong as my love?”Akbar remembers it in his autobiography, Akbarnama. He says, “I had to ask forgiveness from that village girl. I have never forgotten her face, and I have never forgotten that my prayer is just formal. If I am lost in my prayer and my love, in my gratitude toward the ultimate, how can I be aware that somebody has touched me, pushed me, or that my body has fallen? I would not have been aware of anything. But I was aware and that makes it certain that my prayer is just superficial.“That girl’s love was far deeper. She was closer to the ultimate than I was, although she was not concerned with the ultimate at all.” A tremendous statement of understanding…You are saying, “The musicians are playing. We are waiting for you to be with us. There is a moment when the auditorium is filled with silence. Then you come… Osho, what is the magic of waiting?” It is prayer. It is love. It is trust. It is gratitude: it is the whole of religion.If you can learn waiting, and if waiting can become your moment-to-moment experience, whenever you are not involved in ordinary things, and you can find time… Anytime, day or night, just in your bed, sit silently and wait. Wait for the guest. And I promise you: the guest has always come. The waiting has never failed. It has always been an absolute success, but not the success of your ego – it is the success of your humbleness.It is the victory of your being, not the victory of your mind. It is the victory of your silence, of your love. Learn waiting and you have learned all about meditation.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 11 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Why is communication so difficult, particularly between lovers?Communication as such is difficult. Of course it is more difficult between lovers. But first you have to understand the general difficulty of communication.Each mind has been conditioned by different parents, different teachers, different priests, different politicians. It is a different world in itself. When two minds try to communicate as far as the ordinary mundane things are concerned, there is no difficulty. But the moment they start moving beyond things into the world of concepts, communication starts becoming more and more difficult.For example, Gautam the Buddha does not have any God in his philosophy. He is far freer of God than even Frederick Nietzsche. Frederick Nietzsche states that God is dead. The implication is clear: God used to be alive, now he is dead. Gautam Buddha does not talk about God at all. It is so irrelevant that he does not pay any attention to the subject.Now, to a Christian, or to a Hindu, or to a Mohammedan, it is impossible to conceive of a religion without God. God is the center of most of the religions. Only three religions are free of God; one is Gautam Buddha’s, another is Mahavira’s, and the third is Lao Tzu’s.When Christian missionaries came into contact with Buddhist scriptures for the first time, they could not even conceive of the idea that a religion could be without God. What kind of religion will there be if there is no God? To whom are you going to pray? Who is going to send his prophets and his only begotten Son? Who is going to send saviors for you? Who is going to judge whether you are to be sent to hell or heaven? God removed, hell and heaven are also removed. God removed, punishment and reward are also removed. God removed, the very idea of judgment is removed. Then there is no sin and no virtue. Who will decide it?They were even more surprised that Gautam Buddha was known by his disciples – and now even by those who are not disciples – as Bhagwan Gautam Buddha. Now Bhagwan means God. This was very puzzling. Gautam Buddha did not believe in any God. Why did he allow his disciples to address him as Bhagwan?The same is the situation with Jainism. They are even more strict about the absence of God. Buddha simply ignored the whole subject. It was not worth any consideration. Jainism did not leave it because once Mahavira was gone there was a danger of the whole thing cropping up again. He wanted it to be clearly stated that there is no God, there never has been any God and there is no creation because there is no creator. It is an evolving world.What Charles Darwin found two thousand years later was known to Mahavira. It is not a creation, it is an evolving world – it has been here forever and will be here forever. The whole concept of creation and a creator is just idiotic. Mahavira was very strict; he did not want God to pop up in some disguise when he was gone just because people have a certain unconscious hankering for it. It gives a certain false consolation to people. If you really want to be consoled, it is absolutely necessary to avoid the false consolation. If you authentically want to be at peace with existence, then all that is false and based only on belief has to be discarded.But again the problem – the followers of Mahavira addressed him as Bhagwan. Now communication becomes difficult because Bhagwan means a totally different thing to the Buddhists and the Jainas than it does to the Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians, Jews. Their whole concept developed in a totally different way.For the religions which are God-centered, God comes in the beginning, before everything. He creates the world and nobody bothers from where he comes. If there was no world at all, how did he manage to exist and where? There must have been a small island, or some cloud – something. God cannot exist in nothingness, and if God can exist in nothingness, then what is the problem? Why bring him in unnecessarily? Existence is perfectly good, autonomous, not dependent on a despot you call God.According to those who do not believe, he is whimsical because for eternity he just remained silent. What was he doing? Smoking? Taking drugs? Or just dreaming? Sleeping? In a coma? What is the situation? – because according to Christians he created the world only six thousand years ago. And six thousand years is such a stupid idea because India has scriptures which are far more ancient than the Christian God.The Rig Veda according to the Hindu scholars – and I support them on that point… I don’t think the Rig Veda is something great, perhaps two percent of it has something beautiful and spiritual, ninety-eight percent is simply crap. So I don’t agree with their idea that the Rig Veda is written by God, but I certainly agree with their concept that the Rig Veda is ninety thousand years old because the proof and evidence are intrinsic.Ninety thousand years ago, there occurred a certain constellation of stars which has not happened again since then. That constellation of stars is described in the Rig Veda in absolute and perfect detail. Now, there is an astronomical argument which is irrefutable; you cannot do anything. The whole of astronomy supports it – this kind of constellation happened.According to their measurements it happened ninety thousand years ago, and also according to the Hindu scholars it happened ninety thousand years ago. Because it is described in such detail it cannot be said that the Rig Veda was written just three thousand or at the most five thousand years ago, as Christians think. People who were writing the Rig Veda five thousand years ago cannot in any way describe something which happened eighty-five thousand years earlier. There was no astronomical technology in their hands, and anyway somebody would be needed to remember it. Who is going to remember what happened eighty-five thousand years ago? Just think how long you can remember back: your father, your grandfather, perhaps your great-grandfather… Beyond that it is vague. It is not that the world began with your great-grandfather just because you cannot remember further back.These religions – Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Christianity – are all God-oriented. They believe God created the world. In fact they are believers in the concept of creation. And, naturally, creation needs a creator. But the whole scientific approach proves just the opposite. It is not a creation. Creation means complete. That’s what the Bible says: in six days God created the world in its perfection, and then on the seventh day he rested, and nobody knows what happened to him. Where did he go? Because the world was perfect, there was no need for him.Evolution means the world is never perfect: it is trying to be perfect. It is evolving. Creation is something dead: everything has come to a full stop. That is a very dead idea about existence. Existence is a constant flow toward higher beings, higher consciousnesses. Certainly God did not create Gautam Buddha, and you cannot say that Adam and Eve had the same consciousness and the same sat-chit-anand as Gautam Buddha. Gautam Buddha was a very evolved being and the evolution was going on without God managing it. Existence is accepted by Buddhism, Jainism, and Taoism as autonomous and eternal. That looks meaningful. But God is removed completely.The Christians who were translating Buddhist scriptures were worried why Buddha did not prevent his disciples from calling him Bhagwan. They could not understand that in Buddhism, Bhagwan takes on a totally different meaning. It means “the blessed one.” The same is true about Jainism. God-oriented religions have their God in the beginning and then not even a trace is found of that God. Atheists have been challenging him, but he seems to be either deaf or perhaps Nietzsche is right, he is dead. Or perhaps Gautam Buddha is right that he never existed. Who can give the proof?One great English atheist, Edmund Burke, asked a very simple thing. Addressing a big meeting of an atheist association, he said, “If God exists, I will wait for five minutes” – looking at his watch – “and I don’t want him to do something as great as he did for Moses.”God had separated the ocean into two parts and made a path for Moses and his followers to pass through the ocean surging on both sides. No walls, just water. A valley miles deep and on both sides water standing on its own.Burke said, “I don’t want to give him that much trouble. All I want is for him to stop my watch within five minutes, then I will believe.” And God could not even do that.Atheists have been continuously challenging God, but no answer. In fact he has not left his address with us. Even if you want to write a letter you cannot. Those who think the whole hypothesis of God is nonsense find your prayers very childish. Whom are you addressing? Where is he? You have not seen him. You know nobody who has seen him.In Jainism and Buddhism, God comes at the end of evolution, and that is a more significant meaning. Then there is not a single God. It is also significant to remember that a single God is bound to become a dictator. And the world cannot be really free under a dictator – a Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan. God is not elected by you. You are just puppets in his hands. As he created you out of mud, any day he can bulldoze you back into mud. There is no higher court of appeal. The whole idea of creation is whimsical. Buddhism says every living being is on the way to becoming a god. God is the ultimate evolution of consciousness.That’s why Buddha did not prevent his disciples from addressing him as Bhagwan. Nor did Mahavira. They are Bhagwan, but their meaning is totally different. They are not creators of the world; they don’t claim any stupid, ridiculous idea. They are very straightforward. They are simply saying that consciousness evolves from animal to man, from man to God. So every living being one day is going to become God. The whole world will be full of Gods. And this seems to be more scientific – just one solitary God, and existence looks so poor. And that solitary God, what will he do? Marijuana? Hashish? Or play cards with the Holy Ghost? What is he going to do from eternity to eternity?But that’s how communication becomes difficult. The Hindu papers in India never write my name as Bhagwan. That is a taboo because Bhagwan means one who created the world. I certainly am not so mad as to create this world.Christians will be worried…When I was in my first jail in America, I was sharing the cell with a criminal who had been there for many years. I was puzzled; I was first lying and resting – what else to do? But that man would get up – he had his Bible – and he would put the Bible on the bed, sit on the floor, put his head on the Bible and pray to God. His name was Bobby.So one day I shook him and I said, “Bobby, what are you doing? If you were such a great Christian, you would not be in jail. You have murdered and you never thought about God, and about the Bible and everything. God cannot help because for four years you have been praying – and have you ever looked inside this Bible? Just putting your head on the Bible is not going to move the Bible into your head. It is not a creeping thing, it is just dead words.”He was very much shocked. And he said, “I also wanted to ask you. When I heard that you are called Bhagwan, I was very surprised. Certainly you have not created the world.”I said, “If I had created the world, you would not have been in it. You are enough proof I have not created this world.”He was very shocked. He said, “You seem to be a very strange person.”I said, “God has to be a strange person. And you are stupid, Bobby. I am sitting here and you are putting your head on a dead book. Turn toward me.”He said, “But you are not a Christian.”I said, “I am a god. Are you interested in God, or in a Christian God?”He said, “You are raising problems that I have never thought about. Yes, it is true, I am interested in God, but if you are a god, then why are you in jail?”I said, “This is nothing, Bobby. Who was Jesus Christ?”He said, “He was God – God’s only begotten Son.”And I said, “If he can be crucified, what is the problem of my being in jail? Your Christian God would also have been in jail, but because he has not been found yet, he is out of jail.”He said, “That seems to be logical because Jesus Christ was crucified.”He became friendly, very friendly. Just three or four days ago I received a letter from another jail. Bobby had been moved. He told his new cell-mate about me, and told him, “Write a letter to Bhagwan to tell him that poor Bobby remembers him.” He also said, “Bhagwan will have forgotten my name, but he shattered all my beliefs. Just being five days with him was enough.”God created the world in six days. Bobby was finished in five days because I explained to him a simple fact, “God is the final evolution. Bobby, one day you are going to be a god. But it is not going to happen by prayer.”The religions that believe in God are bound to believe in prayer. That’s why in the West, meditation has never developed. Only religions that don’t believe in God have developed meditation. Because God is out there somewhere, you have to pray, you have to depend on him. If he listens – good; if he does not listen – what can you do?Meditation is developed by those whose god is inside. That’s where I find people like Jesus Christ contradictory. On the one hand he says “The Kingdom of God is within,” and then every day he prays to a God somewhere above in the skies. This is a simple contradiction which cannot be explained in any way. If God is within, then meditation is the way, not prayer. Prayer to whom? To yourself. That is the only way of getting deeper into your consciousness and finding the godliness which I call sat-chit-anand.So when a Buddhist or a Jaina is talking to a Hindu or a Christian, if they mention the word God, there will be no communication at all. The Christian will hear one thing: he will hear about the God who created the world six thousand and four years ago, on the first of January of course, a Monday – because he cannot create in the middle of the calendar. There was no calendar before he created the world. The calendar starts with the world. You can’t have a calendar when there is no universe. Where will you hang it? Simple problems! Where will you print it? So Christians don’t say January the first, Monday. I am saying it. But if he ever created the world, at the same time he must have created the calendar.The moment the Christian thinks of God, he immediately thinks of this whole thing that is lined up in his mind. When a Buddhist says “Bhagwan,” there is no question of creation. He is not looking backward, he is not looking into the past, he is looking forward. He is looking forward to everybody’s evolution, into the ultimate flowering of consciousness, truth and bliss. Each living being, sooner or later, is going to become a god. One day the whole of existence will be full of gods. And that will be its ultimate evolution.How to communicate? On each single word you have different opinions, prejudices, conditions. The words are the same, but the moment you say them and the other hears them, he is not hearing the same meaning, he is hearing a different meaning. Of course the word is the same, but the word triggers a totally different meaning. So if your communication is about higher things, it is more difficult, almost impossible.As far as lovers are concerned, they have still more difficulty in communicating because the feminine mind functions differently, and the masculine mind functions differently. The man has been conditioned by the society in a different way to how the woman has been conditioned. And they have to live together, twenty-four hours a day; it becomes heavy. It becomes heavy because whatever the man says, the woman hears something else. The woman is not much in the head, she is much more in the heart: the man is much more in the head. That creates a great disparity. The man is perfectly good in arguments.A man and wife were fighting and the man said, “Sit down, be calm and quiet and let us reason it out.”The wife said, “Never, because whenever we reason anything out, you are victorious. No reasoning! I am going to break things like furniture, burn clothes, if you are not going to agree with me.”And the man said, “Wait. You are right. It is not a question of reasoning because each time I say ‘Calm down, sit quietly and let us argue it out,’ you are the winner.”The woman has her own arguments: breaking plates. Of course those plates are ones which need to be broken. She never breaks the really beautiful ones. She hits the man with the pillow, but hitting somebody with a pillow is not violent. It is a very nonviolent fight, a soft pillow. She throws things at the man, but never aims at him. She aims here and there. But that is enough to create havoc in the neighborhood. That’s what she wants: the whole neighborhood should know what is happening. That humbles the husband. He starts crawling and saying, “Forgive me. I was wrong from the very beginning. I knew it.”As couples settle, the husband forgets all about arguing. When he enters the house, he takes a deep breath, and prepares himself for any irrational thing that is going to happen.A man saw written on a board in front of a restaurant, “Here you will feel at home.” Reading it, he entered.The waitress came and asked, “What can I do for you?”He said, “First, bring me chapatis, but all burned.”The waitress could not understand.“Vegetables, without any salt. Milk which has gone sour.” The woman thought this man seems to be mad. “And then come here and sit beside me and nag.”The waitress thought, “A strange customer, but let us try.” What can be done?She brought burned chapatis, rotten vegetables without any salt, milk which was no longer milk, it was almost curd. And then the man said, “Sit beside me and start nagging.”The woman said, “What kind of person are you?”He said, “What kind of person? Go out and look at the board you have put in front of the restaurant, ‘Here you will feel at home.’ This is how I can feel at home, otherwise not. This is what my wife has been doing to me for years. Now I have become accustomed to it. If you don’t nag me, I cannot eat, I have no appetite at all. Once you start nagging, I immediately start feeling hungry.”It is conditioning. With lovers it becomes difficult, more difficult than for ordinary people because the ways a woman comes to conclusions are not logical, they are hunches. But they are mostly right. Logic may fail, but her hunches don’t fail. She has an intuitive approach – man has only an intellectual approach – and certainly the intuitive approach has a back door to know reality. Intellect simply goes knocking on the front door and nobody opens it. The back door is always open.It is just after midnight and there is a knock on the doctor’s door. Dragging himself out of bed, and poking his head out of the window, he peers down at the figure on the doorstep. “Well?” he asks.The woman looks up and says, “No, sick.”Even in small words like well, the woman functions differently. Once that is understood then some kind of communication is possible.A man goes into the pharmacy and says to the aging female assistant, “I’d like ten condoms please, miss.”“Don’t you ‘miss’ me!” snaps the assistant.“Okay,” he replies. “Then give me eleven.”“No! No! A hundred times no!” cried the centipede to his wife, crossing his legs.It is not only in the human world; even among the animals you will find the same conflict going on all over the world.Old man Finkelstein is desperate to get married, but so far he has not met with any success.Finally he advertises for a wife in the local newspaper. He gets almost two hundred replies, most of them from men, who write: “You can have mine.”The pompous judge glares over the courtroom at the woman tramp who has been dragged into court on a charge of vagrancy.“Have you ever earned an honest dollar in your life, you good-for-nothing?”“Yes, your honor,” replies the woman. “I voted for you in the last election.”Unless lovers come to a state of meditative consciousness, they will not be able to communicate. Their communication will always be a conflict; it will never be a communion. The only possibility is: if both evolve their consciousness to a point where it goes beyond the mind, then all conditionings are left behind. Even the biological differences are left behind. The consciousness that goes beyond the mind is no longer male, no longer female. Now there is a possibility to have not only conversation but some communion. A deep understanding is possible. But without meditation no such possibility exists.For thousands of years man has lived in this situation of no communication and he has become accustomed to it: man has become accustomed, the woman has become accustomed – and they think nothing can be done about it. In fact, I am the first man who is saying something can be done about it. Neither Gautam Buddha, nor Jesus, nor Moses, nor Lao Tzu – none of them even thought about it. Yet it is one of the greatest problems.Every house is full of this conflict. Children grow up in the atmosphere of this noncommunication, then naturally they start learning the same strategies as their parents. It is almost as if every husband has forced the woman into slavery, and every woman has taken revenge. It is natural. She has reduced every husband to a hen-pecked husband.It is a very vicious circle. Man has taken away the freedom of woman, has taken away her education, has taken away her culture, has taken away her freedom of movement in society, has taken away her financial independence. Naturally she is burning with anger, and has been for centuries. Whatever she could do as a personal reaction to this was to torture the husband in a thousand-and-one ways. She has invented her own ways. If she is unhappy, the husband is going to get cold tea, may have to miss his lunch, or when he opens his lunchbox tiffin in the office, he may find that there is nothing in it.It is said…Akbar once asked his courtiers, “Do you think in the capital there are a few strong men who are not hen-pecked?”All the courtiers said, “We think this is a vast capital. There may be at least a few people.”But Birbal, the most intelligent man of this court, said, “My Lord, I think there is not a single man on the whole earth who is not hen-pecked. Husband means hen-pecked.”The emperor was a little angry. He said, “What do you mean?”Birbal said, “I mean exactly what I have said. These courtiers, these great warriors, your generals, they are saying there may be some people in the capital. None of them has raised his hand claiming he is not a hen-pecked husband. You yourself are asking the question, but can you raise your hand and say that you are not hen-pecked? And remember Allah: don’t lie.”The emperor was completely stunned and he said, “I cannot lie, that’s true. About me, it is true. My wife tortures me. That is the only place where I am no longer emperor. But these people are saying ‘a few people.’”Birbal said, “I am ready to investigate the whole capital. Give me your two beautiful Arabian horses. You have one white, one black. I will take those two horses and go for an investigation.”He went to many people, strong people, wrestlers, professional fighters, warriors, but they all said…He told them, “If you can say that you are not hen-pecked, you will have to come to the court and declare it. Then you can choose one of the horses. These are the greatest horses in the world. This is the very best breed which you will never manage to find, you could never afford. They have been brought from Arabia only for the emperor. One horse is yours; you can choose.”But they said, “We love the horses. They look great, but we are sorry we cannot say anything. If our wives come to know that we have declared we are not hen-pecked, there will be great difficulty – much more difficulty than any horse is worth.”Finally he came to a gardener’s hut, where a poor, but very strong, man – seven feet tall – was digging a hole. Birbal asked, “Are you hen-pecked?” He did not answer, but showed his muscles which were almost like steel.He said, “Put your hand in my hand.”Birbal himself was a warrior, a fighter. He gave his hand, but the gardener’s hand was almost like steel. As he pressed Birbal’s hand, Birbal hit the roof. He said, “Let go. You will kill me.” Certainly it seemed so, because he had not even answered about being hen-pecked or anything. He was simply saying, “Don’t dare to ask such a question of me!”Birbal said, “Then you can choose one horse, whichever you like. Certainly you are not hen-pecked.” And the gardener called inside for his wife to come out.She was a small woman, very thin. He asked her, “Which horse should I choose? – because I don’t want any quarrel later on. You tell me the color.”Birbal said, “Stop! Now you don’t choose any. It is finished. You are a hen-pecked husband.” Even Birbal wondered how this small woman was harassing this giant of a man.He came back to the court with two horses and told the emperor, “There is not a single person.”It has deep roots in the psychology of man. Because man has misbehaved for centuries with women, women have found their own small strategies. They cannot revolt because they are so dependent. They have been crippled, they cannot become a class separate from man like the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – the poor and the rich – who can fight and have a great revolution like the Communist revolution in Russia. That is not possible. Because each woman is attached to a single man, women can’t function as a class, so they cannot go against man as a class. But each single woman finds her own strategy for torture.It is very easy for her to torture. The fundamentals of the strategy are: first she makes the man completely dependent on her for his food, for his clothes, for his bed, for everything. This is absolutely unconscious. When the man becomes completely dependent on the woman, if there is any conflict, he does not get any food – and he cannot cook. He will not get fresh clothes because he cannot wash them himself because he knows nothing about it. He will not get a bed prepared for him because he has never prepared it. He does not know what to do. In the house the woman rules so totally that at any moment she can withdraw. That’s enough; she doesn’t have to do anything active and violent, she can simply withdraw. Then the man becomes almost a helpless child.Communication is only possible between equals, and communication is only possible beyond the mind. Here, with my people, you will find, slowly, slowly, a communication is developing. As their consciousness goes higher, they will start understanding many things which they were not able to understand before. They will not only understand their own unconscious, they will also understand the woman’s unconscious. They will not only understand their own minds, they will also understand the feminine mind – and vice versa. And because they are both beyond, there is a possibility of tremendous understanding.The world will be at peace only when man and woman have come to a deep understanding. And with that deep understanding there will be great love, great compassion, great friendliness. It is an absolute to be achieved. Without it man can never become civilized.Osho,My spelling error, “Lolita” for “Lokita,” has created havoc around here! Lovers of Lolita are tearing around calling, “Where is my Lolita?” and Lokita is dying to be called Lolita, and Milarepa doesn't know which is Lolita and which is Lokita!This would have to be a “once” mistake!Jivan Mary, they say history repeats itself, and history repeats itself because man is unconscious. So he goes on committing the same mistakes again and again. Although he decides every time that he is not going to commit the same mistake, the decision remains hanging in the conscious; it never reaches the unconscious from where all actions arise. And there is no communication between the conscious and the unconscious. There is no bridge; they don’t know each other. Nobody has ever introduced them to each other. And you will find this everywhere.A smoker decides: “This is my last cigarette. Enough is enough. I am not going to smoke again.” And within two or three hours he feels so uneasy, so uncomfortable, so tense and under stress, he forgets all about the decision. He thinks, “Just one more cigarette is not going to kill me.” This has been going on for years. He decides, and even while he is deciding he knows this is not going to happen – “Let me try one more time, perhaps…” The problem is that the mistakes are unconscious. Unless your consciousness becomes deep enough so that it reaches the very bottom of your unconscious, you will have to repeat mistakes.I was once an editor of a daily newspaper. In this small life I have done so many things. There I became aware of what they call “proof-reader’s blindness.” I have seen it myself that the proofreader goes on making the same mistake again and again. It seems to be strange that he goes on missing the same word. There seems to be some unconscious reason behind it that pulls him back, or makes him blind, and he passes the word without exactly reading it, or passes it quickly. And once he has committed that mistake he can read the whole passage with the wrong word many times; he will simply be unaware of it.There may be some deep wound inside. For example, a man who has failed utterly in love, for whom love has left only a wound in his being, he will quickly pass the word love without realizing it. He will see that it is written perfectly correctly with the right spelling, but he is not looking at it. He does not want to look at it because it opens his wound. The same is the situation of the typist. It is not a different thing. One can commit the same mistake again and again because man is not conscious, his whole life is a repetition.Just the other day I was telling you about a man who married ten women. He left them fast – three months, four months, was more than he could live with one woman. But finally he not only found that the tenth woman was a woman he had married once before, he also found that he always ended up with the same kind of woman. After three or four months he becomes fed up and divorces her, but when he falls in love again within two or three days he finds, “My God! Although she is a different woman, she has the same character.” He does not know that his choice is coming from the unconscious, and his decision is coming from the conscious. They are two separate parts of his being.He loves a certain kind of woman – a certain hairstyle, a certain kind of eyes – a certain color – a certain face, a certain nose, a certain curvature of the body. He is not aware of why he falls in love with a certain woman, but it is always going to be the same woman in a different dress, with a different name. It is his choice because he is the chooser, but he again finds the same kind of woman, and the same kind of woman will show the same kind of character sooner or later.The man was puzzled as to what was happening, but he was not aware it was happening because of his unconscious. This is our whole life story. We go on making the same mistake. We are bound to do it because we have not done anything to change the very structure of our consciousness.Jivan Mary, it is possible not to commit the same mistake again. But you will need to be not only more alert in typing, you will have to be more conscious in your whole life – each moment. You will have to be more meditative. Then even to commit a mistake once becomes difficult – you can commit once, that is allowed; twice you cannot. Your whole being knows there is no division, your house is not divided; your house is one, you are one, you are not split.But what do we go on doing? With one hand we make something, and with the other hand we destroy it. And we are not aware that both are our hands. It needs a tremendous revolution in your consciousness.Hymie Goldberg gets a phone call from his lawyer. “What do you want to hear first, the bad news or the terrible news?” the lawyer asks.“Hell!” says Hymie. “Give me the bad news first.”“Okay,” replies the lawyer. “The bad news is that your wife has found a picture worth a hundred thousand dollars.”“That is bad news?” cries Hymie. “In that case, I can’t wait to hear the terrible news.”“The terrible news,” replies the lawyer, “is that the picture is of you and your secretary on Miami Beach!”An old chicken farmer is very proud of his brood, so when two smartly-dressed city gentlemen ask to look at them, he quickly obliges.“A very fine bunch of chickens,” says one of the men.“Thank you, sir,” replies the farmer.“And what do you feed them on?” asks the second man.“Special chicken fertilizer, imported from China,” says the old man, proudly.“A-ha!” cries the first man. “Just as we suspected, that is illegal. You will be fined two thousand dollars.”A month later, two more well-dressed men show up and ask the farmer what he feeds to his magnificent chickens. The old man, wiser than the first time, says, “I just feed them on shit.”“A-ha!” say the men. “We are from the Health and Hygiene Department, and what you are doing is illegal. You will be fined two thousand dollars.”A few weeks later, another city gentleman arrives and asks the same question. This time the farmer shrugs and says, “Listen, mister, I just give them fifty cents each and tell them to go to the market and buy what the hell they want!”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 12 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The most fundamental Upanishadic statement is “Aham brahmasmi”. Is it connected in any way to sat-chit-anand?The statement in the Upanishads, “Aham brahmasmi,” is perhaps the most fundamental and the most essential experience of all the mystics of the world. The Upanishads are the only books which are considered not to belong to any religion, yet they are the very essence of religiousness.This statement, “Aham brahmasmi,” is a declaration of enlightenment – literally it means, “I am the divine, I am the ultimate, I am the absolute.” It is a declaration: “There is no other God than my own inner being.” This does not mean that it is a declaration of a single individual about himself. It is a declaration, of course, by one individual, but it declares the potential of every individual.It denies God as a separate entity. It denies God as a creator. It denies God as a ruler. It simply denies the existence of God, other than in our own existence. It is the whole search of the Eastern genius. In thousands of years they have discovered only one thing: don’t look for God outside your own being. If you can find him, you can find him only in one place and that is in you – other than you all the temples and all the mosques and all the synagogues and all the churches are inventions of the priests to exploit you. They are not in the service of God; on the contrary they are exploiting all the potential gods.Aham brahmasmi is perhaps the boldest statement ever made by any human being in any age in any part of the world, and I don’t think it can be improved upon in the future – ever. Its courage is so absolute and perfect that you cannot refine it, you cannot polish it. It is so fundamental that you cannot go deeper than this, neither can you go higher than this.In Sanskrit, this simple statement aham brahmasmi is only two words. In English, it can be translated with these few words: I am the ultimate. Beyond me there is nothing; there is no height that is not within me and there is no depth which is not within me. If I can explore myself, I have explored the whole mystery of existence.But, unfortunately, even the people of this country – where this statement was made some five thousand years ago – have forgotten all about the dignity of human beings. This statement is nothing but the ultimate manifesto of man and his dignity. Even in this country, where such individuals existed who reached the ultimate awakening and illumination, there are people who are worshipping stones. There are people who are enslaved by ignorant priests. There are people who are living in the bondage of a certain religion, creed or cult. They have forgotten the golden age of the Upanishads.Perhaps that was the most innocent time in the history of man. At that time the West was almost barbarous, and that barbarousness has somehow remained as an undercurrent in the Western consciousness. Otherwise, it cannot be just coincidental that the two great world wars have happened in the West. And preparation for the third is also happening in the West – just within a small span of half a century.The days of the Upanishads in this land were the most glorious. The only search, the only seeking, the only longing, was to know oneself – no other ambition ruled mankind. Riches, success, power, everything was absolutely mundane. Those who were ambitious, those who were running after riches, those who wanted to be powerful, were considered to be psychologically sick. And the only search of those who were really healthy psychologically, spiritually healthy, was to know themselves and to be themselves and to declare the innermost secret to the whole universe. That secret is contained in this statement, aham brahmasmi. In a way, the people who followed the days of the Upanishads have fallen into a dark age.You will be surprised to know that the idea of involution has not appeared in the Western mind at all, only the idea of evolution, only the idea of progress. But the mystics of the Upanishads have a more perfect and more comprehensive approach. Nothing can go on evolving forever. Evolution has been conceived by the Upanishads as a circle. In fact, in existence everything moves in a circle: stars move in circles, the sun moves in a circle, the earth moves in a circle, the moon moves in a circle, climates move in a circle, life moves in a circle.The whole of existence knows only one way of movement, and that is circular. That which seems to be going up one day will soon be going down. Again it will come up – it is just like a wheel and the spokes of the wheel. The same spoke will come up, will go down, will come up, will go down.Evolution is incomplete if there is not any complementary idea of involution. Materially man has evolved. Certainly there were no railway trains and there were no atomic weapons and there was no nuclear war material, there was no electricity, there was nothing of the technology that we have become accustomed to living with. Materially, man has certainly evolved, but spiritually, the situation is totally different. Spiritually, man has not evolved.According to the Upanishads, man has gone deeper into darkness. He has lost his innocence and he has lost his blissfulness and he has lost the simple experience of “I am the mysterious, I am the miraculous; I am the whole cosmos in a miniature form, just as a dewdrop is the whole ocean in a miniature form.” The dewdrop can declare “I am the ocean,” and there will not be anything wrong in it. Certainly a particular individual is only a dewdrop, but he can declare “Aham brahmasmi,” and there is nothing wrong in it. He is simply saying the truth.The Upanishads talk about four stages of man’s fall, not of evolution. The first stage, when the Upanishads came into being, is called the “Age of Truth.” People were simply truthful, just as small children are simply truthful. To lie, one needs some experience. Lying is a complicated phenomenon, truth is not. To lie you need a developed memory, you have to remember what kind of thing you have said to one person and what kind of thing you have said to another person. A lying person needs a good memory. A man of truth needs no memory because he is simply saying that which is the case.The child has no experience other than the truth, other than what he experiences. He cannot lie. The days of the Upanishads are the days of man’s childhood, of purity and innocence, of deep love and trust. The first age the Upanishads call Satyuga, the Age of Truth. Truth was not a long journey. You hadn’t to go anywhere to find it. You were living in it.The situation was exactly expressed by Kabir in a symbolic parable:A fish in the ocean, who must have had a philosophic bent, started inquiring of other fish, “I have heard so much about the ocean, I want to know where it is.”The poor fish that she asked had also heard about the ocean but they were not so curious, so they never bothered about where it was. They said, “We have also heard about the ocean, but where it is we have never bothered to ask, and we don’t know the answer.”The young philosopher fish went on asking everybody, “Where is the ocean?” And they were all stunned. They had heard about it from their forefathers – it had always been known – but as far as an exact description or experience was concerned, nobody was able to explain it to the young fish.Finally, when nobody could give her an answer, the young fish declared, “You are all stupid. There is no ocean at all.”Kabir says the same is the situation of man. Man goes on asking, “Have you seen God? Have you seen the mysterious, the miraculous?” – and all he hears is: “We have heard about it, we have read about it…” But there was a day when people were so innocent, childlike, that they knew that they are surrounded by the ocean, that the ocean is not to be searched for, it is within and without. They are part of it, they are born in it, they live in it, they breathe in it, and they will one day disappear into it. They are part and parcel of the ocean.But every child has to grow. And just as every child has to grow, Satyuga, the Age of Truth, could not remain forever. It produced the great scriptures called the Upanishads – the word is so beautiful: it simply means “sitting by the side of the master” – recordings from the notes of disciples who were sitting in silence by the side of the master. Once in a while, out of his meditation, he would say something; out of his heart something would be transferred to the disciple, and the disciple would take a note. Those notes are the Upanishads.Satyuga disappeared – the child grew. The second stage is called Treta – it is compared to a table. The first, Satyuga, was almost like a table with four legs, absolutely balanced. Treta means three. One leg of the table has disappeared. Now it is no longer a table with four legs, with that certainty, with that trust, with that grounding, with that centering, with that great balance. Now it is only a tripod, three legs.Certainly something is missing. It is not so certain. Some doubt has arisen, trust is no longer complete and perfect, love is no more unpolluted. The disciple’s question is not coming from his whole being, but out of his head. But still, much was yet to happen. The child went on growing. As far as age is concerned it seems a growth, but as far as innocence is concerned it is an involution. Both are moving side by side: evolution as far as age and body are concerned, and involution as far as innocence, trust and love are concerned.After Treta, humanity fell still more. The stage after Treta is called Dwapar. One leg is lost again – now everything is unbalanced. Standing on two legs, how can a table have trust, certainty, security, safety, balance? Fear became the predominant quality rather than love, rather than trust. Insecurity became more prominent than a tremendous feeling of being at home. But things went on growing in one direction: as far as material growth is concerned, there was evolution; in another direction as far as consciousness is concerned, there was a continuous fall.After Dwapar, the age of two legs, is the age we are living in. It is called Kaliyuga, the “Age of Darkness.” Even the last leg has disappeared. Man is almost in a state of insanity. Instead of innocence, insanity has become our normal state. In some way or other everybody is psychologically sick.I am talking about these four ages for a particular reason, because the statement that was made in innocence in the days of the Upanishads has become absolutely incomprehensible to our people, to our contemporaries. Even the people who are the inheritors of the Upanishads are afraid to declare “I am God, I am the absolute” – what to say about others? Others have their own prejudices.For example, when Christians started translating the Upanishads they were shocked. They could not believe that such tremendously poetic, beautiful scriptures are in existence. But what they are saying goes against Christianity, against Judaism, against Mohammedanism, even against today’s Hinduism. Even the Hindu is not capable today of declaring “I am God.” He has also become impressed and influenced by Christianity to such an extent.Christian missionaries started condemning the Upanishads because if the Upanishads are right, then what to do with the Bible? The Bible absolutely declares – just as the Koran declares – that there is only one God. If the Upanishads are right then there are as many gods as there are living beings. Some may have come to manifestation, some may be on the way, some may not have started the journey yet, but will start finally.How long can you delay? You can miss one train, you can miss another train, but every moment the train is coming. How long can you go on sitting in the waiting room? And people go on becoming buddhas, and people go on becoming seers and sages, and you are still waiting in the waiting room with your suitcases. How long can you do that? – there is a limit. When you see that so many people have left already – the whole platform is empty – you will take courage, perhaps it is time to move.For Christianity the problem was that everybody cannot be God. They cannot even accept everybody as the son of God, what to say about God? Only Jesus is the son of God.You are only puppets made of earth. God made man with mud and breathed life into it. It is just a manufactured thing, and if a puppet starts declaring “Aham brahmasmi” – “I am God” – the puppeteer will laugh. “Idiots! You are just puppets and your strings are in my hands. When I want you to dance, you dance; when I want you to lie down, you lie down; when I want you to breathe, you breathe; when I want you not to breathe, you can’t do anything.”For Christianity it was a tremendous challenge, and they started finding arguments against it. The Christian missionaries started saying… Their first argument was: the person, the seer, the sage – whoever he may be, the name is not mentioned in the Upanishads – who declared for the first time “Aham brahmasmi,” was a megalomaniac, that he was suffering from a big ego. They were full of prejudice. They could not see the simple fact that it was not the ego that was declaring – because the Upanishads say it clearly: unless your ego disappears, you cannot even understand the meaning of “I am the ultimate.”It is not the declaration of ego. This declaration is possible only on the death of ego. That is a clear-cut statement in the Upanishads. But Christian missionaries went on misinterpreting the Upanishads to the West, distorting and commenting that these people were almost mad. Obviously, to a Mohammedan or to a Christian, the idea that somebody says “I am God,” is very shocking.I have told you the story…It happened in Baghdad in the days of Khalif Omar. He is the most famous Khalif of the Mohammedans, and he is thought to be a very understanding and very moderate, liberal man. But you will see his “liberality” in the story.A man was brought to him who had been declaring in the marketplace, “God has sent me as his prophet, just as he sent Hazrat Mohammed as his prophet a thousand years ago. But now things have changed, questions have changed, new answers are needed. Now I bring the latest dissemination, the latest edition of God’s message to the world. I accept Mohammed was a prophet, I accept that Jesus was a prophet.”Mohammedans don’t accept Jesus as a son of God. They accept Jesus as a prophet of God, because to accept Jesus as a son of God would mean that their prophet, Hazrat Mohammed, becomes secondary. He is just a prophet, not a son, not even a son-in-law. Religions are continually interpreting each other with their prejudices. This has been a contention between Mohammedans and Christians: Mohammedans are willing to accept that he was a prophet, a great prophet – there is no doubt about it – but don’t say that he was the son of God!This man in Baghdad declared, “I have come with the latest message,” but Mohammedans have closed the door with Hazrat Mohammed, as Jainas have closed the door with Mahavira, as Buddhists have closed the door with Buddha. Every religion is a closed religion. It does not allow anybody else to improve upon it. The fear is that somebody, someday, will declare, “I am bringing the latest message.” Then even the holy Koran will become just like yesterday’s newspaper. What can you do with it?To avoid this humiliation Mohammed declared, “This is the last message given by God to the world; now there will be no more prophets. Before me there have been prophets, but now they are all out of date. I bring the last message.”Jainas are not ready to accept another after Mahavira – the twenty-fourth tirthankara, the twenty-fourth prophet of the Jainas. They don’t accept a twenty-fifth because a twenty-fifth may turn things upside down. But after twenty-five centuries, things have to be turned upside down, because everything has changed. It is sheer stupidity to go on following someone who had answered questions that were relevant twenty-five centuries ago. Now those questions are not relevant. New questions have arisen, new doubts have arisen, they have to be satisfied and you cannot satisfy them with the old.That’s why every new generation finds itself slipping out of the hands of the older generation; the new generation can see the irrelevance. Their questions are different and you are answering something which they have not asked in the first place. But every religion has been the same in the sense that they all close the doors – no more improvement.That man was immediately caught and brought to the court of Omar. This is the most heinous crime in a Mohammedan country because Mohammed has said, “There is only one God – the God that I preach – and there is only one holy book – the book that I preach – and there is only one prophet who is the final statement, and I am that. After me everything will remain the same, no changes will be acceptable.”When the man was brought to Omar’s court, Omar told him, “Take back your statement that you are a prophet.”That man laughed. He said, “It is not in my hands. I have been chosen by God to be the prophet. Only he can take it back.”Mohammed’s follower and representative, his pope – that’s what Omar was – said, “Remember you are playing with fire. There is no other punishment except death. I give you seven days to consider.”And he told his soldiers, “Take this man to the jail, strip him naked, bind him to a pillar and beat him continuously for seven days – no food, no water, no sleep. After the seventh day I will come to the jail to inquire whether he has changed his mind or not.”And this is a liberal, moderate, considerate, very understanding Mohammedan! What to say about the fanatic? Just don’t talk about the fanatic.The soldiers did as they were told. After seven days Omar arrived. The man was just wounds and more wounds – blood and nothing else. He was almost dying and Omar asked him, “Have you changed your mind or not?”The man said, “When I was coming from heaven, God told me, ‘Remember: to be a prophet is not an easy profession. You will be stoned, you will be condemned, you will be punished, you may be put into jail, you may even be sentenced to death. Be prepared. To be a prophet of God is a very dangerous thing.’ You have proved that God was right – I am his prophet.”Even Omar was stunned: this man seems to be utterly mad. And just then he heard, from another pillar, another naked man who had been caught one month before because he was declaring “I myself am God.”Now Mohammedans cannot tolerate that at all. A “prophet” perhaps, that too only if a Mohammedan is very literate, very cultured, non-fanatic. Then he may say “perhaps.” If Mohammed can be a prophet, if Jesus can be a prophet, if Buddha can be a prophet, if Moses can be a prophet… All these, Buddha included, have been accepted by Hazrat Mohammed, then what is the problem? Why cannot this poor fellow be a prophet? First listen to him – what message has he brought? Nobody is listening to his message, and people are trying to kill him even before he has delivered his message. Maybe there is something in his message. If there is nothing in his message, there is no harm. Let him think himself a prophet. But if he has some essential message, then it will be very wrong on our part.But if somebody says “I am God,” the way the Upanishads are saying it, this is simply, absolutely unacceptable. And that man had been caught one month before and Omar had completely forgotten that he had been put into jail to consider.The man shouted, “Omar, remember, this man is lying because I never sent him as my prophet. After Mohammed I have never sent anybody as my prophet. I am God, Mohammed is the prophet, and the holy Koran is the message. This man is absolutely mad.” This is a historical fact. Omar could not believe it. What to do now?When Christians – particularly the learned, scholarly missionaries – started translating the Upanishads, they distorted it in every way and they made comments like “This is a statement of somebody who is utterly insane, whose ego is too big. And he is not religious at all, because a religious man should be humble. How can a religious man declare ‘I am God’?”This is very strange about religions. They can see the faults of each other but they cannot see their own faults. When Jesus declares “I am the only begotten Son of God,” they don’t see any ego – it is humbleness. The Upanishads are not egoistic. They are not saying that the one sage who declares “I am God,” is saying something only about himself. He is saying that you are also God – just as I am God, you are God. We are all part of a godliness. We are all part of the same ocean. This fish and that fish are not different; they are all born out of the same ocean and they will all disappear into the same ocean.The Upanishads’ statement is not egoistic at all, but religions which are God-centered cannot accept it easily. Even Hindus, whose forefathers made this statement, have become so cowardly that now they do not dare to make such a statement. They themselves think that it seems to be egoistic. Christianity and Mohammedanism have even impressed so much on the Hindu mind that it is no longer pure Hindu. You will be surprised to know that three times in his life even the greatest Hindu of this century, Mahatma Gandhi, was almost on the verge of becoming a Christian – he was ready to be converted into a Christian.I have tried to figure out Mahatma Gandhi. He is ninety percent Christian, nine percent Jaina and one percent Hindu. He was born in Gujarat, which is still the area most significantly under the impression of Jainism. So from his very childhood, although he was born a Hindu, Jainism was impressed on him. All his nonviolence is not a Hindu idea; it is a Jaina idea. All his five great principles that were to be followed by his ashramites are the five great principles of the Jainas – nothing of the Hindus, although he used to read the Bhagavadgita every morning, every evening in front of his twenty, twenty-five disciples.His ashram was not like this place. It looked just like any slum, where twenty percent lived without even mosquito nets. Instead of mosquito nets, kerosene oil was delivered to them. For what? To put on their faces, on their hands. Any exposed part of the body was rubbed with the kerosene oil. Even mosquitoes don’t come close to you. How can you sleep? The smell is such a stink – even mosquitoes stay away and you have to sleep.I remained only for one day, and when I heard that this was going to happen, I said, “I am going. This is not the place for me.” From where did he learn this kind of stupidity? Not from the Bhagavadgita, although to convince the Hindus that he is the Mahatma of the Hindus he read the Bhagavadgita every morning, every evening.The Bhagavadgita is one of the most significant philosophies of violence, not of nonviolence. It was perfectly in tune with Adolf Hitler, with Benito Mussolini, with Joseph Stalin, with Mao Zedong, but not with any religious person. And it is such a strange thing that during his long life not a single man ever asked Mahatma Gandhi, “Why do you go on calling that Bhagavadgita ‘my mother’?” It was just a political stunt so the Hindus would remain behind him.But the whole philosophy of the Bhagavadgita is of violence. Krishna is teaching war. Through the whole Bhagavadgita – from the first sentence to the last – he is convincing somebody of only one single thing: war. He is speaking to Arjuna, his disciple, who wants to escape from war. In fact, Arjuna seems to be more of a Jaina than Krishna, because while Krishna goes on trying to convince him, Arjuna goes on arguing against war, against violence.Finally he says, “I don’t see the point. Millions of people will be killed, just for my ambition to sit on the golden throne. I don’t think that I will feel happy when I see millions of corpses around me, including my brothers, my relatives, my friends, my colleagues, my elders, my teachers. I don’t see the point in killing all these people just to become a king.”He said, “I will feel so embarrassed, so repentant, that I may commit suicide. I should move to the Himalayas, that would be better. I am finished with the world if this is the way the world has to run. I am no longer part of it. I want to become a sannyasin.”But Krishna prevented him, prevented him in a very cunning way. He said to him, “It is God’s intention that you should fight; going away from the war is denying God’s intention.” Because Arjuna believed that Krishna was a prophet of God, he had to submit – unwillingly, reluctantly.This was the book Gandhi was reading day and night. He even made a commentary on it, and naturally he was in a difficulty – how to make any sense of nonviolence in a book which is completely based on violence? So he says it is only a metaphor; the war never happened. That is the strategy that he takes in his commentary on Bhagavadgita: the war never happened.This is the first time in five thousand years that anybody has said that this war never happened. It denies five thousand years of conviction that the war happened. The war not only happened, it destroyed the whole of India – its spine was broken. The war was so great and the impact of it was so big that it made the whole of India cowardly. Because of this war that Krishna preached, India became a slave country for two thousand years. It lost its nerve, it lost its dignity, it became so nervous about war because it saw what had happened in this war – almost half the country was killed. Every family was in mourning. From every family somebody was massacred; not a single family remained out of the war.That war’s nightmare has followed India for five thousand years. It has created such a fear. It is almost like the people who have seen Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If you talk about war with them, what do you think their reaction, their response, will be? Certainly they don’t want any more wars – they have seen the worst.But Mahatma Gandhi, in a very cunning and political way, at the very beginning said that this whole episode of war was just a metaphor: it was a war between the good and the bad, it was a war between the right and the wrong, it was a war between the light and the darkness. It was not a historical thing, hence there was no question of violence. A war between light and darkness is certainly not going to be a bloodshed – neither light nor darkness has any blood.This man, Mahatma Gandhi, admitted that three times he was on the verge of becoming a Christian. Only the politics of India prevented him, because if he was going to become a Christian, then he would not be the leader of the Hindus. He would be hated by the Hindus, and they were the majority in the country. It was just politics that prevented him from becoming a Christian. He himself would not have accepted this Upanishadic saying; he never talked about the Upanishads. He must have been afraid to talk about the Upanishads because what will he make of the statement aham brahmasmi? It cannot be said that it is a metaphor. It is an actual, realized fact.You are asking what the connection is between this great statement – it is actually called mahavakya, “the great statement” – with another statement of the same significance, sat-chit-anand. Sat-chit-anand consists of three words, as I have told you: sat – truth, chit – consciousness, anand – bliss. These three experiences make one capable of asserting the great statement, aham brahmasmi. They are deeply connected. In fact, if sat-chit-anand is the flower, then aham brahmasmi is the fragrance, so deep is the connection between the two.Certainly “I am the ultimate” is the very conclusion of the whole search of the East – of all the buddhas, of all the mystics. A single sentence can be called the conclusion of the whole of India. But God-centered religions will not be ready to accept it. That simply shows that their understanding is not of truth, not of consciousness, not of bliss.Their understanding is of a very low order: it is not an experience, but only a belief. One is a Christian only by belief; a Jew only by belief; a Mohammedan only by belief. What the Upanishads are saying is not a belief – it is direct, immediate experience. And they are so poetic, so mystic, that there is no comparison in the whole world’s literature.But this final flowering and fragrance is possible only if you start with meditation and not with prayer. These two ways will take you to different conclusions: prayer will take you more and more into fiction and meditation will take you more and more into truth. Meditation is to go withinward, and prayer is to look upward, into the empty sky, with all your desires and greed and demands, with all your fears and insecurities. God is to you – if you are on the path of prayer – a consolation and nothing more. But if you are on the path of meditation, one day God will become your very own self, your very own existence.One day a meek little man is kneeling in church praying. “Please, God,” he mumbles, “please make my boss give me a raise so that I can keep up the payments on my house, and so that my children don’t go hungry.”Just then the church door bursts open and a big black guy in sunglasses strolls in whistling a tune. He goes up to the altar, raises his hands and says, “Hey, man. You up there, God! I really dig you, man. Give me a beautiful new woman, a big new car, and a huge new mansion to live in. And I want it fast.”He then turns around and walks out. The little man is shocked and continues to pray.Next week the little man is back, still praying for the same things, when he is startled by a screech of brakes outside the church. In walks the big black guy with a gorgeous woman by his side. He strides up to the altar and says, “Hey, God! Thanks, man, for the car and the girl. And hey, man, the house is superb!”After the black guy has gone, the little man goes up to the altar and says, “Dear God, you answered his prayers. Why don’t you answer mine?”A voice booms out from behind the altar, “Sorry, man, I just don’t dig you!”If you want fictions, prayer is the path. All the religions that are based on prayer are not authentic religions. Meditation is a totally different route. It takes you inward; it takes you away from the world toward your own being. It is not a demand, it is not a desire, it is not greed, it is not asking or requesting anything. It is simply being silent, utterly silent, moving deeper and deeper into silence. A moment of sublime silence comes, and then a sudden explosion of light and you will feel yourself saying “Aham brahmasmi.” Not outward because you are not saying it to anybody in particular. It will be just a feeling in the deepest core of your being. No language is needed, just an experience of “I am the whole, I am the all. And just as I am the whole, everybody else is.” There is no question of any ego or megalomania.The Christian missionaries who interpreted the Upanishads were absolutely prejudiced and had no understanding about meditation and no understanding about the higher qualities of a true religion. They knew only an organized church. In comparison to the Upanishads, every religion of the world looks so pygmy-like, so childish. Those organized religions don’t give you freedom. On the contrary, they give you deeper and deeper bondage and slavery. In the name of God, you have to surrender; in the name of God, you have to become a sheep and allow a Jesus or a Mohammed to be a shepherd. It is so disgusting, the very idea is so self-disrespectful that I cannot call it even pseudo-religious. It is simply irreligious.The Upanishads are the highest flights of consciousness. They don’t belong to any religion. The people who made these great statements have not even mentioned their names. They don’t belong to any nation, they don’t belong to any religion, they don’t belong to those who are in search of some mundane thing. They belong to the authentic seekers of truth. They belong to you. They belong to my people.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 13 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Again and again, everything I want to say seems unsayable. Question after question burns fiercely and vanishes as quickly. And yet, there's an uncontrollable longing for you to point me in the right direction. Otherwise, how can I know that I'm not already astray?Anand Savita, you may have been astray, but certainly now you are not astray. If questions arise and disappear it is a great symbolic indication. If you want to ask something and you find it unsayable, it means something from beyond the mind is longing to be expressed; words fail, the mind cannot manage to bring it down to the world of language.And this is something to be remembered by you all: if you are getting more silent, more peaceful, more calm and cool, it is an intrinsic indication that you are in the right direction. If things are otherwise – you are becoming more disturbed, more anxiety-ridden, feeling more anguish, feeling as if you are falling apart – it is a sure indication that you have gone astray.I want you to remember the criterion yourself, because the criterion is intrinsic. It is not imposed from outside, it is not arbitrary. You can see it very clearly – according to the symptoms. If silence, blissfulness, a kind of peace that passes understanding are there, then you need not worry at all, as these things can happen only on the right path. They never happen if you go astray. If you are miserable, feeling meaningless, feeling no significance in life, if your life has no music, no poetry, but is just a stale, dead dragging, you have clear-cut symptoms in your hands that you are no longer on the right path.The right path is just as if you are coming closer to a beautiful garden. You may not see it, it may not yet be visible, but far away you can start smelling the fragrance, you can start feeling the cool breeze, you can start hearing the birds singing in the trees. You start seeing that things are becoming greener, livelier; you are approaching closer to the garden. But if things are becoming dry, losing all juice, the trees are becoming bare, without foliage, without flowers, and the path is becoming sandier and sandier and all coolness is disappearing – instead you are feeling hot and perspiring – you know you are moving toward the desert.This is exactly what happens in your inner world. There is a desert called the mind and there is a garden called the heart. If you are moving toward the heart, everything is right, because the heart is the bridge to your being. The heart is not the goal, but it is a sure indication that you have left the mind behind, that the desert has been left behind.The heart joins the mind and being just like a bridge. As you start moving on the path of the heart, things start becoming more beautiful, more loving. You are surrounded by a new energy, a new life, as if you are being rejuvenated every moment. And the day you reach your center, there you will experience sat-chit-anand. But before that experience of truth, consciousness, bliss, these small indications will help you on the path. They are the milestones.As far as I can see, you are going perfectly right because you are feeling things which cannot be said – they must be coming from the heart. Only the heart is without language. It is silent, it speaks in silence. You can say that silence is its language. And you find it difficult to say them because saying is the function of the mind. The feeling is in the heart and the mechanism of expression is in the mind. So if something is arising in the heart, the mind feels absolutely impotent. This is good news.And your questions, you say, “appear one after another, burn fiercely and vanish as quickly.” That’s how it happens to every meditator. You don’t have to ask them! Even before you can ask them they are no longer there. It means you are coming closer to the answer within yourself. It may not be very clear to you what the answer is, but the question disappears without torturing you, without becoming a nightmare, without being stubborn, persistent, harassing you to ask it: that would show you are enclosed in the mind. Mind knows only questions; the heart knows only answers – and the being is beyond both. It knows neither questions nor answers. It is simply beyond all kinds of duality.I have told you many times, but I love the incident so much, because in the contemporary world, and particularly in the West, nothing like it has ever happened. In the East it has been happening to the Sufis, to the Zen monks, to the masters of meditation, but in the West this small incident stands unique – just like a burning torch in a dark night.Gertrude Stein, a great poetess, was dying, she was breathing her last breath. She was loved by many people, she had many friends. She was a woman of tremendous creative qualities. Her poetry comes closest to the haikus of the Zen masters or to the poetry of Kabir, Nanak, Farid. Her poetry has something essentially of the East; she had some glimpses of the mystic experience.At the last moment – it was evening and the sun had set and darkness was settling – she opened her eyes and asked, “What is the answer?”And those who had gathered to say good-bye to her were puzzled. “Has she gone senile, insane? Perhaps death has shocked her and she has lost her rationality.”Certainly no man with a reasonable mind will ask “What is the answer?” because unless you have asked a question, asking “What is the answer?” is very irrational.There was silence for a moment. Then one very close friend asked, “But you have not asked the question. How can we answer?”And Gertrude Stein had a faint smile and said, “Okay, so tell me, what is the question?”And then she died, so they had no time left to say, “This question is as absurd as your first. First you asked for the answer without asking the question; now you are also asking us for the question! There are thousands and millions of questions. Who knows what question you want to be answered?”In fact, Gertrude Stein was passing beyond the mind when she asked, “What is the answer?” She was passing beyond the heart when she asked – reluctantly, smilingly – “Okay, what is the question?” And then she passed beyond.It was one of the most beautiful deaths in the West. In the East we have known many beautiful deaths. It is very difficult for people to make a beautiful life. But there have been people who have lived beautifully and died even more beautifully. Because to them death comes as a culmination, as a climax of life, as if the whole life becomes a flame of fire – in a single moment, in total intensity – before disappearing into the universal. She was not losing her mind in the sense that it is usually understood, but she was certainly going beyond the mind and she was also going beyond the heart.Beyond these two diametrically opposite centers in you is a being which is utterly innocent of any questions or of any answers. It is so fulfilled in itself, so completely contented that there is nothing left to ask and there is nothing left to answer.My own understanding is that Gertrude Stein died enlightened. The West has no understanding of enlightenment. They simply thought she was going crazy. But it was not craziness, it was a moment of great celebration. What she could not attain in her life, she attained in her death. And she gave the sure indications: no question, no answer and you have arrived home.Savita, you are perfectly good. I have been watching you, looking into your eyes, into your face – it has changed so much. I remember when you came the first time to me, years ago. I remember it exactly – how hard your face was, how intellectual your questions were. You have a beautiful face and a beautiful being, but you could not manage to hide the hardness. It was beyond you, you were in your head. Then the face loses all grace.It is still beautiful as far as the shape is concerned, but it loses something essential to beauty: the grace. Now I see that your heart must have taken over your head. Your face shows a grace, your eyes show a silence, you show a certain grounding, a certain centering – small things.When you first came to me I could see how fidgety you were. Even for a few minutes you could not sit in the same position. It is not only a question of the body. It is the mind that is continuously moving, that is continuously changing – that affects the body. Now I see you sitting almost like a marble statue: no movement, and your face is so radiant with love. You are surrounded with a new experience. You are perfectly on the right path. And the day will not be far away when your face will start radiating the light of illumination. Meanwhile, rejoice as much as you can and be grateful to existence with your total being.Just one thing I would like to add: you have become very silent. So silent that perhaps you find laughter a little disturbing. I would like you to remember always that silence is not disturbed by laughter, it is deepened. Laughter to me is an essential quality of religious experience. It involves you totally.But it happens when people are on the path, growing, there comes a moment when their silence becomes a little serious. It is natural. They have never known silence. It becomes a little shadowed with seriousness. And hiding behind seriousness there is a little sadness. Both can be destroyed if you learn a little laughing, a little singing, a little dancing.I want you to reach the ultimate as a child, giggling with joy – that’s the only way to greet existence when you meet the ultimate. You should enter with laughter, dancing, singing, because only your laughter and your singing and your dancing can show your gratitude. No other words are possible.Just for you, Savita…Yossel Moskowitz has four daughters and insists on meeting each of their boyfriends before he allows them to be taken out. The first boy arrives and says, “My name is Jim and I have come to take Kim for a swim. Is she in?”He seems nice enough, so Yossel lets them go. The second lad arrives and says, “My name is Joe, and I have come to take Flo to the show. Can we go?” He, too, is given permission.Soon there is a third boy at the door who says, “My name is Lance and I have come to take Nance to the dance. Any chance?” So off they go.Half an hour later a drunk staggers to the door and says, “Hi! My name is Buck…”But Yossel shouts, “She is not in!”The circus audience holds its breath as the crocodile trainer cracks his whip. The crocodile opens its huge mouth and the trainer puts his arm inside it. He cracks the whip again and the crocodile shuts its mouth with terrific force, but stops an inch from the trainer’s arm. The audience gasps and then goes wild with applause.Next, the trainer takes out his prick, cracks his whip and the crocodile opens its mouth. Then he puts his prick inside the crocodile’s mouth and cracks the whip again. The crocodile shuts its mouth with tremendous force, but again stops an inch away.The crowd gasps as the trainer takes a huge wooden mallet and hits the crocodile over the head as hard as he can. But still the animal won’t bite. He then cracks his whip, removes his unscratched prick and the crowd goes wild.Then the trainer asks the audience if anyone else would like to try this trick. A little old lady rushes into the ring and says, “Yes, yes, let me try! But please don’t hit me so hard with the hammer!”Osho,I am deeply grateful to existence that I can be here beside you and that you are available to me.I believe you are my only authentic mirror. All the other mirrors around me seem to reflect my masks and the roles I'm playing. How can I become more sensitive toward myself?How can I say yes to what I am, and no to what I am not?It is one of the great problems for the seeker – to be caught in duality; and the duality comes in such a way that you may not recognize it at all. It seems so right, it seems that it is going to help you in your growth, but no duality can help you grow. All duality has to be left behind: neither yes nor no, neither you nor me, neither your false self nor your idea of your authentic self. Both have to be left behind.In essence, the moment you are not divided in any kind of duality you suddenly fall into tune with existence. Existence knows no yes, no no. It knows no duality. It is absolutely simple. There is no complexity in it.Now, what you are asking is a complex question. You are asking, “How can I say yes to what I am, and no to what I am not?” You don’t have to – you simply stop saying anything! You go into a non-saying silence within yourself. Otherwise you will get into such complexities that they will hold you back from going in.These are all mind questions. In fact, every question is a mind question. Sometimes they are so beautiful that you may think they are coming from beyond the mind. But no question ever comes from beyond the mind; this is unquestioningly in tune with existence.I will read your question. You say, “I am deeply grateful to existence that I can be here beside you and that you are available to me.” Do you see the duality? It is very subtle. First, you are making a distinction between yourself and existence by being grateful to existence, as if you are apart. Do you think my hand can be grateful to me? Do you think my eyes can be grateful to me? Do you think I have to be grateful to my heart? I am one whole. In fact, to feel one with existence is the only gratitude, but that will not be expressed in words. It will overwhelm you. You may dance with joy that you have arrived, but you will not say anything.You are saying, “I am deeply grateful to existence…” That is where you are making your first duality. If you are really grateful to existence you will disappear. There will not be anyone to say “Thank you” to existence – and that is true thankfulness. Secondly you say, “…that I can be here beside you and that you are available to me.” Another duality! Again your mind is making a distinction between yourself and me. Is there any need to make the distinction? Can’t you come close, so close that you cannot see the other? To see the other as the other, you need a distance.Then you say, “I believe you are my only authentic mirror.” You are too much in the mind. I am insisting every moment, each day when I am with you: religion is not a question of belief. I want you to be free from all beliefs, but the mind is very much attached to beliefs. That’s its way, its strategy, to prevent you from reaching the truth. Truth is an experience, not a belief.The moment you say “I believe,” without your knowing, you are declaring your ignorance. Belief is based on ignorance. A man says “I believe in God.” He knows nothing about God, whether he exists or not. It is his belief, he is projecting his belief. When somebody says “I believe I am in love with you,” what do you think of him? He believes that he is in love with you. He does not know exactly, he has not felt it throughout his being. His heart has not danced with the feeling of love. It is still a belief in the head.You say, “I believe…” and that shows nothing but an imprisonment in the mind. Belief is a word belonging to the mind. Beyond the mind there is no question of belief. Either you know or you don’t. And then, “…that you are my only authentic mirror.” How can you come to this conclusion with a belief? Have you seen all the mirrors in the world? How can you decide I am your only authentic mirror? And that too based on a belief? Just look how your mind is playing tricks on you! What is the reason that mind is giving you to make you believe I am your only authentic mirror?I have heard about a woman who was ugly, really ugly, repulsively ugly. She was very much against mirrors. Her idea was that all those mirrors were making her ugly, because whenever she was not looking in the mirror she was not ugly. She was so against mirrors that in her own house there were no mirrors, and she used to immediately break other people’s mirrors, hit them hard. She used to carry a staff with her; if somebody, somewhere, had a mirror, she never bothered that it was not her possession. She would immediately hit the mirror, breaking it into pieces.The whole village where the woman lived was in utter despair. They said, “In the first place, this woman is so repulsive. Secondly, she goes on destroying our mirrors. We are poor people, but her argument is: ‘These mirrors are making me ugly! It is a conspiracy of the mirror manufacturers. Because when there is no mirror, I am perfectly okay.’”Finally one clever guy in the village went to the city, to the factory where mirrors were produced, and he asked them to produce a mirror in which an ugly woman starts looking beautiful.Mirrors can be made in many ways. If you have seen… There are many places in big cities where you can go into a mirror house where there are different kinds of mirrors: a few make you thin and tall; a few make you very fat and very short; a few make your nose so long that not even a Jew could have it; a few make your nose almost disappear – flat, no nose; a few make one of your eyes small and the other big… There are thousands of kinds of mirrors.In Indore, one of the big cities of India, there is a mirror house. One of the richest men of India – he is dead now – was Sir Seth Hukum Chand. He was given as many titles by the British government as you can conceive. It needed at least half a page to write all his titles. He was Sir Seth – Seth is Hindi, it comes from the Sanskrit root shreshth. It means “the best.” And the British government was giving titles to only a few people. I think he was the only Sir Seth in the whole of India: best amongst the best!He was not a king, but he was given the title of Raja – the king. He owned almost three-quarters of the buildings in the whole city. Even the Maharaja – Indore was a state, a beautiful state – had to borrow money from Sir Seth Hukum Chand. He had a huge amount of money and he made Indore as beautiful as possible – he was not a miserly man.He had a beautiful collection of horses, such as I have never seen. I have seen many horses in many places, but the horses that he had were absolutely unique and rare: such proud horses, so strong. He had made a big palace for the horses, a marble palace. He was the only person in the whole world who had a Rolls Royce made completely of twenty-four carat gold – even the engine! Nothing was to be used except gold. And he had made a beautiful temple, completely of glass.He had also made a mirror house. In his mirror house there must have been at least a thousand or more mirrors. It took hours to move from one room to another room, from one mirror to another mirror. You could not believe that mirrors could be of so many curves, so many different types – they can change you so much.So the factory produced a mirror which would make the woman look beautiful. The man brought the mirror to the woman and said, “Before you break it, just have a look in it. This is a very authentic mirror!”The woman looked into it and she was so beautiful, she hugged the mirror, she kissed the mirror. She said, “I was absolutely right in destroying all the false mirrors. This is the only real mirror.”Now, this was the false mirror. How do you decide that I am your only authentic mirror? Perhaps close to me you feel beautiful, close to me you feel silent, close to me you feel meditative, close to me you feel joyous. Your mind is supplying the reason, “The mirrors around me seem to reflect my masks and the roles I am playing.”How do you know which is the mask and which is the original face? Are you certain? How can you be certain – because a belief can never be certain – that what you feel near me is your original face? Perhaps my presence and my people’s presence and the silence that surrounds this strange temple – godless, but so full of godliness; prayerless, but so full of prayerfulness… You start feeling these things, they infiltrate into your being and you feel happy, thinking “Perhaps this is my reality, this is my original face. Everybody else reflects only my mask.”But if you are really experiencing it, why do you go on keeping your masks? Throw them away! Then no mirror will be able to reflect that which is not. If you see that this is a mask, immediately destroy it. Not the mirror, mind you – destroy the mask!I have heard…A man was reading the newspaper and his wife was standing behind him, looking at what he was reading – wives are very suspicious. The wife read that a famous doctor had declared how many diseases happen because of alcohol. And she immediately jumped.Every wife seems to be appointed by God himself to cure her husband. I don’t see that there is any other purpose for a wife. Her whole life she devotes to curing the husband of all kinds of wrong habits: cigarettes, alcohol, other women. And all that they succeed in doing is to create a hypocrite!She immediately told the husband, “Why are you reading all this nonsense? Read this – what the famous doctor is saying: ‘Alcohol can cause all these diseases; it will take ten years off your life.’ Stop drinking alcohol!”The man said, “Okay, from tomorrow.”The woman could not believe it. She had been torturing him since they had married. It must have been twenty years, and he had never agreed to drop it – and so suddenly. He said, “Okay, from tomorrow.”Tomorrow morning came, but the newspaper did not come. The wife asked, “What happened to the newspaper?”He said, “I have told you, I will stop from tomorrow, not the alcohol but such stupid newspapers!”Don’t destroy any mirrors, because the mirror is innocent. If it shows you your mask, drop the mask! Then every mirror will reflect your authentic face. And when every mirror starts reflecting your authentic face – the mirror of your servant, the mirror of your wife, the mirrors of your children, the mirrors of your parents, the mirrors of your friends, even the mirrors of your enemies – when they all reflect the same face, only then can you be certain that you have come to the original. Otherwise, you go on changing masks.The same man: with his wife, he has a mask made in England – long face, so serious, grumpy, utterly fed up with the world, everything is wrong. And then you see him with somebody else’s wife and he is smiling so much. He has dropped the English face completely; he has become an Italian. You just watch how you change your mask. In front of your servant you have one mask – you are the boss. But in front of your master, your own boss, you have a different mask.Even animals learn tricks with human beings. Otherwise, they are simple people. Have you seen dogs? If they know that somebody is welcome in the house, they will also welcome him with their tails wagging. If they know that somebody is not welcome in the house, they will not wag their tails. They will bark and keep the stranger away. But sometimes poor dogs, not being capable of much discrimination, find themselves in a fix. Somebody comes and they don’t know exactly whether he has to be welcomed or chased away. So they do both things: on the one hand they go on barking, on the other they go on wagging their tail – diplomatic! They are waiting for the response of their boss. When their master comes out, if he shakes hands with the person, the barking stops, the wagging of the tail continues. But if the master is angry and says “Why have you entered the garden? Get out!” the dog’s tail stops completely and he rushes to chase the man out of the garden, barking as loudly as he can.Diplomacy is a contagious disease. In front of your boss…You may not have a tail, though Darwin says that once you had one. He even found the joint in your backbone where the tail was joined, where it was plugged in. That is certain proof that you once had a tail because otherwise why should you have this place where a tail can be plugged in? This was his basic argument to prove that man has come from apes. The only thing missing is the tail. He studied skeletons and found that there had been a tail – the part where it used to be attached is still in your body.It is fortunate that you have lost the tail. Otherwise, when you see your boss or your wife, you will immediately start wagging it. And it will look very odd to have buttons on both sides of your pants, as you will have to keep your tail hidden. It would not be for everybody, only for special people, VIPs. For ordinary people, there will be no need to bring your tail out.But your face shows the same expression. The boss may be shouting at you – you go on smiling, your lips are spread ear to ear. Deep down you want to kill that man immediately, to shoot that man. Deep down you are calling him “bastard.” But on your face, that ear-to-ear smile, although he is harassing you, calling you all kinds of names, saying that you are lazy, that you are always a latecomer and it cannot be tolerated anymore, that you have to mend your ways, otherwise you will be fired.If you watch… With a friend, you have a different mask, with the enemy, you have a different mask, with a stranger you have a different mask. The authentic original face is only possible when you remove all masks, when you start behaving humanly and equally to all. He may be a servant or he may be a master: both are human beings and both need their dignity and respect. Whether it is your friend or your enemy, it doesn’t matter: both are human beings and both need their dignity and respect.You will find your original face only when you have destroyed all your masks – not in a mirror. My effort is not to give you a mirror which gives you a good feeling that you have a beautiful face, that this is your original face. I want you to find your original face, and the only way is that when every mirror you come across…Every human being is a mirror. Have you ever watched a beggar? He will not ask you for anything if you are alone on the street because he knows that alone you are not going to give him anything except the advice, “You are strong enough, you don’t have to be a beggar. Don’t be a parasite, just go and find some work. You are the people who have destroyed this country.”The beggar will follow you, and when there are people around, then he will ask, then he will hold your legs, your feet, saying, “Give me something. I am dying. For three days I have not eaten anything!” And you will give.Deep down you hate him, deep down you want to hit that beggar. But you will give him something because you want to keep your prestige, your mask, in front of those people, so they will think “He is a very generous man, a great man, very religious. He knows what charity is.” But they don’t know what is going on inside you.You know that fellow. Every day he has been saying the same thing to you – “For three days I have not eaten anything.” And still he gets away with it in a crowd. So you will find beggars in places where there is a crowd: in the marketplace, near the movie hall, near your customers if you are a shopkeeper, in front of your friends or anybody to whom you have been bragging about your kindness and your compassion and your greatness.Beggars know perfectly well – it is not one-sided – that not only are you saying something else inside while giving him some money, the beggar is also saying something else inside; he also has masks. He knows that he has got the idiot in the right place. He knows that now you cannot escape. He is thinking he is making a fool of you, but on the surface he is telling you, “Great will be your reward in paradise. God will give you a thousand times more.”I was in Allahabad, speaking at the Allahabad University, and as I was entering the university a beggar caught hold of me. Allahabad is one of the most prominent Hindu religious cities, because it is where three holy rivers meet. Hindus think that where three rivers meet – they call it sangam, the meeting – that place becomes holy. And in a holy place you will find more beggars than anywhere else because naturally everybody who comes there pretends to be holy, and to prove it he has to give to the beggars. The more he gives, the holier he is.The beggar caught hold of me, thinking I was just like anybody else. The professors who were waiting to receive me were there, so he must have thought, “This is the right time.”He said, “If you give me just one rupee, God will give you a million times more.”I said, “If you have such an intimate relationship with God, ask directly! Why put me in between unnecessarily. I don’t have any contact with God and I don’t want a million rupees – what will I do with them?”The beggar said, “My God! I have never seen such a man! You don’t need one million?”I said, “I don’t need even one rupee, and I don’t have one!” He looked at me, surprised.I said, “You have to believe me; you can check. I don’t even have pockets. Where to keep one rupee?”He looked at my robe. There were no pockets. He said, “You are the worst fellow I have come across. And it seems you don’t believe in God.”I said, “You are right. I neither believe in money nor in God. You have to find somebody else who believes in money and who believes in God and who believes in respectability.”I don’t believe in anything. All these professors… I didn’t care. Because I don’t brag, I said to the beggar, “If this is the way a transaction is made, you give me one rupee and get one million rupees from God.”He looked at me and he said, “This is too much! Not a single man in my whole life has asked me for one rupee. There have been people who have not given, but asking…!”I said, “According to your ideology, I am just giving you a chance of getting one million rupees in paradise. Don’t miss the opportunity! You have given the opportunity to many people in your life. I am giving you the opportunity, I am the only man who is missing out on one million rupees for just one rupee. Do it. It is a bargain!”He simply turned his face from me and ran away. I said, “Where are you going? I will be coming wherever you go unless you give me one rupee. And I am going to stay in this city for ten days!”The professors said, “You have done a miracle. We have been trying to get rid of this beggar. He stands just in front of the door. It looks so ugly, and he harasses everybody, and everybody has to give something. But you have done something great. He has run away! We have been trying, but he is a strong fellow. And every professor was afraid that he may be vengeful, thinking: ‘When I go out of the university, he may give me a good lesson, so it is better not to bother him.’ He is almost a wrestler, but he has run away!”For ten days he didn’t appear at the university gate. When I left the university I told the professor in charge, who had arranged my lectures at the university, “Please send me a card if he returns.”He said, “What do you mean? Are you coming back?”I said, “No, I just want to know whether he comes back or not.”And after three or four days I received the news that after exactly ten days – on the eleventh – he was present, “He is again torturing us.”You have to find the original face that you brought with you when you were born, when you were without the crippling by society, without the impositions of masks by your parents, without the diplomacy learned in life. You can find it, but you will have to find it in all the people you meet. And whenever you see any mask, drop it.Those masks are not going to help you. Those masks are the barriers between you and the ultimate. Once those masks are dropped, suddenly you find there was no other barrier, you are one with the universal energy, you are one with the cosmos.Little Ernie has been driving his mother crazy, so she starts visiting a psychiatrist. On her second visit the shrink asks her, “Have the tranquilizers calmed you down?”“Yes,” replies Ernie’s mother.“And how is your little Ernie?” he asks.She looks up and says, “Who cares?”So be silent, calm and quiet – meditation is a nonmedicinal tranquilizer – and then you will not care whether you are facing your servant or your boss, friend or enemy. Who cares? They are all human beings, equally respectable, equally beautiful. There is no need to make any judgment.And finally you are asking, “How can I become more sensitive toward myself?” First start becoming sensitive toward trees, rivers, mountains, oceans, because they will not in any way be attacking you. So you need not have defense measures. Your insensitivity is nothing but your defense. People become hard just to protect themselves. So first start with the beautiful existence around you. Trees won’t attack you; be a little more sensitive. Stars won’t attack you; be a little more available. There is no need to be afraid. Mountains, clouds, the sun and the moon – just become open to them.I’m giving you the first step in becoming sensitive – why are you insensitive? That has to be looked into. You are insensitive because it is a very tough society with tough competition. For the whole of life everybody is at everybody else’s throat; cut as many throats as possible and you will be a great man.Just the other day I was looking at data: Genghis Khan alone killed forty million people; Nadir Shah alone killed thirty million people; Tamerlane also killed seventeen million people, and statistics are not available for Alexander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte. But the data is available for Joseph Stalin: he killed thirty million Russians after the revolution. Adolf Hitler killed six million Jews in Germany, and in total – because of him – fifty million people were killed in the Second World War. It is a very insane society. One has to protect oneself, otherwise you will be killed for small things.My eye specialist is here. He has brought me a beautiful pair of glasses and he told me a story about those beautiful glasses. They have become so precious and so valuable – their design is unique – that just in New York six people were killed because they had those sunglasses. It is very difficult to get them. The price is very high and the waiting list is long – six months, eight months. Who is going to wait for eight months? Not in New York! Things have to be done quickly, people want everything to be done with speed. Instant coffee – that is the motto. Six people were killed, just for a pair of glasses. It is unbelievable.But this is how things are going on. You may not be clearly aware of it, for your unconscious goes on protecting you. That’s what makes you insensitive.I used to live with a friend. He was a very rich man. I watched his strange behavior: when he came into the house, he would walk very fast and he would not look here or there. The servants were working in the garden, the gardeners were working, his children were playing, and whenever he came all his children would become serious. He would keep that same hardness even with his wife.After watching for two or three days, I had to tell him, “It is strange behavior.”He said, “You don’t know… If I just relax a little bit my wife says: ‘We need a new car. This car is one year old. New models have come out.’ I have to keep a hard, stony face. That keeps her afraid to mention the new car. If I relax a little bit every child starts asking for money. Servants, if I even just stand a little bit…”He never looked at his own garden, he never looked at the beautiful flowers.I said, “What is the purpose of this garden? You never go in the garden, you never look at the roses, you never sit on the lawn. And you have the most beautiful lawn.”He said, “It is dangerous; once I go into the garden the mali comes, asks for a raise in his monthly salary. If I say anything about the roses like, ‘You have grown beautiful roses,’ that’s enough! I don’t want to raise the salaries, so I have to avoid my own garden!”He was a totally different person outside his house than he was inside his house. I knew him only outside his house. That’s why I accepted his invitation when he said, “I have a big bungalow – half is empty. Why don’t you come? And you love a garden. I have a beautiful garden and you can have half the bungalow.”I said, “What will I do with half the bungalow? Just one room is enough for me.”He said, “But you can have it for guests or others.”So I moved into his house. Then I came to see a totally different man. I told him, “This is an ugly attitude. You have enough money to purchase a new car, you have enough money to raise those poor servants’ salaries a little bit, you have enough money to give some to your own children for toys or for sweets or something. It is not going to make you bankrupt.”I gave him an absolute ultimatum. “If you don’t change, I cannot live in your house. Only if you change will I live in your house. I cannot see this ugly behavior with your own children. They are so happy, running, enjoying. The moment you come they all become serious, they all start reading their books, doing their homework.“I see your wife is so relaxed when you are not here. She brings things for me – tea or coffee – or if she prepares some sweets she brings some for me. She is such a lovely lady, but the moment you enter the house, she becomes just a mirror image of you.“This I cannot tolerate. I give you three days. Either you change or I will change houses. I was perfectly happy in my own house. You dragged me here unnecessarily and not only will I leave the house, you will lose a friend, too.”He said, “But three days is too short a time to change such a long habit.”I said, “How many days do you want?”He said, “It is difficult to say. I will try my best, but don’t make a deadline. I am unkind to these people, I accept; don’t you be unkind to me.”I said, “That’s okay, I will remain here. I will not make a deadline, but it is better that you be quick. Otherwise I will not inform you – any night I can disappear.”It took him almost six months to relax in his own house although he was perfectly relaxed outside it.Your sensitivity first has to learn to be sensitive with the universe, which is not attacking you. You need not be afraid. Then be sensitive with human beings. That will be a little difficult. You may find yourself in the same position as my friend. But it is worth it. And only when you are sensitive to the universe, to human beings, to the animals, can you at last be sensitive to yourself. That is going to be the final step.You have been condemned from the very beginning – you have been taught, “You are worthless, you don’t even deserve to exist, you have to earn respectability, prestige…” You have become very hard upon yourself. This is called discipline; this is used to create men with steel spines. Every society is trying, every parent is trying, so that his children will become stalins – that is the Russian word for a man of steel – because they are preparing you for a world where you will find only struggle, cunningness, cheating, hypocrites, all kinds of conmen. So you have become very hard inside.Relax from the outer circumference of your being and then go on moving inward. Finally you will be able to relax in your deepest core and that is the meeting with existence.Finally you ask, “How can I say yes to what I am, and no to what I am not?” There is no need. When you know what you are, it is enough. That which you are not will disappear. It is you who are clinging to it. It is not your false personality that is clinging to you. To know the real is to be free from the unreal. There is no question of choice. It is not that you have to choose that this is the real, and that is the unreal, how to say yes to the real, how to say no to the unreal.In the very understanding that something is unreal, you have said no to it. In the very understanding that something is authentic and real, you have already said yes to it, without saying a single word. Just knowing the difference between the false and the authentic, between the mask and the original face, is enough.Meditate deeply and all that I have said to you will become absolutely clear. Don’t start thinking about it, otherwise you will get more into puzzles, more into complexities.Just sit silently and meditate on whatever I have said to you. A great clarity is bound to come; it always comes. It has come to many of my people. There is no reason why it will not come to you.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 14 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Often these days I feel as if I am pregnant. It is not a down-pulling burden. It rather feels like a weightless, but expansive something in my belly and my chest. It is a very strange sensation for a man. I am not showing any signs of pregnancy yet – my belly is still flat as usual but now I have exposed myself, and there is no Holy Ghost to blame and I am certainly not the Virgin Mary.Osho, what is it that I am pregnant with? Is it you?I hope it is me. In fact, every disciple has to come to this stage where he feels almost pregnant with the divine. It is a spiritual pregnancy. But because we are so identified with the body, it may even seem that the body is also pregnant.But something is growing within you. It is not part of the body, you need not be a Virgin Mary. And, of course, holy ghosts are not available anymore, only unholy ghosts – there are a few. One lives with Anando, another has been found in a godown, but they are all unholy ghosts – they don’t do holy things, so you need not be worried about them. Moreover, even the Holy Ghost has not been able up to now to do a miracle – to make a man pregnant. It would have been more in tune with the Christian ideology if Joseph, rather than Mary, had become pregnant. That would have been a great miracle. The Virgin Mary, a poor girl, becoming pregnant is not a great miracle; anybody can do it.The disciple certainly passes through a stage of immense value and beauty. Something transcendental – something more than you have ever thought about yourself, something beyond the grasp of your mind – is growing within you. This is the lotus I have been talking to you about. This is the flowering that brings a man or a woman to the ultimate opening toward the unknown, unknowable, inexpressible.In a way, through this pregnancy you are born again. You give birth to your own authentic self, which up to now has been only a seed. But the seed longs to become a flower. On the way, you will feel something very similar to pregnancy. You will feel light – you will not be feeling heavy like a pregnant woman – because it is not something material that is growing in you. It is something spiritual, nonmaterial, that is opening within you. It will bring you more and more light, make you more and more unfettered, more and more free.Meditators for centuries have felt that when deep in meditation, they suddenly find as if they have lost all weight, as if gravitation no more functions on them. In a certain way, it is right. It no longer functions on their spiritual being. The spiritual being is not matter, hence gravitation cannot have any pull on it. And the weight arises because of the gravitation and its pull.You don’t have weight, not even your body has weight. Weight is the normal name for a scientific fact and that scientific fact is the gravitation force on the earth. You are pulled by that force. It is good for you – otherwise you would become like balloons, moving upward, and you would not be able to find how to come back down to the earth.It happens to astronauts when they move beyond the gravitational field. The gravitational field of the earth is two hundred miles around the earth. The moment the rocket passes two hundred miles, the strangest experience happens to the astronauts. They suddenly lose all weight. If they are not sitting with their belts on, they start floating inside the rocket, just like birds. Even birds feel the gravitation, that’s why they become tired. They can fly only for a certain time. Then they have to rest. But the astronaut in the rocket has no gravitational pull.When the astronauts landed on the moon, they had another very strange experience: as the moon has only one fourth of the gravitation of the earth – it is four times smaller than the earth, hence its forces of pulling are also four times less – the astronauts felt very light, not as light as they were feeling on the way to the moon, but still four times less.If you are eighty kilos, you feel only twenty kilos. Because the astronaut feels four times less weight, he can jump four times further. He can simply jump over your house, just from this street to another street. He can jump to your terrace with no difficulty. There is no problem, because it is only the pull of the earth that is preventing him.They had to walk very carefully on the moon. They were afraid because they were feeling so light. If the same thing happened as was happening on the way – in the rocket – then they would be finished. On the way, between the moon and the earth, they were able to come out of the rocket, they could float outside the rocket. Tremendous experiences, but still they are physical.But as your spiritual being starts growing within you or starts coming into your vision – just a faraway vision of a mountain peak, covered with eternal snow – suddenly you can start feeling, even from far away, a certain coolness, a certain ancientness and a certain eternity. As you become more aware of your inner being, it will appear – as now – as if you are pregnant. You will see that you are not pregnant with anybody else, but that your own potential, your own ultimate possibility, is trying to unfold its petals.You must have seen Gautam Buddha’s statues. He’s always sitting on a lotus flower. In the East, the lotus has always been the symbol of ultimate flowering because there is no other flower so big and so beautiful and so symbolically significant. The lotus grows in mud, dirty mud. That is one of the similarities: your body is nothing but dirty mud, and the lotus grows in the dirty mud. The lotus emerges from the water and its petals are so silky that the water cannot touch them. They remain always untouched by water, even from the dewdrops that settle on them in the night – particularly in winter. In the morning you can see the dewdrop sitting on the petals of the lotus, but the lotus is not wet. The dewdrop and the lotus are still separate. And soon a little breeze… The dewdrop will start falling off the lotus leaves or the lotus petals.That is the second symbol for a spiritual man who lives in the world: just like a lotus flower he is untouched by the world, as the lotus flower is not touched by the water in which it grows, in which it lives, in which it dies – it remains untouched by it.These two things – growing in the dirty mud, growing beyond the dirty mud and the water and still never being touched – are the essential qualities of a sannyasin. Being in the world, but not of the world; being in the world, but not allowing the world even to touch you. The authentic sannyasin does not escape from the world. He is not a coward. But in the past, unfortunately the cowards became sannyasins and they gave a bad name to the whole spiritual regeneration of man.Cowards found it very rational that they were leaving the world because the world corrupts. But the world corrupts you only if you are corruptible, the world corrupts you because you are ready to be corrupted; in fact, you are hankering to be corrupted. If you are not ready to be corrupted, nothing can corrupt you.These cowards created a strange situation for future humanity – for you, for everybody. They created a kind of rift between the ordinary world and themselves. They were spiritual beings because they left the ordinary mundane marketplace and moved to the Himalayas or to the forests or to some desert. But they were really moving away from a situation of which they were afraid. They knew that if they remained in the world they were going to be corrupted. They were fully aware of their tendencies: their desires, their lust, their greed, their anger, their violence. They were fully aware of the whole range of things that corrupt your spirituality, that bring you down, deep into the mud.But just escaping from reality does not transform you. You may live for thirty years in the Himalayas, but if you come back to the world, you will find yourself the same man, with the same greed, with the same ambition, with the same anger, with the same lust. Perhaps in those thirty years you will have gathered much of everything that made you afraid. You are more cerebrally sexual than you were before, because thirty years of repression is going to collect the sexual energy and the sexual dreams and the sexual mind. It will become such a great force that it will be beyond you. It is going to drive you insane. And the same is true about all that is ugly – the greed, the desire for power, domination, anger, violence.Remember one thing always: whatever any man has ever done, you are also capable of it. If somebody has murdered, never think that you are not capable of doing it. If somebody has committed suicide, never think for a single moment that you are incapable of doing it. If somebody has gone mad, don’t feel good that you have not gone mad – you are also carrying the same possibility.But as we all have the possibilities for evil, so we have the possibilities of becoming a Gautam Buddha. If one man was capable of becoming a buddha, an awakened one, every man from that very moment should remember he is capable of the same. But unfortunately, in the past, being a sannyasin became almost synonymous with renouncing the world. It was a very ugly and unfortunate association.My whole effort is for you to remember that you have to become a lotus flower, not a coward. You have to live in the world, yet live in such a way that you remain untouched. If everybody starts renouncing the world, where will you go? If everybody goes to the Himalayas, then buses will be reaching there – tea shops, restaurants will be needed. The whole marketplace will be there. And for all these people you will need a movie house too, and television sets and transistors. Every sannyasin having his own transistor in his ear, deep in the Himalayas. It will be simply stupid. The whole idea is wrong. Where can you escape to if everybody goes there?You can see it happening in the West. On every weekend, on every beach, there is not a single inch of space. All kinds of ugly bodies filling the whole beautiful beach and they are doing the same things they were doing at home: they are lying down and reading the same newspaper, looking at the same Playboy, listening to the same radio. And they have been driving for eight hours, bumper to bumper – tortured, irritated, annoyed.It is very difficult for a driver not to be angry. If you can drive without any anger – particularly in America – you are a saint. Just a few days ago, I heard that people have started carrying guns in their cars because there is too much traffic and horns don’t help. Just a few weeks ago, six people were shot dead just because there is a limit to patience. You go on honking the horn and the person ahead does not listen, but he is not responsible because there is somebody ahead of him who is not listening. Thousands of cars, and the speed has gone back to the primitive age. Now a bullock cart in India goes faster than the best car does in America. You can walk, and you will reach your destination earlier than if you were driving.People became so angry that six people were shot with no enmity – they were strangers. And there is a fear that this will spread. Last week, the news came to me that just in the last three weeks, millions of people have purchased guns. It has been the all-time biggest sale of guns. The government has relaxed the rules, has become very lenient. At first it was taking care to whom it gave a license. Now it is not much of a problem at all; anybody can get a gun if he has the money. And millions of people have purchased guns. They are carrying their guns perfectly visible to the other drivers – listen to the honk, otherwise…Great traffic, and where are you going? To the sea beach – for what? To be alone? For once at least, to be alone, at the weekend to lie down on the sea beach and to rest and relax – with the gun. Eight or twelve hours’ driving and then one hour’s rest in that ugly crowd – then back home, twelve hours’ driving.In the whole world more accidents happen on weekends than on any working day. More people are murdered on weekends than on any other day. More people commit suicide on weekends than any other day. Working days are more peaceful. But what is the problem: is everybody renouncing the world and going to the beach…?It is good that people have not become renouncers. They have listened to all kinds of teaching. A few crazy people went to the monasteries, a few crazy people went to the Himalayas, but only a very small minority. Most of the people simply felt a little guilty, and to cover that guilt they worship those people who have renounced the world.But I don’t teach you renouncing the world. I teach you rejoicing in the world. This is an absolutely new method, a new definition of sannyas: not renunciation, but rejoicing, and still remaining beyond everything that surrounds you. This is your true spiritual birth.You are pregnant with your own potential. You are pregnant with your own new life, new birth. This is going to happen to everybody. It is something to feel blessed about. It is something to sing and dance about, and celebrate.Osho,Being your sannyasin has given me the sense of freedom of not belonging to any particular place, country or even nationality. It's really great. I've felt able to move about without much fear and to be committed without feeling imprisoned. Why then, after nine years, do I feel a bitter sadness mixed with this sense of freedom?Freedom has two sides and if you have only one side of it, a single side, you will feel freedom mixed with sadness. So you have to understand the whole psychology of freedom.The first side is freedom from: from nationality, from a certain church, from a certain race, from a certain political ideology. This is the first part of freedom, the foundation of freedom. It is always from something. Once you have attained this freedom, you will feel very light and very good and very happy. For the first time you will start rejoicing in your own individuality, because your individuality was covered with all those things that you have become free of.But this is only one half and then sadness will come because the other half is missing. Freedom from is fulfilled, but freedom for what? Freedom in itself has no meaning unless it is freedom for something, something creative – freedom to sculpt, freedom to dance, freedom to create music, poetry, painting. Unless your freedom turns into a creative realization, you will feel sad. You will see that you are free: your chains are broken, you no longer have any handcuffs, you no longer have any chains, you don’t have any prison, you are standing under the starry night, completely free – but where to go? Then comes a sudden sadness. What path to choose?Up to now there was no question of going anywhere – you were imprisoned. Your whole consciousness was concentrated on how to get free, your only anxiety was how to get free. Now that you are free, a new kind of problem has to be encountered. What to do now that you are free?Just freedom in itself does not mean anything, unless you choose a creative path. Either you go deeper into meditation for self-realization – that’s what I was talking about: unless you become pregnant – or if you have a certain kind of talent that has not been allowed to develop because of your fetters… You could not compose music because your hands were in chains, you could not dance because your feet were in chains. If you have a talent to be a dancer, then be a dancer. Then your freedom is complete, then the circle is complete.Freedom from and freedom for – this is not something new that you are facing. It is being faced by every person who struggles first for freedom and then suddenly finds, “Now that I am free, what am I going to do?” Up to now, he was so occupied, so engaged, so very busy. Even in his dreams he was thinking only of freedom. He never thought about what he was going to do when he achieved freedom.What has happened is beautiful, but something more is needed. You have to become a creator. You have to find some creativity that fulfills your freedom, otherwise the freedom is empty. You need either to create something or to discover something. Either bring your potential to actuality or go inward to find yourself – but do something with your freedom.Freedom is only an opportunity. It is not in itself the goal. It simply gives you the whole opportunity to do whatever you want to do. Now you are free and you are feeling sad because you have not used this opportunity yet. Meditation will do, music will do, sculpture will do, dancing will do, love will do. But do something with your freedom. Just don’t sit with your freedom, otherwise you will become sad.Freedom has to be a creative force in your life, not just a negative kind of freedom. The first part is negative: it is simply getting rid of the prison, it is getting rid of the chains. That you have done: now you are standing underneath the sky, completely lost.Perhaps you have never realized that the imprisoned person has a certain reason for remaining imprisoned. That’s why millions of people in the world remain prisoners of religion, of caste, creed, nation, color. They go on tolerating all kinds of prisons – not without reason. Their reason is that when they are imprisoned they don’t have any responsibility, they don’t have to be creators, they don’t have to find some positivity in their freedom. It is enough for them to remain imprisoned because then others will go on taking care.Why are people Hindus? Why are people Mohammedans? Why are people Christians? – because Jesus will take care. You need not be worried. All that you have to be is just a slave of the Christian church and then the Christian church will take care of all your sins, of all that is needed. One feels absolutely unburdened with responsibility – no responsibility.But remember one thing fundamental to the whole question of freedom: responsibility and freedom are together. If you don’t want to have responsibility, you can’t have freedom either. They both come together or they both go together. If you leave responsibility, you have to accept slavery in some way or other.Now, you had dreamed about freedom without ever thinking of the great responsibility that will follow. Freedom you have, but you have not fulfilled the responsibility; hence, a sadness lingers around you. You are absolutely capable of destroying this sadness. If you were capable of destroying your slavery, your chains, you are certainly capable of being creative. If you were able to destroy prisons, you can certainly make, create, something beautiful.My own experience is: unless you become a creator in some way, your life will remain empty and sad. The only blissful people are the creators. It may be simply the creation of more consciousness, more experience of sat-chit-anand, more truth, more consciousness, more bliss. It may be simply an inner world of creativity or it may be something outer. But freedom has to become responsible, positive.Your freedom is still negative. It is good that you are out of the prison, but it is not enough. Now you have to earn your bread. Up to now, they were supplying the bread. With the chains, they were supplying you a shelter, they were giving you clothes.In American jails I asked many prisoners who were with me, “How long have you been here?” One young man was with me in the first prison. I asked him how long he had been in, because he was not more than twenty-five.He said, “I was twelve when I was first brought to prison for selling drugs. But in prison, I found that I am free of all responsibility. Everything is supplied, medical care is available. No problem, no worries about tomorrow – from where the bread will be coming tomorrow. There is no worry. So since then, I have been coming again and again back to the prison. When they release me, I commit some small crime and I am back. And I love the place and I love the people. The first time I was afraid, but soon I found this is a better home.”This is how people become jailbirds. He was absolutely happy. Everybody knew him – the doctor, the nurses, the jailer – and he was a nice person. He was very interested in health. I watched him because there was nothing else except him to watch. As many times as he would find time from television… Otherwise, he was sitting in front of the television, and even while watching the television he started doing pushups.He was known as “the prince” by the other prisoners because he was a nice person – no bad habits, nothing. He just found that the jail seems to be the most simple way of living. And I asked the nurses, “Why do you call him ‘the prince’?”They said, “He wants the best clothes, and he fights for them and he gets them – because he is known to everybody. He wants the best food. He wants everything that is available for the prisoners. He does not allow anybody else to be his partner in the cell, because he has so many of his own things. One bed is for sleeping in and on the other bed he has all kinds of things.“He leaves those things with the nurses when he has to go out of the jail. He says, ‘I will be coming back, within a week at the most, so keep my things as I will be coming.’ And within a week he is back, and the magistrates know and everybody knows that he will be coming back – there is no point to it.”Even the doctor told me, “There is no point in sending him out because he comes back hungry, with dirty clothes. Nobody gives him a job, nobody gives him any employment. Again he becomes a street person. Here, he is the healthiest prisoner because he does so much exercise the whole day.”Even while looking at the television, he was also doing exercises. And he slept without any anxiety for tomorrow, as everything would be available the next morning.So many people inside the churches, inside synagogues, inside temples, attending mass… Almost everybody is a member of a religion, a member of a nation, a member of a family, a member of an association, a political party, Rotary Club, Lions Club. People go on finding more and more chains. It seems to be very cozy. You have so much protection and no responsibility.Freedom means you will have to be responsible for every act, for every breath; whatever you do or don’t do, you will be responsible.People are really in deep fear of freedom, although they talk about freedom. But my own experience is that very few people really want freedom because they are subconsciously aware that freedom will bring many problems that they are not ready to encounter. It is better to remain in a cozy imprisonment. It is warmer, and what will you do with freedom? Unless you are ready to be a seeker, a searcher, a creator… Very few people want to go on a pilgrimage or to go into deeper silences of the heart, or to take the responsibility of love. The implications are great.You will have to dispel that darkness, otherwise sooner or later you will enter some prison. You cannot go on burdening yourself with sadness. Before the burden becomes too much and forces you back into some slavery, into some imprisonment, change the whole situation by being a creative person. Just find out what is your joy in life, what you would like to create, what you would like to be, what you want to be your definition.Freedom is simply an opportunity to find a definition for yourself, a true, authentic individuality, and a joy in making the world around you a little better, a little more beautiful – a few more roses, a little more greenery, a few more oases.I am reminded of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society. She used to carry two bags in her hands, always. Either going for a morning walk or traveling in a train – those two bags were always in her hands. And she was throwing something out of those bags – from the window while sitting in the train – onto the footpath outside, by the side of the train. People used to ask, “Why do you go on doing this?”She laughed and said, “This has been my whole life’s habit. These are seasonal flower seeds. I may not come back on this route again” – she was a world traveler – “but that does not matter. When the season comes and the flowers blossom, thousands of people who pass every day in this line of railway trains will see those flowers, those colors. They will not know me. That does not matter.“One thing is certain: I am making a few people happy somewhere. That much I know. It does not matter whether they know it or not. What matters is that I have been doing something which will make somebody happy. Some children may come and pluck a few flowers and go home. Some lovers may come and make garlands for each other. And without their knowing, I will be part of their love. And I will be part of the joy of the children. And I will be part of those who will be simply passing by the path, seeing the beautiful flowers.”A man who understands that freedom is nothing but an opportunity to make the world a little more beautiful, and to make himself a little more conscious, will not find himself sad.It is good that you asked because if you had not asked, you might have carried this sadness which would slowly have poisoned your very freedom. A negative freedom is not very substantial, it can disappear. A freedom has to become positive.Osho,Is it true that women really think differently from men? Or is it just superstition?It is not just superstition. And it is beautiful that it is not a superstition. The world needs the variety. Just think – a world where only men exist or a world where only women exist will be a poor world, very poor. Man and woman are polarities. It is between them that the world becomes colorful, beautiful.Yes, there are problems too. Flowers don’t come alone, they come with their thorns also. Days don’t come alone, they bring their nights with them. Existence believes in polarities. It functions by what Karl Marx has called “the dialectic.” The very process of evolution is dialectical. It is between the polarities that the whole of existence develops.The woman is more intuitive, more instinctive. If she is not a meditator, she will be only instinctive. She thinks with her body. She is more rooted in the body than man, she is more aware of her body than man; and the body is our whole experience of the past evolution of millions of years. Man is more in the mind, more intellectual. But intellect is a very late development. While instinct is very ancient and very deep, intellect is very superficial and very new, very childish.If man becomes meditative, he will find it more difficult to get rid of the intellect, because his whole education and upbringing is based in the mind, in the intellect – and to be a meditator, he has to drop all that he knows. The woman can become more easily a meditator because the jump from instinct to intuition is very simple. The jump from intellect to intuition is very difficult. But unfortunately, through the centuries the woman has not been allowed to participate in the world of meditation. She has, in fact, been rejected by almost all religions. The reason is clear: all religions were against the body, and the woman is body-oriented. Rejecting the woman, they were really rejecting the body orientation. They were all against the body. All their religious ideologies were intellectual.And certainly the woman cannot participate easily in intellectual activities. She feels bored, she thinks, “What nonsense does man go on talking about when there are so many juicy things happening?”Man thinks the woman is good for just being used for her sexual body. But she is not good for any intellectual conversation, or any philosophical conversation. Men and women both know that the other is a little off the wall; they both agree on that point.I have heard it said that man was made before woman to give him time to think of an answer to her first question.Mendel Kravitz is stark naked in front of the open window doing his morning exercises. His wife enters the room and calls out, “Mendel, you idiot! Draw those curtains. I don’t want the neighbors to think that I married you for your money.”Absolutely a different logic – that man may not have thought about it.The priest with a reputation for his sermons on hellfire was leaving the neighborhood.One old lady comes up to him and says, “I am sorry you are leaving, Father. We never knew what sin was until you came.”A handsome tomcat had just moved into the neighborhood, and all the other cats were very interested. One of them has the first date. “Well,” they all cry the next morning, “how did you get on?”“A completely wasted evening,” replies the pretty cat. “All he could talk about was his operation.”There is certainly a great difference between man’s and woman’s ways of thinking, looking at things. But it makes life juicier, spicier. The world needs all kinds of musical instruments to create an orchestra. Just one kind of musical instrument will be really boring. The woman has not been respected in the past. That has kept the world in many ways poor, because the woman has not been allowed to express her way of looking at things.She has been forced to think like man, to behave like man, to be just a shadow of man, but not to be herself. This was something absolutely ugly and to be condemned. I condemn it unconditionally. The woman should be allowed her way. She has not to be a carbon copy of man, she has not to think like the man. She has to think like herself, she has to be herself, and this will give the world a greater polarity.And the further apart the individualities of man and woman are, the deeper will be the attraction between them. They should be strangers to each other – only then can they fall in love with each other. They should remain forever mysteries to each other. Only then can their love be a joy, a continuous discovery.But the woman has been crushed. Her mysteries have been crushed. She has been used only as a production factory – not given the human rights which are basic. And that has made the world boring, ugly. Man has dominated to such an extent that the whole history is filled only with wars. If the woman had been allowed as much equality of opportunity for growth, the world would not have seen so many wars. In every war it is man who is killed, but it is woman who suffers.It is easy to be killed, it is far more difficult to suffer. The mother suffers for her sons who are killed. The wife suffers when her loved ones are killed. The sister suffers when her brothers are killed. And their agony is going to last for their whole life. For those who are killed, it is a very small thing. It happens within seconds – and you are gone. But for centuries the woman has been just suffering.No woman wants war because she is the ultimate victim, not man. It is man who creates war, it is man who fights war, but it is the woman who suffers. The woman is half of the world. If this half of the world had also been allowed to have its say, history would have been different. It would have been more peaceful, more loving, more sensitive, more aesthetic. There is still time to allow woman to be purely herself, unpolluted, unimpressed by man. And we will have a better world and a better humanity.It is not unfortunate that they think differently. It is immensely significant and something to be deeply rejoiced in. But the woman needs her whole freedom. The world has lived under man’s domination too long. It is time that woman had her share in participating in everything that is happening in the world. She has to contribute her part, which is going to be different from man’s part.And it will create a more harmonious whole than we have been able to create up to now. It has been a half circle. It has to be made a full circle. Life has to become total – man and woman together, contributing to the world all that they are born with: their different potentials, their different languages, their different ways of thinking, seeing, being.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 15 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,What is the generation gap?The generation gap is a very new thing in the world. Just half a century ago, nobody had even heard the term generation gap. Man has been here for thousands of years, but no society, no culture, no civilization was bothered about the generation gap. So, a few things have to be understood: how it came into existence, what it is, and what its final implications are.In the past, by the age of six or seven at the most, children used to follow their fathers’ professions, whatever it was, and howsoever little they could help… If the father was a carpenter, the boy would try to bring wood, to help him in his own little way. And this was the only way that was available for the child to learn.Always the older generation was the wiser generation. Just being old was enough to be wise, because knowing came only through one door – and that was experience. But experience needs time. Obviously the children were so new they did not have enough time to compete with the older generation. The older generation knew much more about everything – it had lived longer. That was the only measurement.Those who had lived a long time became more and more respected because they were more experienced. They knew more things than others. This created the phenomenon of respect for the old. So whatever the older people were saying was bound to be right. There was no hesitation, there was no question, there was no doubt in the minds of the younger people. They believed in the older generation’s religion, they believed in the older generation’s superstitions, they believed in everything that the older generation was handing over to them.The generation gap was not there, the generations overlapped. Before retiring, the older generation prepared the newer generation to take over the work. So there was an overlapping time of twenty years, thirty years, in which the younger generation was working under the older. And the older generation had all the power, all the prestige, and it molded the new generation according to its own ideals, morality, manners, etiquette.There was no opportunity for the youth to declare their individuality. They were part and parcel of the older generation. They had come out of the womb of the mother, but they never came out of the womb of the older generation. By the time the older generation was retiring, becoming very old or dying, they became individuals. But by that time they themselves were old and they had to take care of the new generation that had come into being. So it was a very deeply connected world.How did the generation gap come into being? It is dependent on many factors. Scientific progress has given people time for their children to be educated in the schools, colleges, universities. Now a new door has opened for learning. In the whole past there was only one possibility to learn and that was from the older generation. Now a new door has opened for learning, fast learning.Experience moves at a very slow pace, but education depends on your intelligence. You don’t have to depend on the pace at which education is moving. And during these twenty-five years of education, you are no longer under the control of your parents, of your society, of your priests.In these twenty-five years you have no responsibility, you are not married. In the past, marriage used to happen too early – seven years, eight years, ten years, was old enough to get married. A ten-year-old boy gets married to a seven-year-old girl, and with the phenomenon of marriage comes a tremendous responsibility – they have almost become adults.In other words, what I want to say is that in the past there has never been anything like youth. From children, people became adults. Youth was missing. Youth is a new phenomenon, the younger generation is a new phenomenon. It is a by-product of scientific progress. Scientific progress has given us so much technology and children are allowed to have many years in the universities to learn.Secondly, when there was no science – and it was not long ago, just three hundred years – nothing was changing. Everything was as it had always been. The bullock cart had been there for centuries. It was still the only vehicle. So the older generation knew everything because everything was old.With scientific progress the world of great books has completely disappeared. And progress is going faster and faster, so fast that scientists no longer write big books out of fear that if you write a big book, by the time it is completed it will be out of date; scientists are simply writing papers in the periodicals.It was perfectly good for Charles Darwin to take thirty years to write a single book. Now it would simply be stupidity. By the time you are finished, all that you have written is wrong. Science has gone further, and the speed of science is so great that you cannot write with the same speed.And science has developed into such a huge tree, with so many branches, that now to call anyone just a scientist is not right. It does not give you the right definition. He may be a physicist, he may be a chemist, he may be a mathematician. And the branches go on dividing into new branches. Now there is a new chemistry which has its own independent world – biochemistry.Mathematics is no longer just one science. The old mathematics which is used in the ordinary world is no longer relevant for nuclear physics. It needs a new mathematics. So there are new mathematicians. The theorems of Euclidean geometry are no longer relevant. Now there is a totally new science opposing them, non-Euclidean geometry, which does not believe in any definitions of Euclid. For two thousand years Euclid was valid.For two thousand years Aristotle’s logic was the only logic. It is no longer the case. There is non-Aristotelian logic, there is non-Euclidean geometry, and every day sciences go on growing into different dimensions. And each dimension is so vast that the man who knows nuclear physics may not be aware at all of what chemistry is doing, or what is happening in the world of biology, or what is happening in the world of medical science. The scientist is no longer a man working alone, but only a specialist. Because of this specialization, things are moving very fast. Everybody has taken a small part and is developing it to its ultimate end.When the student comes back home after five years at the university, he knows more than the older generation. That is the problem, that is what is creating the generation gap. To him, even his own parents look foolish, out of date, knowing nothing. This has taken away the respect that was taken for granted in the past. You cannot respect someone who looks to you completely out of date, out of tune, who does not know what has happened in the last twenty-five years.The growth and the pace of growth is such that what before did not happen in twenty-five centuries now happens in twenty-five years. Naturally, a tremendous gap between the older and the newer generation is bound to happen. It is inevitable. The newer generation knows more, for the first time in the history of man, than the older generation.If a student is intelligent enough, he can know more than the professors. He just has to spend more time in the library and be acquainted with the latest developments. The professor is already twenty years behind. All the professors, all the teachers, all the parents, all together are complaining of one thing: the newer generation is not respectful toward them. But they can’t see one simple thing: the whole reason for respect has disappeared. You have to accept it, there is no other way. The person who knows more cannot respect the people who don’t know that much.And this gap is widening. It has stopped the communication between the older generation and the newer generation because conversation is so difficult. The parents have their own egos. They are not going to sit at the feet of their own children and learn from them. The children have their own egos, they know more: why should they sit at the feet of their parents and learn from them things which have proved to be completely wrong? They almost speak different languages. The influence of the older generation on the newer generation has completely gone. The relationship has become more and more formal. It is just a remnant of the past, but its substance, its soul, is dead. And this is going to happen more and more because every day science is developing with greater speed in all dimensions.Specialization is a new thing in the world. In the past, you used to have a family doctor. Now you cannot have one because there are all kinds of specialists. The family doctor used to treat you as a whole organism, but now you have been divided into parts because each part is so detailed that a person goes on researching it his whole life, and yet he does not come to the end. So there are specialists who will be only taking care of your eyes. To you, eyes look small, but once you enter the world of specialization, the eyes have their own whole world. It is not a small thing, it is a very complicated phenomenon. There is a specialist who understands the brain. There is the specialist who takes care of your skin. Dermatology in itself is such a big science that there is no time for the person to think of other things. Somebody takes care of your ears, somebody takes care of your tuberculosis, somebody takes care of your cancer.You can’t have a single person taking care of you anymore, because there is no such thing as a physician, just purely a physician. In fact, there are only consultants who direct you… Their whole work is to direct you to the specialist you should see, because specialization has gone to such minute detail that you need a consultant to decide to which specialist you should go. Your body is no longer taken as a whole organism, it has been dissected.Science dissects everything into segments because each segment is so big that the whole body cannot be understood by one man alone. So when a student specializing in eyes comes home, he is not going to listen to his father’s or mother’s old recipes for cures for the eyes. He knows so much more that they seem simply ignorant and their recipes simply foolish, superstitious.The older generation will have to learn one thing: to no longer expect respect. On the contrary, if you want to be still respected, give respect to your own children. This advice is meaningful only because of this generation gap. In the past it would have been meaningless. The older generation used to give love and the younger generation used to give respect. That was a settled thing for thousands of years. Now everything is unsettled; it is a chaos. And because the older generation is not getting the respect, they are withdrawing their love. The whole communication, the old relationship, is on the rocks. The new generation is still expected to respect, to listen, to follow – which is impossible.In fact, the older generation will have to listen now and will have to give respect to the new people. And only if the older generation is humble enough to give respect to their own children, will the children perhaps be able to give respect. There is no other possibility. All communication lines are broken because they speak different languages. And it is not their fault, it is simply the situation.“I never slept with a man before I slept with your father,” declares the stern mother to her wild daughter. “Will you be able to say the same thing to your daughter?”“Yes,” replies the girl, “but not with such a straight face!”“Just look at me!” declares old man Rubenstein. “I don’t smoke, drink or chase women, and tomorrow I will celebrate my eightieth birthday.”“You will?” asked his son curiously. “How? You neither smoke, nor drink, nor chase women. How are you going to celebrate?”All lines of communication are completely blocked, but what old people are doing – condemning the new generation – is wrong. I can see the reason why things have changed. The new generation is not responsible. It is not their crime. It is simply a totally different set of circumstances. The older generation should show a little more understanding, a little more clarity, a little more readiness to listen to the new generation because they are the future. In the past, the past used to rule the future. Now things are otherwise; the future is going to rule over everything.I have been a teacher and I have attended conferences of professors of the universities. The whole problem to them was how to create discipline, how to create respect. The students were getting out of hand, no discipline, no respect. I was the only exception. Because I said to them “The whole responsibility is yours” they finally started dropping me from their conferences.In the past, there were children who were married before they were ten. Sometimes children were even married when they were still in their mother’s womb. Just two friends would decide: “As our wives are pregnant, if one gives birth to a boy and the other gives birth to a girl, then the marriage is settled, promised.” The question of asking the boy and the girl did not arise at all. They were not even born yet. And for the parents there was no certainty: both might be girls, both might be boys. But if one was a boy and another was a girl, the marriage was settled. And people kept their word, their promises.My own mother was married when she was seven years old. Her parents had to tie her to a pillar inside the house when the marriage party was coming and there were fireworks. At the reception there was music and dance, and everybody was out of the house.My mother still reminds me, “I could not understand why only I was left inside the house and tied! They wouldn’t let me go out.” She had no understanding what marriage was. Like any child, she wanted to see all the beautiful things happening outside – the whole village had gathered, and she was crying.My father was not more than ten years old, and he had no understanding of what was happening. I used to ask him, “What was the most significant thing that you enjoyed at your wedding?”He said, “Riding on the horse.”Naturally, for the first time he was dressed like a king, with a knife hanging by his side, and he was sitting on the horse, and everybody was walking around him. He enjoyed it tremendously. That was the most important thing that he enjoyed at his wedding.A honeymoon was out of the question. Where will you send a ten-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl for a honeymoon? So in India the honeymoon never used to exist and, in the past, nowhere else in the world either.When my father was ten years old and my mother was seven years old, my father’s mother died. After the marriage, perhaps one or two years afterward, the whole responsibility fell on my mother, who was only nine years old. My father’s mother had left two small daughters and two small boys. So four children – and the responsibility on a nine-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old son. My grandfather never liked to live in the city where he had his shop. He loved the countryside. He had his own beautiful horse. When his wife died he was absolutely free.You will not believe it, but in his time – and it is not long ago – the government used to give land to people for free because there was a lot of land but not so many people to cultivate it. So my grandfather got fifty acres of land free from the government. He loved living sixteen miles away from the city where he had left the whole shop in the hands of his children – my father and mother – who were only twelve and nine years old. He enjoyed creating a garden, creating a farm, and he loved to live there in the open air. He hated the city.Now, how can you think that there could be a generation gap? My father never had any experience of the freedom of young people of today. He was never young in that way. Before he could be young, he was already old, taking care of his younger brothers and sisters and the shop. And by the time he was twenty he had to arrange marriages for his sisters, marriages and education for his brothers.I have never called my mother mother because before I was born she was taking care of four children who used to call her bhabhi. Bhabhi means “brother’s wife.” Because four children were already calling my mother bhabhi, I also started calling her bhabhi. Even today I call her bhabhi, but she is my mother, not my brother’s wife. They have tried hard to make me change, but it comes so natural to me to call her bhabhi. All my brothers and sisters call her mother. Only I am crazy enough to call her bhabhi. But I learned it from the very beginning, when four other children…And then I had a rapport with my uncles and with my father’s sisters, a friendliness. They were a little older than me, but there was not much distance. I never thought of respect; they never thought of receiving respect. They loved me, I loved them.It was a totally different world just seventy years ago. Generations were overlapping, and there used to be no youth. Now youth has come into existence and it will be growing bigger because as machines are going to take more and more jobs in the factories, in the offices, what are you going to do with people? They cannot be left doing nothing, otherwise they will do something absurd, something irrational, something insane. They will go mad. So you have to extend the period of their education. From twenty-five, soon it will be thirty-five. Then you will have to give them only a very small period of employment.My own understanding is that there is going to be a second layer of university. After ten years of work, not more than that, you will be retired. By the time you are forty-five, you are retired. The best way will be to have another university that begins at the age of forty-five. It will be good, beneficial to the world, because knowledge will expand with such tremendous speed. But it will be very difficult as far as human relationships are concerned. They change with small things. You may not even think…For example, in the past when there were no cars, it was impossible to fall in love with a girl who did not live in your own neighborhood. And then too it was very difficult because all the neighbors knew you, all the neighbors knew the girl, all the neighbors knew your parents, the girl’s parents. Immediately you would be reported. You could not go far away. The moment the car came into existence and was put into the hands of the young people, love became a tremendous phenomenon.Now taking your girl to any faraway place where nobody knows you, nobody knows the girl, nobody is going to complain to your parents, has become very easy. It has also become very easy to take out a different girl every day because the first girl will never know where you have gone. The car has managed a totally new world of love affairs. The inventors of the car never thought that it would change the whole structure of society.In America, the average person lives in one city for not more than three years, remains in one job for not more than three years, remains in one marriage for not more than three years. Strange, but things are changing so fast. When you change your job, it is not only the job that changes. You have to change the city, the place you live in, the house. You become acquainted with new secretaries, new typists. You were getting fed up with the old ones, but the new ones bring new life to you.One of my attorneys was going to come this week but then he informed me, “I am sorry, I will not be able to come because my wife is divorcing me, so I am going through the process of divorce. And I will end up almost a pauper because she is a powerful woman. Everything is in her name – the house, the car – so once we are divorced, I am on the streets. She is going to take everything. And living with her has become so difficult that I would prefer to be on the streets than continue living with her. The person who is going to marry her I think of as my best friend, because he is taking on the whole responsibility, not realizing what is going to happen to him soon.”In the past people lived in one village their whole lives. Perhaps they went once in a while to the nearby town or city. But even today in India there are millions of people who have not seen a railway train because they have never gone that far from their small village. They are perfectly satisfied in their village. They are poor, but they don’t have the longing to go anywhere. They have a small piece of land and they are too attached to it – they cannot leave it.America is continuously on the move. It is the car that keeps people moving. When I was in America I wanted to see trains, but I could not see any. Five years I was there. I inquired, “I don’t see any railway trains. I never come across railway crossings.” I was informed that most of the people fly. The remaining ones who enjoy traveling use their cars. Trains are almost old-fashioned. It takes seven days for a train to cross America. Who is going to waste seven days in a train? The distance can be covered by plane within two hours. You can have your supper in London, your lunch in Mumbai, your coffee break in Tokyo, your supper in New York.With this speed, there are bound to be many implications; old ties cannot remain. So people have their girlfriends all around the world. It was not possible in the past to have a girlfriend if you were married. Even if you were not married, then too it was not possible to have a girlfriend. It was against the older generation’s morality. They never gave you the chance. Before you could even think of any girl, you were married. Marriage came almost naturally. Just as you got your sister, your brother, you got your wife. Before you became aware what was happening, you were already caught. There was no question of choice.There is a certain human psychology. If you are living, for example, with your sisters, with your brothers, you simply love them. Not that they are very beautiful or something unique. They are just your sisters, they are your brothers, and you have lived so long together that a liking naturally arises. In the past, love had no existence, it was only liking. You lived together with your wife for years before you could make love to her, and a certain liking… There was no alternative, so you were almost in chains.You could not have any friendship with any woman. That was prohibited. Your only possible relationship was with your own wife, and that, too, deep in the darkness of the night when everybody was asleep. You could not even whisper. Somebody might wake up because families were extended families with fifty people, forty people living under one roof.It was good in a way because you never saw the woman, her whole topography. You never saw the man. Everything was happening in the dark. You never got fed up. Now everything is happening under electric light and there are idiots who even have cameras fixed in their bedroom to take pictures of what kind of stupidity they are doing, so later on they can enjoy them in their photo album.Small things make such long-lasting and deep changes in life that one is not aware that this is going to happen. The new generation is going to have a greater future and, for the first time, the older generation has to learn to be humble, loving. Perhaps if they are humble and loving they may still be respected for their love and for their humbleness, and there may continue a certain communication. But they have to understand clearly that they represent the past and the new generation represents the future – and the gap is large.If they go on sticking to their ideologies and to their churches and to their superstitions, the gap will become bigger. It looks strange to learn from your own children, but I don’t think it is strange – just the situation has changed. For thousands of years, children have learned from you. Now it is time to have a change. Start learning from your children. Start looking at the world through the eyes of your children, and the gap will disappear. But the gap will disappear only if the older generation changes its attitudes. It is not going to disappear the way they are behaving all over the world.They are trying to force the new generation to go according to them, as they have always been going. But they don’t see that the whole world has changed. Nothing is anymore the same. New things have brought new possibilities. The inventors had no idea what their inventions would do, but small things can have a tremendous effect. The world cannot be the old way again. People cannot leave all the facilities, comforts and luxuries that technology and science have given to them.So the gap is going to become bigger and bigger, unless the older generation proves more prudent. Now is the time to prove that you are really wise. Up to now, it was just taken for granted. This is the challenge to the older generation to behave wisely and intelligently. Then the gap can be bridged. But it will be bridged from the side of the older generation, not the younger generation.Osho,When I see you, sometimes I see a twinkle of childlike innocence, a warmth that I call love. And sometimes I see a vast emptiness, as cool and crystal clear and impersonal as the night sky. Are both these qualities in you? Are both these qualities in me? It seems impossible but true.You have stumbled on a very significant truth. The childlike innocence and the warmth of love that you see are not contradictory to “…a vast emptiness as cool and crystal clear and impersonal as the night sky.” In fact, they are both sides of the same coin. If you become childlike, innocent, there will be a warmth and love in you. But on the other side of the coin, you will be just like the cool, impersonal nothingness, just like a starry night.Both these things happen together. The first happens – the coolness, the nothingness – and then the innocence of the child brings the warmth. But it is always difficult for the intellect to figure it out when it sees something which appears to be the opposite.For example, if you dig up the roots of a rosebush, you cannot conceive that these roots are connected with the roseflowers. The roots are ugly. There seems to be no likeness in any way possible between the roseflowers and the roots. But the roots are giving all the juice and life to the roseflower. It is the roots which are giving the color, the liveliness, the warmth, the beauty to the roseflower. Life is full of such apparent opposites. This is your inner opposite: if inside you, you become as cool as the starry night – nothingness, impersonal – this will be your root; then your childlike innocence, warmth, love, will be your expression as a flower. They cannot exist separately.This is in me and these qualities are in you too. Once you have become aware of the phenomenon, it won’t take long for you to realize the same roots and the roses within you. Only when you experience it within you, will you be able to understand – not just intellectually, but existentially. But you have certainly stumbled on a tremendously great truth.You are saying, “It seems impossible but true.” Truth is impossible, but anyway it happens. It only appears impossible, but it is our very potential. Existence is so full of mysteries: never think in terms of impossibilities. Everything is possible. The impossible is only an idea of the mind.Can you understand how these green trees are growing upward, against gravitation? It is impossible. But they are managing perfectly well – all the trees of the world – and they have never thought about gravitation, they don’t care about it. Scientists have been very troubled that trees grow one hundred and fifty feet high. And not only the trees, but the juice, the water, has to go upward without any pumping system in the tree. How is it managing? You cannot take water one hundred and fifty feet high without an electric pump.But these trees have their own mystery, and it is so subtle that when scientists became aware of it they could not believe it: for millions of years these trees – ignorant, uneducated, not knowing anything of science – have been doing a miracle. The miracle is that on the top where every tree is searching for the sun… That is the trick: every tree is searching for the sun. So whenever the trees grow thick, the trees will also go higher. It is a competition. Whoever goes higher will survive longer.They are seeking the sun so the sun can evaporate water from their tops. And it is a connecting link; they function like blotting paper. When on the top the sun takes the water as vapor, the top becomes dry, the blotting paper becomes dry. It goes on taking the water from underneath and the second layer of blotting paper becomes dry. And because the second layer has become dry, it takes water from a lower one. In this way, for one hundred and fifty feet the tree goes on carrying its water without any pumping system. But it needs the sun, otherwise it will die.It is the sun against gravitation. The tree is managing a conspiracy against gravitation in combination with the sun. With the help of the sun it is going higher, taking juices from the roots. It has been found that roots have a certain sensitivity which even we don’t have. A few people have it. You must have heard of a few people who can just walk around and tell you where you will find water. But these people also take help from the trees, which you may not have noticed. They always carry a branch, a fresh branch cut from the tree, in their hands. The whole trick is that they carry the branch in their hands. Their hands are very sensitive. They don’t know anything about water, but the tree branch knows. So wherever the tree branch gives them a jerk – just so slight that you cannot see it, but they can feel the jerk – the tree branch is interested, there is water.They are deceiving people, they are trying to show that they are working a great miracle. It is not a miracle; it is a simple method the trees have been using. Wherever the water is, the branch is bound to move. And they have only to be sensitive to the branch, where it moves, which side, where it points. They will go round and round, again and again, at the same point, to make completely sure where the point is, where you will find water.It has been found that the roots of trees move hundreds of feet away just to find water. But how do they manage to know that a hundred feet south or north there is water and, strangely enough, even water in a water pipe, a hundred feet away? The tree roots are so sensitive toward water that although the water may be going through a pipe, they become aware of it. And it has been found that they break the pipe. They enter the pipe and they start drinking your water for their own purposes, sending it one hundred and fifty feet high. It is stealing, and they don’t pay any taxes! They don’t care about your water corporation. But they manage.In the commune in America we were living in a desert. Only one type of tree grows in that desert. That tree has learned ways to exist in the desert, it has adapted itself to desert life. As the camel is adapted to the desert, those trees are also adapted.Their whole strategy is – because they don’t have any water as far as their roots are concerned – to gather moisture from the air, particularly in the night when the desert becomes cool and there is moisture, humidity. From each leaf, from every branch, they suck in the moisture, and that is their only way of existence. They don’t use their roots because as far as the roots are concerned, it is pure desert; there is no water at all. But they learned a new method – just the opposite – of absorbing moisture through the leaves.Ordinary trees everywhere evaporate water from the leaves and suck water from the roots. But desert trees function in a totally opposite way. They don’t use their roots. They use their roots only to keep them standing, just as a support for them to stand – that’s all. It is sheer intelligence: in the night they will suck in all the moisture from the air –and they live perfectly well.It is a wrong idea that existence is unintelligent. It is more intelligent than you can think. Its whole functioning is full of intelligence and nothing is impossible. You just have to find the right way and then impossibles become possibles. Your mind is a little cowardly. Your mind wants things according to it, it wants everything in accordance with its own conditioning. That makes many things impossible. You have to learn not to force existence to be in accordance with you. That is the irreligious way, and you are not going to win.The religious way is to be humble and function according to existence. Be natural and let nature decide the course of your being. And nature is tremendously intelligent. It gives you birth, it gives you life, it gives you your intelligence. Unless it is an ocean of intelligence, from where can you get your intelligence? – which is small, certainly, in comparison to the universal intelligence.It is my experience that both these things come together. A silent nothingness, impersonal coolness… But remember not to hear me saying “coldness”; I am simply calling it “coolness.” Coldness is a totally different thing: coldness is a closedness. Coolness is not a closed experience. It is very lively, very open, a fresh breeze passing through you continuously. You are being renewed every moment – that’s why you are cool.And because you are impersonal, you are innocent. Otherwise you cannot be innocent. And because you are innocent and alive and fresh every moment, there comes a certain loving warmth in you which is unaddressed to anybody – just like a fragrance. Anybody can rejoice in it who is capable of being receptive.I want my people to make this impossible possible. When this impossible becomes possible, you will have the total existential understanding of sat-chit-anand, of truth, of consciousness, of bliss.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 16 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,When I was coming for discourse, my heart was trembling with fear; I felt as if I was going to die. Death seemed to be very close.Later in the discourse, I felt an infinite joy from some unknown source. Are these just two colors of love for you, or is it something else? Will you please comment?Death is always close by. It is almost like your shadow. You may be aware, you may not be aware, but it follows you from the first moment of your life to the very last moment. Death is a process just as life is a process, and they are almost together, like two wheels of a bullock cart. Life cannot exist without death; nor can death exist without life.Our minds have an insane desire: we want only life and not death. We don’t look at the existential truth, we always cling to our own insane desire. Any desire that goes against nature is insane. And this desire is in almost every living creature, not only human beings. Even the trees are afraid of death, but trees can be forgiven. They are not conscious beings, they are only unconscious – fast asleep.But you are a little bit awake: you can sense the presence of death. Hence the possibility opens for a deeper understanding: life and death are both together, two extremes of one energy. Life is the active force and death is the inactive force. Life is the positive electricity and death is the negative electricity, but they cannot be separated.You are saying, “When I was coming for discourse, my heart was trembling with fear; I felt as if I was going to die.” Those who are aware are aware that death is possible at any moment – the very next moment and you may be gone. This awareness is going to help you to live this moment as deeply as possible, because death can cut your roots without informing you, without any previous intimation of “I am coming.” It simply comes. You know only when it has happened. But it is not the greatest misery. The greatest misery is when there was the chance and the opportunity, you did not live – you went on postponing.Life is an opportunity. Death is the end of the rope. If you understand death, your life will become intense and total. But instead of understanding death, you become overwhelmed by it. Hence the heart starts trembling with fear. Fear is not going to help at all, fear is going to cloud your mind even more. There has never been any understanding out of fear.So whenever you feel fear, it is a tremendous opportunity to understand that life is momentary, it is ephemeral, it is made of the same stuff as dreams are made of. How real the dream looks when you are asleep – in fact, more real than your experiences when you are awake. You may have never thought about it, but while you are awake you can doubt: “Perhaps what I am seeing may be just a dream.” I may be a dream, you may be a dream, this whole communion may be happening just as a dream. Soon you will be awake and you will find, “My God! It was just a dream.”There is a possibility when you are awake to suspect, to doubt the reality that surrounds you. But when you are asleep, you cannot even doubt the existence of the dream. It is so real, it is more real than reality. Have you ever doubted any dream, thinking that perhaps what you are seeing is a dream? The moment you doubt, you are awake, and the dream is immediately finished. The dream can remain there only if you are totally asleep, so deep that no doubt, no suspicion, can arise in you.But to those who have understood both life and death as nothing but two aspects of one reality, the dream and the so-called reality of your waking consciousness are not basically different. Just as in the morning you wake up and the dream life is finished, one day in death you wake up into another reality and all that was real up to then – for seventy years – becomes just a dream. Not even a trace of it is left anywhere in your consciousness.Death is a constant reminder – “I can come any moment. Be prepared.” And what is the preparation? The preparation is: live life so totally, so intensely, be so aflame with it that when death comes there is no complaint, there is no grudge. You are absolutely ready because you have lived life so totally, you have known all its mysteries – there is no point in living anymore. Death has come exactly at the right time, when you may have thought to die yourself. I call that death perfect which comes at the moment when you yourself may have thought, “It is enough.”Death comes, and you understand that life has been lived totally, so now there is no point to go on breathing and go on waking and sleeping unnecessarily – because nothing new is going to happen. Now everything is past and there is no future. In such a moment, death is a welcome guest. And unless you are ready to welcome death, know well that you have missed life. Those who feel sadness and fear about death are the people who have missed the train. But in our unconsciousness, we are all continuously missing the train. The train is moving every moment, just in front of you, but somehow you go on missing.I have told you about those three professors, all belonging to the Department of Philosophy…They were talking, standing on the platform. They had come to send off one of them on a long journey. But they got so involved in their talking and discussions that the train left. It was only when the last compartment was moving just in front of them that all three became aware of it. They all ran. Two jumped into the compartment, one could not.An old man, a porter on the railway station, was watching the whole scene. And this man standing there was looking so sad that the old man said, “I can understand that you missed the train, but don’t be worried, because within two hours another train will be coming.”He said, “I am not worried about myself. I am worried about those two fellows who have entered the compartment. They had come to send me off…”But such was the rush – and everything had to be done so quickly.This is our state. It can happen to anybody, just because our actions arise out of our unconsciousness. Your heart trembling with fear is nothing but your misunderstanding. As far as death is concerned, what you experienced is true for everybody, every moment, until you die. It is not true only for those who are already dead. In one thing they are better off than you: they cannot die anymore – no fear, no trembling of the heart. They just lie down and rest in their graves. Nothing is going to happen to them anymore.But as long as you are alive, the possibility of death is absolutely certain. Only the timing is not certain. But the happening is absolutely certain. What does it matter whether you die after seven days or seven years or seventy years? One thing is certain: you are going to die. Life is not something that you can go on missing. Otherwise at the moment of death you will feel the greatest misery and pain, the deepest agony, from missing the whole opportunity that was given to you.Existence gives so abundantly, it is not miserly. You are just not alert enough to use the opportunity to transform yourself into something immortal, eternal, into some experience which will make you beyond the reach of death. Just fearing death is not of any help. If you see that death is following you, it is time to start searching deeper into yourself for that point which is beyond death. We have been calling that point sat-chit-anand: the truth of your being, the ultimate consciousness of your life, and the tremendous blessing of your coming to flower.You are also saying that as you sat in the discourse you felt “…an infinite joy from some unknown source.” There is nothing mysterious about it. You came to the discourse trembling, overwhelmed by the fear of death, and here you saw laughter and music and you became one with the commune. You forgot your tiny ego and its fear of dying. You fell into deep harmony with all who are present here. This harmony is the source of your joy, not any unknown source. This harmony is the source of your infinite joy, and this harmony is also the source of your deep feeling of love for me.It is not something unknown, it is something very clear, you just have to be a little more conscious. Then this clarity will give you all the clues to things that go on happening in your being, but you won’t know from where they come, where they are going. Everything seems to be a misunderstanding. But out of harmony, out of love, out of joy, arises understanding.One day a psychiatrist was invited by the local women’s club to give a talk about sex. He accepts the invitation, but because his wife is a bit of a prude, he tells her he is going to talk about fishing. The next day the psychiatrist’s wife happens to meet the sponsor of the talk in the local supermarket.“Your husband,” gushes the woman, “gave a splendid speech last night.”“I am surprised to hear that,” replies the wife. “After all, he has no experience in that area.”“Come on, now,” says the other woman blushing, “he seemed to know a great deal about the subject.”“Maybe,” replies the wife, “but he only tried it twice. The first time he threw up after eating what he caught and the second time he lost his rod!”But that kind of misunderstanding goes on. You have to be a little more clear.Osho,Again I feel this fear inside me: the fear of connecting with you really deeply; the fear of falling apart, and then not being able to function anymore in this world; the fear of being helpless and absolutely vulnerable.What to do? My mind is already set that enlightenment is not going to happen to me before the death of my body. Is this okay?Fear arises in many situations. Deep down it is always there, but not active. It is inactive, so that you don’t become aware of it. But fear is the very foundation of unconscious life. All your actions arise out of it. You want money, you want power, you want prestige. What are all your ambitions except to cover up your deep hidden fear? Perhaps money may be a security, perhaps power may make you more protected, secure, safe. Perhaps respectability, society, your religion, God… All these are by-products of fear.Why do you believe in God? You have not seen him, you don’t have any evidence that any such thing exists anywhere. But you know that without God you will not be able to repress your fear. Your fear needs God. It is a fear-oriented hypothesis. Your fear needs a father figure to protect you in dangerous situations, to help you when you need the help, to become a light in your darkness, to support you when you feel you are falling into an abysmal abyss. God is your concentrated fear.And there are lesser gods. Money is a lesser god – more visible, hence more people cling to money. But they don’t want to take any chances, so they also go on donating to the church, just to keep a bank balance in God’s bank. And here they go on clinging to the money because in life it seems money gives a certain security. At least tomorrow is certain. You will have food, you will have the house, you will have your wife, you will have your husband, you will have your children.Our whole life seems to be circling around the center of fear. It is present twenty-four hours a day, but we become aware of it only in certain situations. You start feeling the presence of death. Perhaps you have seen somebody dying, perhaps you have seen somebody very old on the road and it has reminded you about the next step. That fellow is going to step into a grave soon. You are also in the same queue, but how far are you? Maybe a little longer distance, but sooner or later – and the queue is becoming shorter every moment. You are coming to the window.Anything may trigger the idea of death in you – just a dry leaf falling from the tree is enough to remind you of death. Just a few days ago it was so green and so young, so beautiful. It used to dance in the morning sun. What has happened? A dying leaf falling from the tree was the cause of Lao Tzu’s enlightenment. Seeing the dry leaf falling, he accepted his death so totally that there was no question of any fear. If this is how life functions, then there is no question of fear.Have you ever thought that death is the only certainty in life? Everything else may fail. Love may fail, money… Nothing is certain. You know what is happening in America. Just a few days ago the dollar was on top, the biggest and the strongest currency in the world. It will never be again. It has gone down the drain. There is no possibility for it to rise again. It will have to go even lower. And how proud the dollar was! And now its place has been taken by the German mark or by the Japanese yen. The Japanese yen is now the topmost, but it cannot remain at the top.Nobody can remain at the top forever. Once you have reached the top, the next thing is to fall. How long can you balance? It is almost like in a circus when somebody is balancing on the rope. How long? Just for a few seconds it is possible to manage it, and that too needs tremendous exercise and rehearsals. And still the fear is there. Underneath there is a net, because even after so many rehearsals, so much practice, nobody knows – anything is possible. The rope may break, the rope has not been trained not to break. Just any small thing: the woman who is walking on the rope may sneeze just in the middle. You cannot know – anything is possible. You cannot prevent a sneeze.Money is more visible. People believe in money more than in God. They may pretend that they believe in God more, but their actual life shows something else. But the reason is the same. Whether it is money or power or prestige or God or religion, the reason is the same. You are living in fear and you are trying to protect yourself somehow.But death is only one of the reasons you are aware of fear. Love can also make you aware of fear, because love is also a kind of death. Your ego has to die, only then is love possible. It is a very partial death, but still something close to death. Hence people talk about love, but are very afraid of love. They talk about love because they feel very lonely. That loneliness creates fear.Man is really in great trouble. The old proverb is right which says “Life is not a bed of roses.” It is not. Such great dilemmas! Loneliness creates fear. Out of that fear you want to be in love, to be intimate with someone so that your loneliness disappears. But as you come closer to somebody, again another fear – you may be lost.You have to be humble enough to reach somebody’s heart, otherwise there is no way. The ego will be a barrier, it will keep a distance. And love is possible only when there is no distance at all – the ego has to give way. That ego giving way appears to be almost a death because you have been so identified with the ego.So man is split. Half of him wants to love, half of him pulls back – don’t go any further, you are too close, there is danger. Your fear is that if you come in deeper communion with me, you will fall apart. Naturally, nobody wants to fall apart. And a great fear arises. But there is a strong magnetic pull also. Deep down you know that whatever can fall apart is not you. And whatever can fall apart is going to fall apart sooner or later. How long can you hold it? It is not your authentic reality. It is just all false personality which needs continuous holding. Not even for a moment can you leave it alone, otherwise it will fall apart.I know a few people who are even afraid to sleep.When I came to know the first person who was afraid to sleep, I could not think what the problem might be. I went because his son had come to me – he was my student. He said, “My father is in tremendous misery. Apart from that, he is a successful man. He is rich enough, there is no need to worry.”Then I asked, “What is the problem?”He said, “The problem is, he is afraid of sleep. He says, ‘What is the guarantee that I will wake up?’”Now, how to give this man a guarantee? And naturally the fear seems to be logical. There is no guarantee. You may not wake up. Many people have not woken up. Once they have gone to sleep, they have gone. But if you become afraid of such things, life becomes absolutely impossible. So he keeps himself awake and he keeps his whole family awake. He is driving everybody mad.His son said to me, “Do something, because to keep himself awake, everybody else has to be awake. He will not let anybody sleep. He knocks on everybody’s doors asking ‘Are you awake?’ Just a few minutes of sleep and his knock comes. If everybody sleeps in the house, it will be very difficult for him to remain awake. All the lights have to be on. And he goes on making everybody stay awake because there is danger.”Now this man looks insane, but if you try to understand, you will see that this is your fear also. You are saying you are afraid that you will fall apart. And I guarantee: you will fall apart! So what is the fear? Do it once – once and for all! Then there will be no fear. Fall apart and let us see what falls apart. Not your legs, not your hands, nor your eyes… Nothing that is really yours is going to fall apart, only your false notions about yourself: your personality, your ego, your knowledgeability, these are the things which are going to fall apart. But they are not worth holding on to.Once they are gone you will have a far more beautiful space available to you. Don’t cling to things which don’t have any authentic reality. And the authentic reality need not be supported by you. It is there, it is not going to fall apart. Only the false can disappear, only your shadow – not you. But why should you be afraid if your shadow disappears? Your shadow is not you. Your shadow has nothing to do with you. It has no reality, it has no existence, it has no meaning in your life. But you have become too identified with your shadows.I have read Aesop’s Fables more deeply than the greatest holy scriptures of the world because Aesop’s Fables have more significance and more meaning, and tremendous psychological truths which are completely missing in your holy scriptures.One of the parables of Aesop is…A fox gets up early in the morning as the sun is rising. She comes out of the cave looking for some breakfast. But then, just as she comes out, she sees her shadow. In the early morning sun the shadow is very long. She says, “My God! I am this big! Even a camel will not be enough for breakfast.” She starts searching for a camel – it will be even better if she can get an elephant.But time passes and she does not come across any elephant, any camel, and it is getting hot, and in fact the time for breakfast has passed. It is time for lunch and she is feeling really hungry. The sun has come just above her head. She looks another time at her shadow. It has shrunken completely, it is just under her.She says, “My God, I never thought that hunger can do that much. I have shrunken. I used to be so long – just in the morning – so huge and just missing one breakfast… Now even if I can only get a rat that will do for lunch.”Just a small parable written for children, but if even an old man can understand it… It has a tremendous psychological truth. We are all living identified with our shadows and the fear that the shadow may disappear. It is better not to come too close to someone who can make your shadow disappear, who can make you aware of what is false in you and what is not false, because the moment you become aware about the false, it falls apart. But my suggestion to you is: rather than trembling your whole life about the false, being afraid about its death, it is better once and for all to get it finished.And you are saying, “…and then not being able to function any more in this world.” Strange fears! I have been functioning perfectly well in this world. My family was also worried, my neighbors were also worried, my friends were worried, my professors, my teachers, “How are you going to manage?” Everybody was worried, except me.I used to tell them, “Trees can manage, animals can manage. I don’t think there is much of a problem. The whole of existence is managing. I will also find some way.”But my father was very much concerned. Almost in tears he would say to me, “I am worried. I have loved you so much, although you have given me more trouble than any of my children. But perhaps because of that I have loved you more than any of my children.” And he had enough children – eleven children. Whenever he would find me alone he would say, “I continuously think of your future because you are going to be good for nothing.”I said, “You are right. I am going to be good for nothing. But you need not be worried, because I don’t see any problem in being good for nothing. Existence will take care.”And he proved right. I turned out to be good for nothing. I have never done anything – neither good nor bad – but I have lived perfectly, totally, intensely. The way I wanted to live, I have lived that way, without caring even if the whole world was against me. I have not cared. I have lived my own way, my style, because I don’t think that I have to listen to anyone. I have my life and I am responsible only to myself, to nobody else.Why are you so afraid that you cannot function anymore in the world if you come closer to me? All these people are closer to me and they are all functioning perfectly well, better than anybody else. And then you ask me, “What to do?” First thing, just fall apart. Come closer, become good for nothing, and just see how existence takes care of you. A little trust.And then, fear upon fear, “My mind is already set that enlightenment is not going to happen to me before the death of my body.” Here there are so many enlightened people. They don’t tell it because if they tell it, people will laugh about it. So they keep it secret, but they know perfectly well that they are enlightened. They are all alive, more alive than you will find people anywhere else. And their enlightenment has not disturbed anything.My enlightenment is not a small thing that can be disturbed because you smoke cigarettes. You can smoke, just smoke in an enlightened way! My enlightenment does not prevent you from anything – just change the quality. It does not teach you to escape from the world. I am absolutely in favor of the world.I call those people cowards whom you have worshipped as saints. I call them people who have betrayed the beautiful earth. And I want my people not to betray the earth. You can reduce my whole vision of life to a single sentence: not to betray the earth. Trust it, it is your mother, it is your very source of life.And why should you be so certain that you will not become enlightened before the death of your body? If so many people can become enlightened… Just remember one thing: become enlightened and don’t tell it to anybody; telling creates trouble. Then people start asking questions: “You are enlightened, so why are you doing this? And why are you doing that? And why are you going to the Blue Diamond Restaurant?” Once you say you are enlightened, you are in trouble.Once it happened…I was going from one meeting to another meeting in Mumbai, and one of my very close friends was driving me and we came to a bistro, a beautiful place. He just jokingly asked me, “Should we go in?”I said, “That’s a great idea.”He still thought that I was not going to go in, but he wanted to see how far the thing would go. So he stopped his car. I got out of the car. He started feeling a little nervous.I said, “Come on!”He said, “But if somebody knows you and knows me there will be trouble.”I said, “Don’t be worried. You just come behind me.”He had to come because I entered. There was a striptease going on; a woman was dancing nude. I pulled up a chair just in front of her. The manager had heard me speak somewhere. He came running to touch my feet and my friend was perspiring… It was air-conditioned.I said, “You are not enlightened. I am enlightened. Why are you perspiring? And he is touching my feet, not yours.” Even the naked woman came to touch my feet. When the manager came, naturally…My friend was almost having a nervous breakdown.You will not believe it – I had to drive because he was not in a position to drive. He was lying back, just resting, getting better before we reached the next place.He said, “This is the last time. I will never drive you anywhere. You have almost killed me!” Because not only the manager came, the woman came and all the customers, and there were about three hundred people in the bistro. “And there were many who recognized you, who recognized me.”There was great silence, all the music stopped, everything went topsy-turvy.The manager asked me, “What can I do?”I said, “Just bring good ice cream.”So I ate the ice cream. He hadn’t even the courage to ask for payment and we went out. You don’t ask payment from an enlightened man!But since that time my friend has stopped driving me. Before that he used to drive me in Mumbai from one place to another place. Since that day he lost his nerve.What is the problem? Just become enlightened but don’t tell anybody! And then you are free to do anything you want. Inside you are enlightened. Outside you are free to act. I am not taking you away from the world. I am teaching you the art of how to be in the world and yet not be part of it.You are hoping to get enlightened when your body dies so that you don’t commit any mistake. But if you are committing so many mistakes, you can commit them even when you are dead. Committing mistakes is something which becomes habitual. If you have been committing mistakes all your life, do you think just by death you will stop committing mistakes? You will commit them somewhere else, but you will continue. Don’t wait – death will come. But you don’t have to postpone enlightenment until after death.The reason is clear: you are worried that enlightenment means that, just like me, you will have to remain in one room. This is my way. It is not necessary for you to be in your room. You can be in anybody’s room. Here it is happening every day. People see somebody suddenly coming out from somebody else’s room. They cannot believe what is happening. In fact, it seems no room belongs to anybody. People are simply changing every night. And all are enlightened people. I don’t take enlightenment seriously. It is the most hilarious thing in the world.Paddy decides to go rabbit shooting, but when he gets to his favorite field he sees the village priest is already there. Paddy watches with fascination as the priest holds his finger over a rabbit hole and immediately a rabbit pops out. The priest grabs it and puts it into a sack. He repeats this unusual but very successful technique until his sack is full of rabbits. Paddy stops the priest and asks him how he does it.“Easy,” says the priest. “Put your finger on your wife’s pussy and then hold it over a rabbit hole. They can’t resist the smell, so when they come out, grab them!”As this sounds much easier than shooting, Paddy rushes home to find Maureen bent over scrubbing the floor. He lifts up her skirt and applies his finger as instructed.Without looking up, Maureen giggles, “Holy Moses, Father! Rabbit hunting again?”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 17 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there any difference between the criminals and the politicians?The criminal is poor; he is uneducated, unsophisticated and simple-hearted. The politician is a hypocrite – cunning, diplomatic, sophisticated. But their essential reality is the same. In other words, the criminal is a politician who could not succeed, and the politician is a criminal who has succeeded in attaining power. But their psychologies are not different. They both want power and domination; they both want to do things without any concern for the consequences; they are both end-oriented, they don’t bother about the means.Their basic philosophy is the same: the ends justify the means. If you succeed, then how you have succeeded – using right means or wrong means – does not matter. Success proves that your means were right. It is the end that proves your means were right. They are both violent. But if you have to choose between the two, the criminal is certainly the better. He does harm, but his harm is very limited – maybe he kills someone. Genghis Khan alone killed forty million people; Tamerlane killed seventeen million people; Nadir Shah killed thirty million people. The exact numbers Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte and Ivan the Terrible killed are not available. But they must have succeeded in killing far more than Tamerlane, Genghis Khan, Nadir Shah. But numbers for Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler are available. Joseph Stalin killed thirty million people after the revolution in Russia. Adolf Hitler killed six million Jews inside Germany, and in the whole Second World War he killed about fifty million people. Criminals have a very limited score.Politicians are great criminals, so great that you accept them as your heroes, so great that they create history. I have known politicians in the highest posts and I have seen criminals. And I was amazed by the fact that criminals have done whatever wrong they have done out of innocence; they were not aware of the law. They were temperamental – in a certain moment of rage and anger they became mad and they did something. But their act was not premeditated. That makes a tremendous difference. The politicians I have known have done far greater harm to humanity.And they go on doing harm, because they have the power of all the armies, of the bureaucracy. They do not do it out of innocence. Their actions, howsoever ugly, are preconsidered, well planned. But they belong to the same category; politicians are bigger criminals, that is the only difference – the difference of quantity. The criminals are simple human beings. Their only fault is their unconsciousness. They don’t take note of what the outcome of their action will be. They don’t plan it well.One of my teachers, an old Mohammedan, always used to be in charge of the examinations. He was a very beautiful man. He never married. I asked him once, “Why have you never married? You are such a beautiful man. You could have got a very beautiful woman.”He said, “It is difficult. I can afford only one thing. It is difficult to maintain both a wife…” He loved clothes so much that he had three hundred and sixty-five robes – every day a different robe.He said, “I am a poor teacher. In one year’s time, the turn of a robe will come, and by that time people will have forgotten about it.” So he was always looking at new robes – very costly. His whole salary was going into clothes. But he lived in a beautiful small house, very well decorated with a beautiful garden.He was very much respected and because of that respect he was always chosen to be in charge of the examinations. Before the examinations he would tell the students, “Remember one thing: to do wrong is not wrong, but to be caught doing it is wrong. You are free to do whatever you want to do – copying, cheating. You may be carrying books inside your clothes, notes… Everything is allowed, just don’t get caught red-handed. I am going to do my work. I will make every effort to catch you. So I warn you; don’t blame me later on.“If you are courageous enough and you are certain that you are cunning enough to get away with whatever you are doing, it is perfectly okay. But if you are caught, you are finished – your year is lost. So I will give you two minutes to think. Either you bring all your notes, all your books, that you are hiding in your clothes – anything that you are doing which is not allowed in the examination… Just bring it here. I will keep my eyes closed so you don’t feel embarrassed, because I don’t want anybody to feel embarrassed. After two minutes it is your responsibility.”And he would sit with closed eyes, a very sincere man. He simply did not want to embarrass anybody. And students would come with books and notes. Some would even come with notes written inside their shirts and they would have to sit the whole time without shirts. But they knew the man was very clever, you could not deceive him.When people started going to him, others would lose their nerve and they would also go. Within two minutes his table was full of notes, clothes, handkerchiefs… People had to run out to wash their hands, because they had written notes on their hands.After two minutes everything was clean, and he would ask, “Can I open my eyes or are you still doing it?”He was saying something immensely important: the politician is the criminal who has not been caught, and the criminal is the politician who is not clever enough, who has been caught. And the criminal was doing a very small thing, on a small scale. But basically they are not different. The politicians are ugly creatures in the sense that they go on interfering in other people’s lives.One night Hymie Goldberg is coming home. It is a dark night and he is late. And a man comes close to him and says to him, “I have been robbed. The robbers have taken away everything. All that I have is this gun.” He puts the gun on Hymie Goldberg’s chest and says, “Now, you have two alternatives: either you give me money or I give you death.”There was a long silence. Even the murderer started feeling a little nervous because Goldberg was just standing there.He asked, “Have you heard me or not?”Hymie said, “I have heard, but let me think.”But it is very rare to find such people who decide between money or death. Probably most people would give you the money because if you are dead, anyway the money will be gone. What is there to think about? But Goldberg has a thousand years of heritage. He is a perfect Jew.The ordinary criminal uses direct means. That’s why he is caught. The politician uses very indirect means. It is very difficult to catch hold of him. Indira Gandhi told me once, “I never write anything, I simply phone, because writing can be used as a proof against me any day.” This is great planning. She would call the governor of a state and say “Do it.” But she would never write anything. Now, there is no record of a verbal communication. She also said, “There are stupid politicians who go on writing things when they are in power.” And she showed me a whole file. That was her whole power.The file had come as an inheritance from her father, who was the first prime minister of India. He was collecting material against all the politicians – although they were men of his own party – proof that could be exposed any moment if the man tried anything against the party or against the party leader. If anyone wanted to leave the party he could not leave because Nehru knew… The file became such a terror that even the great leaders of this country were afraid of it. Nobody knew exactly what was collected in the file, because everybody was doing all kinds of wrong things. Just a few days ago…There was one president, Sardar Zail Singh, and he had ample proof against the prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, that he was not listening to him, he was not even asking him for necessary signatures. Without those signatures, nothing can be done. The president is only a nominal head in India, but his power is the signature. And things were happening without Singh’s signature.But he could not do anything because when he was chief minister of Punjab, he had been caught red-handed taking a big bribe. The investigation was started, completed, and it was proved that he was a criminal, but Rajiv never passed on that file to Singh. He never said a single word about it to the newspapers or to the country. This was a key thing.So, when Zail Singh wanted to say some things to the country which were going to be against the prime minister, he was told, “It is perfectly okay, you can speak but your file is in my hands: all will be exposed. You will be immediately arrested.”He could not ask for an extension to be the president again. And even though he is no longer a president, he cannot say anything against the government – though he knows everything – for the simple reason that his own crime will be immediately exposed. When he was president he was immune, he could not be arrested. But now he is an ordinary citizen. He will be arrested, harassed; harm can be done to him.Politicians work in criminal ways. Ronald Reagan was saying to the senate that he would not sell armaments to Iran because, of course, Iran is anti-American. “How can I sell armaments to Iran which can be used one day against America?” He was saying this to the senate and underneath, in the darkness, armaments were being sold to Iran. Nobody would have known it. Because all those armaments were being sold without his own senate and the country knowing about it, all the money must have been going into his own pocket. He has been caught red-handed: when Iran and America had a conflict a few months ago, Iran used American armaments against America. It was a puzzle: how did they get American armaments?And it was clear to the senate that Ronald Reagan had done another tremendously criminal thing: he has put billions, trillions of dollars into very sophisticated armaments that he does not have people trained to operate, and he has been selling the old armaments which his whole army is trained to use. Now this is creating the situation where, if America gets into a war with a country like Russia, there is no chance for America to win. It will have all the sophisticated arms, but no experts to operate them because it has sold all the old armaments for which the whole army is trained.Even a small country like Iran managed to fight with America, for the simple reason that it knows perfectly well that what Ronald Reagan is doing is against America, against his own country – just for his own interest, because he cannot run again for president. He has been president twice already, so this is the last chance to gather as much money as he can manage, by any means.Now this is the ugliest thing that one can do to one’s own country. Do you understand the facts? People are not trained and you have wasted trillions of dollars on arms which scientists have recently invented, for which years of training will be needed, and you have taken away and sold all the old armaments for which people are trained. You have sold them because you think that you have got better armaments, so there is no need for the old armaments. But just having the better armaments is not enough – you need people to operate them.In just a small conflict with Iran, it became clear. America had the best missiles, but they all missed, because the people who were using them had no idea what to do with them, how to use them. The more sophisticated the armament, the more training and expertise is needed. Reagan has put the whole country into the most dangerous situation.Just the other day I received a letter from a very well-known fighter for human rights. He has exposed what Ronald Reagan and his company are doing: they are trying to distort the whole constitution. In America, religion and state should remain separate – that is the constitution of a secular state. And every religion should have the same opportunity; no single religion should be the dominant religion. It is not a religious state.But Ronald Reagan is a fundamentalist Christian. That is the most fanatical group of Christians. And he has conspired with all the Christian bishops, Christian divine healers, and now he has in his hands the majority of the people. The country is Christian and he is trying in every way to impose Christianity on American citizens. He has been trying for a long time, as he was when I was there. And the Supreme Court refused. He was trying to make the Christian prayer – approved by the church – compulsory in every school, in every college, in every university: every educational institution should start the workday only after they have said the Christian prayer.But he failed, because the Supreme Court decided that this is against the constitution. He went roundabout: he said, “It is against the constitution if the government enforces it. Right. But if the parents enforce it, the constitution has no power over it.” So, he argued, in non-governmental institutions which get governmental support – they are semi-governmental, not under the government’s direct control – like colleges, even universities, schools in the thousands, the parents can decide because they are the trustees of those institutions. They can decide, “In our institution, the Christian prayer will be the beginning point.” This was going in a roundabout way.Now a few judges have become very old, so he has changed them. There are nine judges: all that he needs is five judges in his favor. Four judges have become old and have retired. The American constitution allows the president to appoint the Supreme Court judges. The people who made the constitution could never have conceived a situation where suddenly four judges would retire. If one judge retires, it does not make any difference. The president can place his own man, but the eight remaining judges will be there to oppose him – he will not have the majority. It is the first time in the whole history of America that four judges have been appointed by the president. One judge who is very sick, very old, insists on remaining because he says he is the only defense of constitutional rights. If he retires, then the fifth judge will also be Ronald Reagan’s. Then five judges are enough, and whatever he wants, he can do. He can overrule the constitution, he can even change the constitution.That old man is being harassed from every side to retire. He is sick, in a hospital, but he is reluctant to retire. “Because,” he says, “once I retire, America loses all its constitutional rights. It becomes a Christian country. No other religions will have the independence to exist. They will be dominated by the Christians.” But how long can that man last?Because Ronald Reagan’s term is coming to an end soon, that man can be killed, that man can be poisoned, that man can be declared naturally dead – he is old and in hospital. And I have every suspicion that before Ronald Reagan retires that man is going to die. Either he will retire or he will die. And they will find ways, which are very easy, to kill that man, just to get Reagan’s man appointed.The chance may never come again for a president to appoint five judges. He can change the whole constitution, he can change everything that is beautiful in the American constitution. One religion can become dominant over the whole country – one single cult, one single creed.Politicians are criminals with very clever, cunning, planning minds. Criminals are poor people, small politicians, not knowing how to do things. They go on doing things and getting caught.Ronald Reagan and his entourage are flying to Japan when the plane is forced to land in the Pacific Ocean. Escaping from the plane they are washed up on a desert island and find themselves without food or water.The next morning they notice the wreckage of the plane only two hundred yards from the shore, but they also see sharks.“I’ll swim out and get some food,” volunteers one man. “I used to be a lifeguard.” He dives into the water but the sharks soon find him and he is forced to return.Another man steps forward. “I am the President’s bodyguard and those sharks had better watch out!” He gets twenty yards into the surf before racing back to the beach with sharks snapping at his heels.Suddenly Reagan jumps up. “I am the President and I can manage it. I will bring back some food,” he declares. No one takes much notice, but when he strides down to the beach everyone becomes alarmed.He enters the water and immediately eight sharks form a two-lane escort and help him to the plane and back again.“It is a miracle!” cries Nancy.“Nonsense!” snaps Reagan. “It is just professional courtesy.”Just the same category of people. What those sharks are doing on a small scale, the great president is doing on a greater scale. Naturally the poor sharks show professional courtesy. A great hero – they escort him like bodyguards, take him to the plane and back. There is not much difference in their approach, in their attitude.The world will be a far better place if politicians and criminals – who belong to the same category – disappear from the world. And it will be easy to make criminals disappear because their demands are not high. Perhaps their situation is forcing them to be criminals. Somebody cannot manage to buy medicines for his dying wife so he steals. You cannot call him a criminal. In fact, the society is criminal which does not make arrangements for a dying wife. That man is simply breaking the rule of a criminal society. But he will be called a criminal because the society owns the courts, the judges, the law, the constitution, everything.Most of the criminals are created by situations. Most of the politicians are created by their own ambition. Hence they are the most dangerous people in the world. If the world wants to be at peace, politicians should disappear entirely from this planet. And once they disappear, criminals will disappear without much effort. They are simply shadows of the politicians. The politicians have created a society which is basically criminal.I have told you a story about Lao Tzu. He was made Chief Justice by a Chinese emperor who thought that he was the wisest and the most respected human being in the whole empire. He could not find a better chief justice.Lao Tzu told him, “It won’t last long. If you say so, I will accept the post. But you don’t know me, you have just heard about me.”But the emperor was stubborn as emperors are supposed to be. He said, “No. You have to accept this post.”The first case that came before Lao Tzu was about a great thief who had stolen a lot of money and armaments from the richest man of the empire. The man was so rich that he was lending money to the emperor; he was far richer than the emperor himself. Naturally, he never expected what happened.The man – the thief – was caught red-handed. So there was no question that he should not be punished. Lao Tzu heard the whole thing, both sides, and gave the judgment: “Both the thief and the rich man should be sent to jail for six months.”The rich man could not believe his ears. He said, “What is going on, what kind of justice is this? I have been robbed and you are sending me to jail?”Lao Tzu said, “According to me, you are the real criminal. He is just your shadow. You have accumulated the whole wealth of the country, you have left everybody poor, beggars. You have exploited so much that now it is a natural consequence: people will steal from you. I cannot send your shadow to jail without sending you also. The shadow alone cannot go to jail. It will go only with you.”The rich man said, “Then I want to have an audience with the emperor before you implement your judgment.” He told the emperor what kind of madman he had chosen.“Just try to understand. If today he is sending me to jail, tomorrow you will be my companion in jail, because we belong to the same profession. I exploit people, you exploit people. Our whole profession is to be parasites. And you have put that crazy guy who… Never in history has such a judgment happened.”The emperor also was alerted and thought, “This is dangerous. Perhaps that man was right when he said ‘You don’t understand me, and you don’t understand my way of thinking. You are taking an unnecessary risk by appointing me your chief justice.’”Lao Tzu was immediately relieved of the post.Osho,Why do you always laugh at the pope? Are you against him for any personal reasons?I have no antagonism against anybody in the world for personal reasons. I laugh at the pope for absolutely impersonal reasons.First, he pretends to be the only infallible man in the whole world, which is absolutely absurd because the whole history of popes shows that is not right. One pope burned Joan of Arc because she had become so powerful, so respected by people, that the pope started feeling jealous. She had freed France from slavery. And certainly a young girl with such courage had never been seen in the whole of history. It was obvious that she would have tremendous love and respect from the people. She had brought freedom to them as a gift.The pope was very jealous. In fact, he felt that people had been paying more attention to her than to him. He declared her a witch and once the pope declared any woman a witch, the only punishment was to be burned alive. And Joan of Arc was burned alive. It was very shocking to the whole of Europe.And slowly, slowly the sympathy toward her became so strong that after three hundred years, another pope came along who saw that it was impossible to remain as the highest and the most important person unless something was done about Joan of Arc – her glory had become far greater than it was before she was burned.The pope decided that it was a mistake to think of her as a witch. “She is a saint,” he declared. “From now onward, she will be known as Saint Joan of Arc.” And her grave was opened – just burned bones were there. Those bones were taken out after nearly five hundred years, worshipped, taken to the special graveyard where only saints have their graves, and the pope himself came for this great moment to confer sainthood on those dead bones. The woman had been burned nearly five hundred years ago. On what grounds can the pope say that he is infallible?There are many such cases. If one pope decides she is a witch and another pope decides she is a saint, both cannot be right. Both can be wrong, but both cannot be right. If one is right, then the other is wrong. The idea of infallibility is laughable. It is sheer arrogance. And the pope declares that he is the direct representative of Jesus. The truth is that the tradition of popes started three hundred years after Jesus’ crucifixion. There is a gap between the beginning of the tradition of the popes and Jesus. The gap is of three hundred years. How could Jesus have appointed them to be his representatives? But nobody asks them because they are surrounded with Christians who simply believe whatever they say.The pope before this pope was a homosexual. It was known to everybody because before becoming a pope, he was a cardinal in Milan, where he was continuously moving with his homosexual boyfriend. And the whole of Milan knew it. It was the talk of the town. It was so ugly.Then he was chosen to be the pope. And immediately, the first thing he did was to appoint his boyfriend as a secretary. Secretaries seem to be strange people, but to have a woman as a secretary is understandable. And that boyfriend was hanging around him – no secretarial job or anything. That was just a facade to keep him in the Vatican. And these people go on talking about infallibility; they go on talking about their direct connection with God.I don’t have any personal antagonism and particularly toward this pope, although he is the worst that has ever happened in the long line of popes.When Nathan Nussbaum returns to America from Europe, his partner in the men’s clothing store wants to hear everything about the trip.“And I even went in a group to see the Vatican,” says Nathan, “where we were blessed by the pope.”“The pope?” exclaims the partner. “What does he look like?”“Nothing special,” answers Nathan. “I would figure a size forty-four, short.”A tailor has his own understanding about things. I also have my understanding and I am not a tailor…I can see the whole stupidity of all the popes that have been in power.One pope forced Galileo to change in his book his lifelong research proving that the earth moves around the sun. “Change it, otherwise you will be punished by being burned alive. Because the Bible says – and the Bible can never be wrong, because it is the written word of God himself… You have to change it and write that the sun goes around the earth.”Galileo was very old and sick. He said, “There is no problem. I will change it. Just one thing you have to remember: my changing it does not make any difference. The earth will still go around the sun. Neither the earth reads my books, nor the sun reads my books. If you say… I am not a stubborn person and I don’t care which one moves. This is my research. Even if I change it, tomorrow somebody is going to discover it again because this is the fact.”For the pope the question was totally different. If one thing is found wrong in the Bible, then the whole Bible comes under suspicion. Who knows? If one thing is wrong, other things may also be wrong. And if God can write wrong things – is fallible – where does the pope stand? And particularly this pope, who is a Polack…I am worried, immensely worried, about what they are going to find after this pope dies, although he will live longer than they think. Popes in the past have not lived more than one year, or two years, because they became pope at the very end of their life. It is a long hierarchy. They start as the lowest of priests, they become bishops, they become cardinals, and then finally, two hundred cardinals choose the pope. It is very rare and only very old people are chosen, for the simple reason that they will be dying within a year or two, when another cardinal can be chosen.This is a simple strategy in politics. But they forgot… This Polack has completely forgotten to die. He was chosen with the hope that he would follow the tradition because he was old. But he is so enjoying being the pope that he has been becoming younger, not older. And now all the cardinals are in a fix – what to do? And where are they going to find somebody after the Polack dies? You will have to find someone more stupid, more idiotic, and I don’t think there are people outside Poland who can manage to be more stupid than this man.Two Polacks are leaving school to go out into the world. One of them asks the other, “And what are you going to do with your life?”“Well,” replies the other, “I have decided to be a chicken farmer.”Five years later they meet on the street and the first Polack asks, “How is the chicken farm going?”“My God,” replies the other, “it was a complete disaster. All my chickens died.”“Why,” asks his friend, “what happened?”“I am not sure,” the other Polack replies. “I either planted them too deep or too close together!”Polacks have a specialty – his was the farming of chickens. I am not against the pope, I am against the whole ideology that the pope represents. I am against the idea of God, I am against the idea of the son of God. I am against the idea of any human being pretending to have a direct phone connection to God. The whole Christian theology is so poor that if you understand religion a little bit as an experience, you will be surprised that Christianity is counted as a religion at all. There is nothing religious in it. No meditation – not a single pope has been enlightened. Even the man who created the whole of Christianity was not enlightened.Christianity was not created by Jesus. He remained a Jew his whole life. He was born a Jew, lived a Jew, died a Jew. He never knew that he was a Christian. He was not trying to create a new religion at all. There is not a single statement by him to that effect. He was continuously trying to prove himself a Jewish prophet for whom the Jews had been waiting for thousands of years, the awaited great prophet after Moses – and the Jews were angry because of this.If he had created a new religion, there would have been no problem. If he had wanted to create a new religion, the Jews might have laughed at the whole thing, that a son of a carpenter whose birth is suspicious… Holy ghosts don’t exist, at least in Judaism. Some hooligan may have done the trick. They would have laughed, but because he was continuously harassing them to accept him as their prophet… That was impossible.Sometimes it is good to understand things from their background psychology. Why was it so difficult for the Jews to accept Jesus as their last prophet? Obviously he was not educated, he was not even a rabbi, he had no learning about the Jews’ scriptures. At the most, he was suffering from megalomania. But these were superficial reasons to reject him.The deeper reason is: the last prophet was their hope. And the hope was that the last prophet would redeem them from their misery, from their suffering. Jews have suffered more than any race in the world. And they were living with the hope that the last prophet would come one day and the coming of the last prophet would be the end of the dark night.They believed – because of Moses – that they were the chosen people of God. And the chosen people of God having a carpenter’s son as their last prophet, of whom it is well known that he is not the son of his own father… He was born after the marriage, but before nine months, so certainly he was not the son of Joseph!Mohammedans never refer to Jesus as the son of Joseph. They also don’t believe in the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost has been invented by Christianity just to cover up an old slander. Mohammedans call Jesus, ibn Mariam: Jesus, the son of Mary. This seems to be more sincere. They don’t bring anything else into it, they simply drop Joseph out. One thing is certain – he is the son of Mary. The Arabic for Mary is Mariam. And in Arabic, everybody has to write his name and his father’s name. Because the father is uncertain they write Jesus’ mother’s name: Jesus ibn Mariam – the son of Mariam.The Jews were hoping for a prophet, a great prophet who was going to deliver them from all their suffering. And Jesus was not doing anything to redeem them from all of their suffering. They could not accept him, because to accept him would have destroyed their hope. And that hope was the only thing they were living for. It is a very strange phenomenon.Hymie Goldberg was on a ship – his first journey – and was suffering from seasickness. The captain came to him and told him, “Don’t be worried, because never in the whole history of shipping has anybody died of seasickness.”Goldberg said, “Please don’t say such a thing. Death is the only hope that I am living for, hoping that I will die. This sickness – and you are telling me… You think you are consoling me, but you are taking away my only hope.”Nobody wants their hopes destroyed. Because life is so empty, we are filling it with hopes. The poor man is thinking he will become rich. The uneducated person is thinking if he cannot become educated, at least his children will become educated. But everybody is living through hope because the present is absolutely empty. They can only imagine a fulfilled future.Jesus did not give that fulfillment. That was given by the hope that one day the prophet will come. Of course, they will never accept anyone, because no man is capable of redeeming you from suffering; it is not only Jesus. Nobody else after him has tried because seeing the result… Otherwise, the Jews will crucify the other fellow also because you cannot redeem anybody from his suffering.It is a simple thing: everybody creates his own suffering and only he is capable of redeeming himself. You cannot throw the responsibility on some prophet who will come and redeem you from all misery, all anguish. The Jews are utterly tired, but hope is the only light in their dark night – and Jesus wanted to take away that hope also. This was the underlying psychology. They cannot accept Jesus.It is a strange thing that the founder of Christianity was a Jew who never knew anything about Christianity. He never founded it. It was founded by a man who was against Jesus. His name was, in the beginning, Saul. He was so much against Jesus that he was traveling toward Jerusalem to convert people who had become Christians back to Judaism. Jesus was gone, he was dead. This man Saul was moving… He was a fanatic Jew, and he wanted to reconvert those Jews who had been converted into Christians. But something happened on the way.My own understanding is that it was sunstroke. He was a very violent and angry man, very hot. And the sun was also very hot. He was passing through the desert, day and night moving toward Jerusalem. One day, just in the middle of the day, when the sun was at its hottest and he was burning with a deep desire to convert back all the Christians, he got a double sunstroke. He fell into a coma.And in his coma, he saw Jesus Christ. The reason is very simple: if you are so much against Jesus Christ you will continuously be thinking only of Jesus Christ. In that coma he saw Jesus Christ coming in all his glory. It was just a dream, but it transformed the man. He changed his name to make it a point that “I am no longer the same person.” From Saul, he became Paul and this Paul was the founder of Christianity. He was the first pope – a very strange pope!I think there is not much difference between Paul and the Polack Pope – they are both living in a coma. But they have nothing to do with Jesus. I have a certain love for Jesus, although I cannot say he was an enlightened man – but very close. He was just with the wrong kind of people. Always choose your company very intelligently.He finally came to his senses after the crucifixion. He did not die on the cross, he escaped to India. His grave is here in Kashmir. I have been to his grave. It is strange that no Christian takes note of that grave. If they take any interest in the grave it will show that Jesus died here, but they believe that after resurrection he simply went to paradise. If they mean it symbolically – Kashmir is known as the paradise of the earth – that’s perfectly true. He had come to paradise, but he did not fly toward the sky.He lived a long life – one hundred and twelve years. But he had learned the lesson: one crucifixion is enough. Here in this country, you cannot teach because everybody knows so much about spirituality. At the most, you can become a disciple. There is no possibility of anybody becoming a master or a prophet or a savior. Here everybody – nine hundred million people, even villagers – is a spiritual prophet. Everybody knows the scriptures like a parrot.So coming to Kashmir with his small group of friends and fellow travelers, he simply remained silent, just working on those few people he had brought. The village is still in existence. He used to call himself “the shepherd.” In Kashmiri the word for shepherd is pahalgam. The village is called Pahalgam, the village of the shepherd. And you can see by the noses of the people you find in Pahalgam that once they were Jews. In fact, the whole of Kashmir was once Jewish.It was a tribe that Moses was taking to Jerusalem, to Israel, not knowing himself where Israel was. For forty years they wandered in the desert. The great prophet, Moses… Almost seventy-five percent of his followers died in that forty-year tedious journey in the desert, and I don’t think they ever found Israel. What they found was a helplessness. Finally Moses was too old and not willing to search – it was enough, he had searched enough. They settled on some land… It was just to give a sense to his people. And they were no longer his people, they were the third generation. There was almost no relationship between Moses and the people he had brought there.Those who had come out of Egypt with him had died long before. The young people were not very interested in his leadership, in listening to him. One tribe of the Jews had got lost in the desert. Just as an excuse, because he was feeling uneasy with his people… They were new and young and they knew nothing about Moses or his miracles: that he had separated the ocean, that he had gone to see God and God had given him ten commandments – they had not seen all this, they came afterward.Moses was not comfortable with them. So he said to them, “You settle and I will go and look for the one tribe that got lost.” And that one tribe had reached Kashmir. In fact, Kashmir was a far better place than Israel. And when that last tribe found Kashmir, they really believed that this was the true holy place, so beautiful that there was no comparison in the whole world.You will be surprised to know that Kashmir was Jewish, but Mohammedans forced all the Jews of Kashmir to be converted to Mohammedanism. But their faces, their noses, are so prominently declaring that they are not Mohammedans, they are not Hindus – they are Jews.And a strange coincidence: Moses died in Kashmir and Jesus also died in Kashmir. Both graves are in Pahalgam, just near a forest, and the family that still looks after those two graves is Jewish. That family has been looking after those two graves for generation after generation. Those are the only two graves in India on which the inscription is in Hebrew.But Christians will not take note of it. I used to talk to Stanley Jones, one of the very famous Christian missionaries. And he said, “I can understand why you insist that I come with you, you want to show me. But we want to be clear with you, we don’t want to see the grave of Jesus because that will destroy our whole idea that Jesus was directly called by God to heaven.”People protect their superstitions and are not ready to encounter reality. And continuously for eighteen hundred years these popes have been protecting all kinds of Christian superstitions which don’t correspond to reality. I am not against them, I am not against anybody in the world personally. But I am against all kinds of prejudices, all kinds of nonsense, all kinds of rotten ideologies that go on existing in the name of religion.I simply want religion to be purified. I want there to be no religions in the world, but only religiousness, just a quality, not any organized church. No holy scripture, but the whole of life holy, and everybody coming to a consciousness which transforms his actions, his being into religious qualities – sat-chit-anand.Everybody has to become the truth, the consciousness, and the bliss.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 18 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,You are running within me like silent water, merging me slowly into an inner smile!Thank you for being with us.The path of a seeker is full of beautiful spaces and is also full of desert-like moments. It is full of joy, just as you see in the morning when the sun is rising and the birds start singing and the flowers smile all over the earth. But it is not always so. There are moments of immense darkness. One feels lost, one does not know where one is, whether the night is going to end or not.It is something to be very deeply understood: the path is up and down, it is not always ecstatic. And it is good that it is not always ecstatic, otherwise you will be utterly tired from ecstasy. You cannot smile twenty-four hours a day, you need a little rest, too. Those moments when one feels dark, lost, are moments to relax. And those moments when one feels a joy, a smile, are the moments to rejoice. But one should not start choosing. Both are equally acceptable, both are equally inevitable.You need to understand this equality of both moments – dark and negative; light and positive. And you are not asking for only the joyous moments. You are not asking for anything at all. You are simply rejoicing in whatever existence gives to you. Whatever the gift – maybe a dark night or a joyous morning, tears or smiles – it does not matter. Your gratefulness remains the same. Only such a seeker, whose gratefulness never wavers, whatever happens, is equally rejoiced. He is equally thankful for it.It is a little difficult… When things are going well, it is easy to be thankful. But real thankfulness is when things are not going well – then is the fire-test of your gratitude. And only through such moments does your gratitude become more and more solid, concentrated, centered. You start growing roots. It is very easy to feel thankful to God, to feel thankful to existence, when everything is good.You are saying to me that you are thankful because I am with you. Your thankfulness should remain the same when I will not be with you. Only then is your thankfulness not situation-oriented, but centered in your being, not dependent on the outside, but springing from your inner being. It is yours only when no outer change can change it. For that you have to learn the art of choicelessness.You are saying that I am running within you like silent water, merging you slowly into an inner smile. It is beautiful, but these are the moments for you to be reminded of the moments when the smile may not be there, when you may not hear the sound of the running water that is bringing the smile to you.There are dark nights of the soul. But your real test – whether you are an authentic seeker or just a superficial curiosity-monger – is not the beautiful moment. The real test is the moment when everything seems to be lost, when everything seems to be against… If you can still smile and be thankful to existence, then things will start changing for you. Slowly, slowly there will be smaller gaps of darkness and longer spaces of light. As your choicelessness deepens, the dark moments will disappear.A day comes when there is no night any more. A day comes when it is always dawn and the birds are singing and the flowers are blossoming and you have a smile that is not an effort, hence you cannot be tired of it. It is simply there, just like the fragrance of the flowers. They are not tired of it. Or just like breathing – twenty-four hours a day, seventy years continuously – you are not tired of it. Only after a choiceless state of consciousness, does one come to the moment when one can remain orgasmically blissful every moment, each moment. And that is our target.I have been working with thousands of people. And the trouble is that when things are going well, they are very thankful. When things are not going well and I go on making them aware that there will be times when things will not be going well – it is just how existence functions, how existence creates a dialectic between the opposites for your growth – they become angry at me. Just as you are smiling and being thankful, they become revengeful, angry. And in both cases I am not involved at all.When you are thankful, I am not involved; when you are angry and resentful, I am not involved. It is just you in both cases. This has to be deeply recognized: it is always you. You cannot throw the responsibility onto me. But if I accept your thankfulness, naturally you will tend to throw the responsibility of your resentment on me too.So I always feel a little hesitant whenever I hear the words: “Thank you, Osho.” Then I know there is danger. I am getting into trouble, because what will you do when the smile disappears and tears come to your eyes – tears of sadness, of depression?There are valleys and there are peaks. The path is long. When you are on the sunlit peaks, you shout with joy, thankful. But when you are in the dark, deep valleys, completely lost, you start being resentful. Remember: it is always your experience, don’t project it onto me. It is better to be independent and take the responsibility. It will make you mature; and it will save me from the trouble of your resentments, your anger. I have no problem: you can be resentful, you can be angry, it is all the same to me.Whether you are thankful or ungrateful, it is all the same to me. I want you to learn the art of choicelessness, so that it becomes the same for you, too. And the beauty of thankfulness, when there is nothing to be thankful for, is just a great miracle, magic, a moment of tremendous transformation. It needs great intelligence. I hope you will prove to have that intelligence. I trust in everybody that they have the right intelligence to understand the deepest mysteries of life.One day a Polack walks into a store and asks for some egg-ski, some milk-ski and bread-ski. The shopkeeper looks at him and says, “Are you Polish?”“Yes,” replies the embarrassed Polack. “How did you know?”“Simple,” says the shopkeeper, “you put ski on the end of all your words.”The Polack walks out determined to improve his English. So for five years he goes to night school. When he is satisfied, he goes back to the market, walks into a store and with an impeccable English accent says, “My good man, please give me a dozen eggs, a bottle of milk and a loaf of bread.”The shopkeeper looks at him and says, “Are you Polish?”“My God!” exclaims the Polack. “How the hell do you know that?”“Simple,” says the shopkeeper. “This is a hardware store.”Osho,I have listened thirty or forty times to the discourse on the inescapable.Each time I feel I'm grasping it, but it escapes me. This discourse is so huge that it is inescapable.Osho, please elaborate on your discourse.That which is the authentic, the truth, is always beyond the grasp of the mind. If you can grasp only this much – that it is beyond the grasp of the mind – you have done more than is ordinarily possible for a human being. The mind is a very small thing and existence is tremendously big.Existence is so oceanic, so infinite, so eternal. Our minds are so small that it is no wonder that whenever you come close to the truth, you feel that your heart has fallen into a certain harmony. Your being has moved from its sleeping state into a certain awakening, but your mind remains in a very stunned and shocked state. The truth is beyond the mind, but not beyond the heart – the heart can grasp it. But this is the trouble: the heart cannot say anything about it. Yes, it can dance, it can sing, but it cannot use any language. Language is confined to the mind.And as far as your being is concerned, which is deeper than the heart, it can have the full comprehension of the truth. But the very comprehension of the truth by your being makes it utterly silent. The very understanding makes your being filled with the feeling of the mysterious, the unknowable. The being cannot even do what the heart can do. It remains just as if it is no more. All has become silent, although the silence is very much alive. It is not the dead silence of a graveyard, it is the silence of the starry night – immensely alive.But the deeper you go, the further you are from language. Even dance is a language, even gestures are a language, even your eyes – without saying anything – can say much. But as you go deeper and deeper, there is the world of sat-chit-anand, there is the truth and consciousness and bliss. Everything becomes utterly silent. The mind is left far, far behind. The mind cannot hear even faraway echoes of what is happening in the being.Yes, the mind can hear something of what is happening in the heart. The heart is very close to the mind, although deeper. The mind can feel that a certain harmony is arising, a certain peace, a certain joy. It can understand the heart dancing with abandon, but the mind cannot express it in language. So it has a certain feeling from the heart, just a cool breeze passing through the mind. It can have a little taste – something sweet is happening somewhere deep, but how to say it?I have told you the story, which is an ancient story, especially made for such a question…Two beggars live in a forest, near a city. Naturally they are enemies, because they are in the same profession and in competition. One is blind the other is lame. And they are always quarreling about their clients. You don’t know what beggars say about you. They have their clients, they have their territories.I always used to give one rupee to a beggar whenever I went in or out of the railway station. And in those days I was traveling for almost twenty years continuously. One day I found that the old beggar was gone and a young man was standing there. I asked him, “What happened to the old man?”He said, “I am his son-in-law.”I said, “You may be his son-in-law, but what happened to the old man?”He said, “He has given this territory to me in dowry. And he has moved to another place, to the bus stand.”I said, “I had no idea that I was being given in dowry to somebody.”And he said, “He has informed me about you, that you will give me one rupee. You are on my list.”I said, “People don’t know that they are somebody’s property, that they can be given in dowry.”Beggars are continuously fighting. There is great struggle and competition. And those two beggars had been enemies for years. But one day the forest caught fire. The blind man was perfectly able to walk and run, but it was dangerous. He could not see whether he was going in the right direction – where there was no fire – or whether he was running through the fire toward more.The lame man could not run on his own. The fire was spreading so fast and the winds were so strong, but he could see that there was still a possibility to get out. There were a few places where the fire had not reached yet. But soon it would be reaching there. Soon, they would be covered by fire from all over the place. They both forgot all their antagonism, competition. This was not the time to fight, this was a time to unite.The blind man took the lame man on his shoulders and they became one personality. Now they had both eyes and they had legs. The lame man could see and direct where they had to run – and fast – and which directions had to be avoided. And the blind man was strong enough to run, carrying the lame man on his shoulders. They came out of the forest without being injured.This ancient story is about your mind and your heart. Your heart can see, but cannot say. Your mind can say, but cannot see. If you are capable of bringing your heart and mind closer, your love and logic closer, your experience and expression closer, perhaps the mind can also say something significant. It may not be complete, it may not be an entire expression, but it may be an indication in the right direction. It may be a finger pointing to the moon. It may not be the moon, but it can indicate toward the moon.You have been listening to one of my discourses on the inescapable, and you say, “Each time I feel I have grasped it, but it escapes me.” The moment you feel “I am grasping it” or “I have grasped it,” that is the point where it escapes from your hands. There are things which you can grasp, but you cannot say “I am grasping it.” Remain silent. Rejoice in the moment, but don’t say anything.It is almost like my open hand. I have the whole sky in my hand, but with my closed fist the sky has escaped. My closed fist is empty. The moment you say “I have got it,” you have closed your fist. You had got it, but you should have remained silent, utterly silent. The moment you say “I have got it, I am grasping it, this is it,” you have made it very small. It was too big, it cannot be confined to these small words. Your fist is too small and the sky is too big.You can have the whole sky in your open hand; there is no problem. You can have the fragrance of all the flowers in the garden with the open hand, but if you close your fist there is nothing left – not even stale air. Fragrance cannot be grasped in your fist.This is one thing which is fundamental for everyone to remember: when you feel that you are coming closer to something great, remember not to say anything – just rejoice in it. You are allowed to sing a song which has nothing to do with it; you are allowed to dance, enjoy – which has nothing to do with it. And your grasping will become deeper with your dance, with your song, with your music. Or you can simply sit silently.Deep down, you are experiencing. Something is singing and your whole being is feeling a new sweetness, a new liveliness, a new love radiating around you. But beware not to say “I have got it.” The moment you say “I have got it,” you have missed it. Immediately, you will find, “It has escaped me.” Then you are in a vicious circle. Then you run after it, and the more you run the less is the possibility to understand it, to come closer to it.It comes only when you are silent and relaxed. It comes only when you are not even looking for it. It just comes out of the blue, from nowhere – you don’t hear its footsteps. But when it comes, rejoice. Rejoicing is the only way to keep it around you. The deeper you can rejoice, the deeper you can take it in with your breathing, with your heartbeats – but don’t say a single word. Every word is a disturbance. It is a very shy experience. It does not allow itself to be exposed to the mind, to intellect, to reason, to logic. The moment you bring those in, it moves out through the back door.One of the great mystics, Kabir, has the right symbol for it. He says it is like a shy, newly married girl. In the West, that girl has disappeared. But in the East, once in a while, you can find that shy, newlywed girl. With that girl Kabir symbolizes the experience of truth.You have to be very sensitive and very alert, otherwise it will escape. It cannot expose itself to your logic: that is too harsh a world. It cannot expose itself to language: that is too primitive. Language has no grace; there is no possibility for the inescapable experience to be reduced to ordinary communication.The moment you say “I have got it”… Why do you say it? If you have got it, enjoy it! Just old habits.I have heard…A drunkard entered into the pub. He could not believe his eyes. There were three men and a dog sitting around a table playing cards. He went around and around, again and again, watching.“Is it really a dog or a man?” He was very drunk so he was suspicious, thinking, “It may be that I am seeing something which is not the case.” Going around, again and again, he managed to figure it out, “If I can see the three people as men, it is not possible that I see only the fourth man as a dog.”Finally he said, “My God, this dog seems to be very intelligent. Is he playing cards with you three?”The owner of the dog said, “Yes, he can play but he is not very intelligent.”The drunkard said, “What are you saying?”He said, “I am his owner, I know him. Whenever he gets a good hand he wags his tail. That’s where he exposes himself. Then the whole thing goes wrong as that is the time when he should not wag his tail. He is a great player, but the tail… Old habits. He becomes so joyful that he cannot stop. I have been telling him thousands of times, ‘You are a great player. You should not behave like a dog,’ but dogs are, after all, dogs!”And that is the situation of the mind. The moment your heart feels something, the mind starts wagging its tail. It says “I have got it.” And just because of the old habit something tremendously important is spoiled.An Englishman, an Arab and a Frenchman are sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Casablanca, when a gorgeous oriental woman walks past them.The Englishman drops his teacup and exclaims, “By Jove!”The Arab murmurs reverently, “By Allah!”The Frenchman smiles and breathes a soft “By tomorrow night.”Just different habits.It is Monday morning in Washington and Ed Meese comes into the president’s office looking very depressed.“My God, Ed,” says Ronald Reagan. “You look terrible. What happened?”“Well, Mr. President, sir,” replies Meese, “I had a terrible week. On Monday I crashed my car and had to pay ten thousand dollars to get it fixed. On Tuesday my daughter ran off to Pune. On Wednesday the stock market crashed. On Thursday I caught my wife in bed with the gardener. On Friday my son died, and on Saturday my house burned down.”“Good Lord,” cries Reagan, “what a terrible week. Was there nothing positive in it?”“Oh yes,” replies Meese. “On Sunday I got my AIDS test result.”Osho,Could you please speak of the mysteries of the heart?That’s what I have been saying: the mysteries of the heart cannot be spoken of. You can experience, and then there is no need for any explanation, for any expression. We are accustomed to figure out everything rationally. It is an old, long, perhaps a million-year-old habit.We feel a little uneasy if we cannot figure out something completely rationally, logically. That which remains unexpressed haunts us. The whole of science is born out of it. It is the haunting of the unknown; it becomes almost a nightmare. It is perfectly good for science to be haunted by the unknown because the unknown can be made into the known.Outside your being there are only two categories – the known and the unknown. What is known today was unknown yesterday, what is unknown today may become known tomorrow, so those two categories are not really different. It is only a question of time, inquiry, adventure. Everything that is objective can perhaps one day be reduced into the single category of the known.But in the inner world, the world of the heart you are talking about, there is a third category – the unknowable. That’s why science does not accept anything inside you. Science does not accept you at all because to accept you is to accept a mystery which is unknowable. And the scientific mind will become almost insane because the unknowable cannot be made known. That is simply the nature of it.The mind wants everything to be known, just as Francis Bacon said – his was one of the most significant scientific minds – “Knowledge is power.” The mind wants power, and the way to power is to know more and more and, finally, to know everything. The unknown is beyond the mind’s power. You cannot dominate the unknown. How can you dominate it? You don’t know about it. The whole territory is in darkness. You have first to bring the territory into light, within your control.The mind is a politician and the whole of science is a by-product of the mind. And you can see the connection: finally what the mind creates goes into the hands of the politicians.What Albert Einstein created reached the hands of President Truman. When he wrote the letter to the then American president, Roosevelt, saying “I am working on splitting the atom,” he was welcomed immediately into America and given all the facilities. Now, Truman was the president. When he heard that Truman was going to drop those atom bombs that resulted from his researches… He had created them only for an emergency, such as if the fascist countries were going to win and destroy the whole democratic world, then as a last resort atom bombs could be used and the whole situation changed.Without Albert Einstein, Germany was hindered in its atomic research. But because Einstein was a Jew and Germany was killing Jews by the millions – although he was not going to be killed because he was too important for Adolf Hitler’s victory and his idea of conquering the whole world – still, as a protest, he escaped from Germany and he wrote a letter to Roosevelt, a very famous letter. He was immediately welcomed, “Come, and you can have all the facilities that you want to work on the atom.”Truman decided to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki without any reason: there was no urgency, there was no emergency. Germany had already fallen and Japan was going to fall within two weeks at the most. There was no way for Japan to stand alone without Germany. Japan’s forces were already losing their morale and they knew perfectly well, “If Germany is gone, how long can we carry on?”All Truman’s generals told him, “It is absolutely absurd to drop the atom bombs, because within two weeks or even before that Japan is going to kneel down before us.”Now, it is absolutely ugly to destroy two huge cities. And they had nothing to do with the war. Small children, old parents, wives – they had nothing to do with it. They were simply citizens living in those cities.Albert Einstein wrote another letter, hoping that just as his first letter was welcomed, the second would also be welcomed. He was utterly disappointed. But I could have told him that he should not write the second letter, that nobody would even answer it.It was not answered because he was saying, “It is absolutely wrong, immoral, when a country is falling apart by itself… I have not done all this research for such a situation. If Japan had been winning, I would have been the first to suggest that it was time to drop the bomb, but Germany is finished, Japan is almost finished. Dropping the atom bomb on an enemy who is losing ground every day is absolutely absurd and inhuman, and I protest against it. Please don’t do it.” But nobody even answered, nobody even cared.Einstein died in great sadness and depression. Once he was asked, “If you were given another chance to be born, would you not like again to be a physicist? Much that you have been doing has been left incomplete. Obviously you would like to complete it.”Einstein replied, “Absolutely not. If I am given another chance, I would rather be a plumber than a physicist, because my whole life has been used by the politicians. I have been deceived.”But the whole of science is in the same position. It is not a superficial phenomenon. The reasons are deeper – perhaps the scientists are not even aware. The mind is the politician and the whole of science is nothing but the search for power. And that’s what politics is – a search for power in another direction, and one day finally they are going to meet.One day the scientist is going to need the support of the politician because scientific instruments, labs, are becoming so complicated and so costly that no scientist will be able to afford them, as in the old days. Galileo could work in his own house with a small lab of his own – private. That is no longer possible. A nuclear plant has to be supported by a great nation with a huge amount of money, and thousands of scientists have to be supported.A single scientist cannot work… Things have become so complicated that all scientific research has finally to be subordinated to the politicians. And once you are in their hands – just servants – they are going to use whatever you produce for their own purposes. You may not be producing them for destruction. That is not the point. You are producing under politicians, with their money, with their power. You are simply a servant. You are not going to decide what is going to be done with your discoveries, with your inventions.The politicians have their own ends, but I can see a very deep connection. It is the same mind that moves in the direction of science, a search for power; reduce the unknown into the known, and the mind becomes powerful. The politician is also on the same search, the search for domination, power. And if science can support this, then the politician is willing to manage all the money, all the manpower, all the intelligence that is needed by science. But whatever it produces will be used for more power, for more domination, for a world-conquering, destructive process.The heart has nothing to do with the known or the unknown. The heart is concerned with the unknowable. You can experience it, you can have all of it – the whole mystery of it, but don’t ask for its demystification. That’s what we are always asking: the mystery should be explained in a logical and rational way, so we can become powerful over it.This is an ego trip. Knowledge is an ego trip. The heart is the world of love, not of logic, and the heart is not at all concerned with any ego trips. It knows nothing of the ego. It is very humble, very simple, very childlike.You are asking, “Could you please speak of the mysteries of the heart?” I can manage, I am managing even this very moment for you to experience something of the mysterious, of the unknowable. It is surrounding you here. In this silence you can have a taste, you can enter the mystery of the heart, but slip down from the head. Don’t ask for any explanation. Just be a little child who does not ask anything, who accepts everything.Do you remember your childhood? It will help. Mostly we forget all about our real childhood. Do you remember the time when you were only two years old? You don’t. People start remembering only from about four years old. That is the end of childhood. You have become part of the society. You have started learning its alphabet, its manners.Parents feel very happy when a child starts being mannerly, starts talking with people the way grown-ups should talk. Parents feel immensely happy but they don’t know what they have destroyed. They have destroyed a mysterious world – the world of fairies, the world of the wonderlands. The child was living in an innocence that they have completely erased.That’s why if you go backward trying to remember, you will be finally stuck somewhere around the age of four. Perhaps the women may be stuck at the age of three, because girls are one year ahead of boys. They mature sooner. They become civilized one year earlier. They behave better.Experienced mothers have told me that even in their pregnant state, after the third or fourth month, they can feel whether it is a girl or a boy because the boy starts playing football. The girl remains quiet, relaxed, but the boy starts kicking here and there. That is going to be his lifelong thing. He is starting to rehearse before he comes out. Girls are quieter. Boys cannot even sit quietly for a few moments; they need continuous occupation, something has to be done. And this remains a lifelong thing.Because the girls are more centered and more silent, they start learning social manners earlier than the boys. Boys have many other occupations – so many things have to be done, so they are always diverted. In schools, in colleges, in universities, they can’t compete with the girls. Girls are always coming first in the class, are always getting the gold medals. It is very strange that all their gold medals are used only for finding a good husband. That means a rich husband – a doctor, an engineer, somebody with the possibility of being a professional success. But boys cannot compete with girls for the simple reason that their minds are diverted into so many directions that they cannot concentrate.If you go backward you will be stuck either at the age of four or at the age of three. But you don’t remember what happened in those three or four years because nothing logical happened, nothing rational happened, you did not ask for any explanation. You simply enjoyed the beautiful colors of the flowers, you enjoyed running after butterflies, you enjoyed collecting seashells, colored stones. And you were so immensely happy for no reason at all. Just because you had collected some seashells you thought, “What can be more beautiful? What more could Alexander the Great brag about?” You had the whole world in your hands because you had collected a few wildflowers. You were enjoying very much, rejoicing, but you have forgotten all that authentic childhood.The mystic has to learn to be a child again, and because you have been a child, the second childhood is not difficult. It is already there deep down in your being. It has to be rediscovered. I will not say “discovered,” I would refer to it as “rediscovery” as you have known it already. And once you enter that magic circle of your childhood, you will know the mysteries of the heart. But nobody can speak about them.It is good that nobody can speak about them, otherwise you will never discover them yourself. You will remain with the explanations, with the ideologies. Hung up in the head, you won’t enter the mysteries themselves. But now nature leaves no alternative: either you have to go into the heart yourself or you have to remain a superficial human being without any significance, without any grandeur.Be a child again. That is the whole psychology of meditation.Miss Goodbody, the pretty young school teacher, noticed that little Ernie had a gleam in his eye and his gaze followed her all around the room. He obviously had a crush on her, so she called him aside after school.“Ernest,” she begins, “your grades have been slipping lately and I notice that you are not paying attention in class. Is something distracting you?”“Yes, Miss Goodbody,” says Ernie in a soft voice.“By any chance,” she asks compassionately, “is it me?”Little Ernie nods and the teacher smiles. “That’s very sweet,” says Miss Goodbody, “I’m very flattered. And to tell you the truth, I hope to have a husband one day who is as bright and cute as you.”“Then why not me?” asks Ernie.“Well,” says Miss Goodbody, “I don’t want a child.”“Okay,” replies Ernie, “I promise to be super-careful.”Just start being a little more poetic, start loving more the things of the heart – music, painting, sculpture. Arrange your life not around the head but around the heart, in friendship, in love, in compassion. Rather than going after explanations, go after experiences, and you will be preparing the right path toward the heart.One day, it explodes in tremendous luminosity and fills your whole being with a light of the beyond. And then you don’t need any explanation. The experience itself is yours – what is the point of any explanation? Explanations are for those who are utterly poor as far as experience is concerned. I don’t want my people to be poor. I want you to be as rich as possible – and the only riches are of the heart.Once you are richer in the heart, a new dimension opens toward the being. You cannot bypass the heart. From the head there is no direct route to the being. First you have to come into the heart, and then only can you pass deeper into being. And from being, there is the ultimate quantum leap into the cosmic, into the ultimate, into the absolute. You disappear just like a dewdrop in an ocean.Moishe is employed as a groom working in the Czar’s stables. One day the crown prince comes rushing into the stable. “Moishe,” he calls, “get the finest carriage ready. The princess is coming home, I just received a telegram. The best harness with the bells and feathers.”While he is getting everything ready, Moishe notices that one of the horses has an erection. “Hey!” he says to the horse. “Who had the telegram, you or the prince?”Moishe must have been an innocent person. These innocent people are not counted at all by our so-called sophisticated society. We don’t pay any respect to children. We don’t pay any respect to those whose eyes are still filled with wonder. We have created a world just out of the head, denying everything else, even the existence of the heart.Ask the physiologist and he will say there is no mystery in the heart – it is just a pump, no heart is there. It is simply a pumping station for the blood – what kind of mysteries are you asking about? A pumping station is a pumping station. The physiologist will not accept that you are feeling a deep love arising in your heart. He will laugh. He will say, “In a pumping station? Love arising?” He will not accept that because of love you are having heartache – not possible. There may be some malfunctioning in the mechanism, but it can’t be love.Science cannot accept the existence of love. Neither can it accept the existence of your heart, nor the existence of your soul, nor the existence of any mysteries which are beyond logic. Maybe today they are beyond, but tomorrow they are going to be explained away.I say unto you that science is a very incomplete approach to life. Our society is very lopsided because it has not taken note of the inner which is as big as the outer. There is a vast universe outside you and there is a universe similarly vast inside you. You are just standing between two infinities, two eternities. And because you are standing just in between these two wonderlands, you have the opportunity to enjoy both.I am not against the outer. I am against the emphasis that only the outer exists and there is no inner. The inner is far more important because it is your very being. By not knowing it, not experiencing it, not going deeper into it, your life will remain empty, just a long, long, drag – boredom, depression. Nothing will flower in you, no songs will be heard within your being, no sunrises, no flowers, no stars. And all that was possible, you just never moved inward.Moving inward is the path to the divine. Moving outward takes you toward objects. But you are not an object. You are a deep subjectivity and this subjectivity has to be explored. That is the ultimate mystery.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 19 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there any difference between the state of no-mind and being present?It is an intellectual question, nothing to do with your experience; because if you have experienced even a glimpse of no-mind, all questions including this will simply disappear. Questions belong to the territory of the mind. No-mind means absolute silence – no question, no answer, no thought at all. Hence we call it no-mind.First you have to understand the mind because that’s where you are, that’s from where the question is arising. Unless you understand your space – the point from where you are raising the question – you will not be able, even intellectually, to comprehend some difference between no-mind and being present. There is no difference in experience, just two names for the same experience from two different aspects, two different angles.No-mind is experienced within you. Nobody else can see it; it is purely subjective. With no-mind comes tremendous presence. When you are in the mind you are almost absent. The quantity of your presence or absence has to be measured by your consciousness. You have such a small layer of consciousness – that’s your only presence. Otherwise, ninety percent you are absent.But the man of no-mind is one hundred percent present. You can feel his presence from the outside. You cannot see his no-mind. The presence of his being is a radiation of a silent state within. That is beyond you, but if you are available, receptive, you can experience something of the tremendous presence of his being. In each of his gestures, in each of his looks, in each of his words, or even in his silence, you can be touched by his presence of being.The presence of being comes into existence only when the person as such disappears. It is the melted state of the person – the presence – as if the flower has disappeared and only the fragrance has remained. You cannot catch hold of it, but you can be surrounded by it. Such people who have their being absolutely present – one hundred percent alert – are known in the world of language as having charisma. There is no other charisma. There is only one charisma and one charismatic aura and that aura comes from no-mind. But no-mind is the center within and the aura is the circumference of that mind, that no-mind.When inside you everything becomes silent, you are no longer as you used to be – a person. Now you are just a fragrance, a presence. But your presence has deepened. It has become a solid pillar of light.Anybody who is intelligent is bound to feel something new that he has never experienced before. So these are two viewpoints: one is the inner experience of no-mind, and the other is from outside. It is the by-product of no-mind, the presence of being. But first you have to understand the mind because that’s where you are, and that’s from where the journey has to start toward no-mind, culminating finally into a beautiful fragrance, awareness, a magic aura around you.People have named it in different ways because people are different. Somebody will say “It is a hypnotic force.” Somebody will say “It is something like magnetism.” Somebody will say “It is mesmerism.” Somebody will say “It is charisma.” Somebody will say “We don’t know exactly what it is.” One thing is certain: it has a tremendous gravity, it pulls you toward itself. And if you are courageous, you can be drowned in it and you can be transformed in that drowning. It will be your death and your resurrection, both. As you are, you will die, as you should be, you will be born.But the mind is a very dark place. To comprehend light from there is almost like a blind man trying to comprehend light.A young English gentleman returns from a stay at a stately home.“How was your weekend?” asks a friend.“Well,” he replies, “if the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine had been as old as the chicken, and the chicken had been as tender as the maid, and the maid had been as willing as the duchess, it would have been a perfect weekend.”This is how the mind functions. If you look into it you will start laughing at your own mind. It is never in the present. It can’t have presence because the basic quality is missing. It is never in the present. Either it is in the past, which is no more – just a memory, a faded memory, a faraway echo; perhaps a dream that you had sometime, but not more than that – signatures on water. You have not even completed your signature and it has disappeared. That’s how the past goes on disappearing. You have not even lived it and it slips out of your hands. And then the mind goes on thinking about it.So either the mind is past-oriented or it is future-oriented. Because it has missed the past, out of sheer necessity a projection arises about the future. The past is no longer in your hands, it is gone, and gone forever; there is no way to bring it back. All that you can do is to project into the future whatever you wanted to do, however you wanted to live… Naturally, while you are thinking about the future, making it fuller than your yesterdays, you are missing the present moment. Your mind moves like a pendulum from the past to the future, from the future to the past. It never stops just in the middle, where reality is.You are always real, but your mind is always unreal. You are always in the present, you cannot be anywhere else. But your mind is never here, it is all over the world. It will not be just at the point where you are. Except for that place, it can roam all over the world. It can go to the moon, it can go to Everest… Everything is possible for it, whether it is memory or imagination, but the mind has no contact with the present. Your body is far more present, it is totally different from your mind.And, very strangely, all the religions have condemned the body not the mind because they themselves were using the mind for the faraway future, farther away than ordinary people think about. You think about tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, or next year at the most. But all the religions were thinking about a future beyond death. Their heaven and their hell and their God are all so far away from the present moment.And remember: you will always be in the present moment. And the distance between you and those imaginary spaces in the future will remain the same. It won’t change. Because all the religions were using the mind as their foundation, they had to deny the body. It is very unfortunate, but nothing can be done about it. It has happened.Your consciousness is exactly in the present, just like your body. So I am in favor of your body because it shares one thing in common with your being: your being is in the present, your body is also in the present. Only the mind is continuously moving here and there, never coming home.There is a reason for it not to come home: in the present the mind has no function. What can the mind do in the present? The mind’s capacities consist of memory, which is the past, or imagination, which is the future. That is the whole capacity of your mind. There is no place for the present moment. The mind will not know what to do. In the present you cannot remember, you cannot imagine; in the present you can be. But you can be only be in the present when the mind is no longer functioning.Hence, my approach is totally different from all religions: I want you to respect your body because it is in the present. That will give you the clue – a direct route to your being because the being is also in the present. Just leave the mind aside. We are against the body, we are very condemnatory of the body, not knowing at all that this condemnation of the body is breaking the bridge to your being.A man of authentic spirituality is deeply in love with his body because he knows his body shares many things with his being. The mind shares nothing, neither with the body nor with the being. It is an absolute stranger that has been forcibly put into you by the culture, the religion, the society. They are using the mind to enslave you.And because you are in the mind you continuously go on asking about things of which you have no experience. You don’t know what no-mind is, except a word. You don’t know what presence of being is, except that you have heard about it. Just words won’t do.Move away from the mind, and when I say move away from the mind, I am saying move away from the inner chattering. That is the only disturbance that is preventing you from knowing yourself and this beautiful existence. Because your body is in the present, you are in the present, existence is in the present. They are all herenow, only the mind is a strange phenomenon. You have been much manipulated by others. Your educational systems, your friends, your family – everybody is trying to make you a great mind. In other words, everybody is trying to pull you away from the present moment.I am reminded of a great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. He is a specimen of those people who are absolutely in the mind. He lived according to the mind so totally that people used to set their watches whenever they saw Immanuel Kant going to the university. Never… It may rain, it may rain fire, it may rain cats and dogs, it may be utterly cold, snow falling – whatever the situation, Kant would reach the university at exactly the same time all the year round, even on holidays. Such a fixed, almost mechanical… He would go on holiday at exactly the same time, remain in the university library which was specially kept open for him, because otherwise what would he do there the whole day? He was a very prominent, well-known philosopher. He would leave the university at exactly the same time every day.One day it happened…It had rained and there was a lot of mud on the way. One of his shoes got stuck in the mud. He did not stop to take the shoe out because that would have made him reach the university a few seconds late – that was impossible. He left the shoe there. He just arrived with one shoe. The students could not believe it. Somebody asked, “What happened to the other shoe?”He said, “It got stuck in the mud, so I left it there, knowing perfectly well nobody is going to steal one shoe. When I return in the evening, then I will pick it up. But I could not be late.”Once a woman proposed to him, “I want to marry to you” – a beautiful young woman. Perhaps no woman has ever received such an answer, before or after Immanuel Kant. Either you say yes or you say no.Immanuel Kant said, “I will have to do a great deal of research.”The woman asked, “About what?”He said, “I will have to look in all the marriage manuals, all the books concerning marriage, and find out all the pros and cons – whether to marry or not to marry.”The woman could not imagine that this kind of answer had ever been given to any woman before. Even no is acceptable, even yes – although you are getting into misery – is acceptable. But this kind of indifferent attitude toward the woman. He did not say a single sweet word to her; he did not say anything about her beauty. His whole concern was his mind. He had to convince his mind whether or not marriage is logically the right thing.It took him three years. It was really a long search. Day and night he was working on it, and he had found three hundred reasons against marriage and three hundred reasons for marriage. So even after three years the problem was the same.One friend suggested out of compassion, “You’ve wasted three years on this stupid research. In three years you would have experienced all these six hundred, without any research. You should have just said yes to that woman. There was no need to do so much hard work. Three years would have given you all the pros and cons – existentially, experientially.”But Kant said, “I am in a fix. Both are equal, parallel, balanced. There is no way to choose.”The friend suggested, “By the pros you have forgotten one thing: whenever there is a chance, it is better to say yes and go through the experience. That is one thing more in favor of the pros. The cons cannot give you any experience, and only experience has any validity.”He understood, it was intellectually right. He immediately went to the woman’s house, knocked on her door. Her old father opened the door and said, “Young man, you are too late. You took too long in your research. My girl is married and has two children.”That was the last thing that was ever heard about his marriage. From then on no woman ever asked him, and he was not the kind of man to ask anybody. He remained unmarried.The mind is very impotent in a way. It cannot give you any existential juice, any existential experience, and that is the only thing that matters. So please move away from mind. Don’t ask about the difference, because there is no difference between no-mind and being present. No-mind is the inner subjective experience and being present is available for everybody. It is the circumference, and no-mind is the center. They are both together. Neither the circumference can be without the center nor the center can be without the circumference.But the circumference can be experienced, and that’s what has attracted millions of people to a man like Gautam Buddha or Chuang Tzu or Jesus or Moses. It was their integrity, their individuality, their solidity. In comparison to them, people felt hollow. They had immense presence. Other people looked just like shadows, without any souls.George Gurdjieff started saying to his disciples, for the first time in the whole of history – he died in the year nineteen hundred and fifty… He started saying a very strange thing, and although it is not right, he is not wrong. He started saying to people, “You don’t have souls.” What he meant was, “You don’t have any presence, your being is hollow. Inside you there is nothing but darkness, unconsciousness, absence. Everything is absent.”You have been told for centuries that you are born with a soul. It is absolutely wrong according to Gurdjieff. I know and he knows that what he is saying is not the truth, but it is a device. He is making you aware of your hollowness, of your emptiness, and he has chosen the best way to hit the nail on the head. He is saying, “You don’t have souls! Forget all the nonsense that tradition has been telling you. That was a deception, but you accepted the tradition: ‘We have souls already, there is no need to seek and search.’”He said, “You will have to create the soul, you cannot have it just through birth. Through birth, you get only the body. Through your upbringing, you get your mind. And through a conscious effort to transcend into the beyond, you will achieve the soul.”He said definitively that only a very few people have lived with souls. And without a soul, what are you? A cabbage, a cauliflower? I have heard there is some difference between cabbages and cauliflowers. The difference is that the cabbage is uneducated and the cauliflower has college degrees. But that does not make much difference – both are vegetables. Your life is a vegetation.Of course I cannot agree with Gurdjieff as far as the truth is concerned. But I agree with him and his compassion; he did not bother about the truth. He bothered more about you. He wanted to make you aware that unless you do something, you are not going to create a soul. Soul is your own creation. But he went too far. I am not ready to deny you the soul, I only deny you the awareness of it. You are born with the soul as you are born with the body. The mind is a social product. You are not born with the mind. That’s why a Mohammedan has a different mind and a Hindu has a different mind and a Christian has a different mind. You can see their differences of mind.Since India’s freedom, for forty years, Hindus have been fighting for only one thing, as if that is going to solve all human problems.The greatest rich man of India, Jugal Kishore Birla – he is dead now – had been hearing about me. Finally, he could not resist the temptation and he invited me to his palatial house in New Delhi.The man who had brought me the invitation – I was staying with him – was the MP from my constituency, and I could not say no to him. He was an old man, seventy-five years old. He was the only man other than Winston Churchill who had remained a member of parliament for sixty years continuously without any gap. He was called the Father of Parliament. He entered parliament when he was only fifteen. He belonged to one of the richest families himself, and he and Jugal Kishore Birla’s family belonged to the same caste.He persisted. I was reluctant. I said, “What purpose is going to be served by my meeting that old man? I know about him… Perhaps he does not know as well about me.”But he insisted, “He is not far away, and he has been very interested in you and he wants to talk to you.”So I went, and what was the first thing he asked me? He said, “I can give you a blank checkbook. You can use as much money as you want. All that has to be done is somehow to create a movement in the country so that cow slaughter is stopped.”I said, “What is going to happen if cow slaughter is stopped?”“All problems of the world will be solved.”Only a Hindu mind can think that by not killing cows all problems will be solved. This is such a stupid idea. But the Hindu has been so influenced for centuries, continuously conditioned that the cow is the mother – although they don’t accept the bull as their father, which is a logical and rational approach.I asked Jugal Kishore Birla, “Do you accept the bull as your father?”He said, “What are you talking about?” He became angry.I said, “Don’t become angry. If the cow is your mother, then some bull is bound to be your father.”He looked at the MP who had brought me and I said, “You can keep your checkbook. Perhaps you will find some idiot who can do this work. I cannot say to anybody that the cow is my mother.”He said to the MP, “What is the matter? Is he not a Hindu?” Because a Hindu cannot think that anybody can deny that the cow is the mother.I would have no objection if they were accepting all animals as mothers, as fathers, as brothers, as sisters, at least as faraway cousins. It would have been acceptable; it would have been a beautiful world if people accepted animals as their brothers and sisters. But just choosing the cow – that is the Hindu conditioning, that is the Hindu mind.Every person gets a mind ready-made, and that mind is being forced into him by all methods and means. That is the only part that has not been given to you by existence. Existence has given you the body: love the body, rejoice in the body, let the body dance without any guilt and without any fear of these religions, and you will be coming closer to your being through the body.Nobody has come closer to the being through the mind. The mind is the most arbitrary, artificial creation by the society to subdue the individual, to destroy his individuality, and to destroy the discovery of his own being.You are born with the soul, but you are absolutely unaware of it – because of the mind. The mind never allows you to be in the present. That’s the reason my insistence on meditation is so strong – because meditation simply means a method to get rid of the mind.The moment the mind is not there, suddenly you are in a new space: so fresh, so beautiful, so blissful. That is your soul, that is your no-mind. And once you have entered that space, that space starts growing around you and creates a certain energy field. That becomes your presence of being.Osho,I suspected you of stealing my creativity, and in my unconsciousness made a secret bargain with you, “Okay, take it. And in exchange give me love and meditation and bliss and myself.” You gave me glimpses, and then they too disappeared, and I was angry at you.Beloved thief – I love calling you “Beloved thief” – beloved thief, will you steal me?Prem Pankaja, you are saying, “I suspected you of stealing my creativity…” That’s absolutely wrong. In the first place, what was your creativity – third-rate trashy novels? You know it perfectly well. You thought that was creativity?I have not stolen your creativity. Just by being here you became aware what kind of rubbish you were writing. Yes, those novels were selling because there are people hungry for trash, just waiting for something third-class – they cannot comprehend anything better. I have not stolen your creativity because my whole purpose is to give you creativity. And if your old creativity is gone it is because you are now more understanding, more alert, more conscious, so you cannot go on creating that trash.I have cleaned you of all rubbish. You had come to me with a mind full of bullshit. It has been a tremendous work to clean your mind. And you tell me that I have stolen your creativity? Now there is a possibility of your being creative. Now you can create something really beautiful, something that remains even when you are gone, which has a longer life than your life.Even today the absurd stories of Chuang Tzu are as beautiful, as enchanting, as they would have been to his contemporaries. Twenty-five centuries have passed, but those stories of Chuang Tzu still retain the freshness of this morning’s roses. And he wrote nothing but absurd stories – absurd for the simple reason that the whole humanity is absurd – to make you aware how absurd you are.One morning he woke up very sad. That was very strange because he was a man who was continuously blissful, an enlightened being. His disciples said, “This is a very strange experience. We never expected that you could ever be sad.”He said, “But something happened. I was also not expecting it, but it happened. Things go on happening without your expectations. And I am in such a dilemma.”They said, “Just tell us. Perhaps we can be of some use, of some help.”He said, “I will tell you, knowing that nobody can help me, neither you nor anybody else. But I will tell you, just to give you some idea of how much I am in a dilemma.“Last night when I went to sleep, I knew perfectly well that I was Chuang Tzu. And in the night I had a dream that I had become a butterfly.”All the disciples laughed. They said, “You are too much. A dream is a dream, don’t be bothered about it.”Chuang Tzu said, “You have not heard the whole story. Then in the morning when I woke up, I found that I am Chuang Tzu again.”So they said, “The problem is solved. What is the problem? It was just a dream, it has passed away. You are again Chuang Tzu.”He said, “You idiots, you don’t understand the problem. The problem is: if Chuang Tzu can become a butterfly, then what is the guarantee that it is not now the butterfly who has become Chuang Tzu? And do you want me to be a butterfly? My problem is that a great doubt has arisen in me. I think perhaps the butterfly has gone to sleep now and is dreaming that she is Chuang Tzu. If Chuang Tzu can dream that he is a butterfly, what is wrong with vice versa? The butterfly can dream. And I have lost my identity. Who am I, I ask you?”They were all silent. He had been telling absurd stories: now he has created an absurd situation. What to say to this man? And he was their master, so they could not be rude to him.They said, “We should go and meditate over it. What else can we do?”Then his chief disciple, Lieh Tzu, came and all the disciples said, “Perhaps you can do something. The master is very sad. He is sitting in his bed, not coming out.”Lieh Tzu listened to everything, then went to the well, pulled out a bucket of water, carried in the bucket of water, and poured it on Chuang Tzu.He said, “You idiot, what are you doing?” And he jumped out of bed.Lieh Tzu said, “I am bringing you to your senses. Now tell me who you are, a butterfly or Chuang Tzu?”Chuang Tzu laughed. He said, “My son, if you had been here before, you could have saved me from so much sadness. The whole morning I was waiting for you, hoping that perhaps you would find some solution.”Lieh Tzu said, “Should I bring another bucket?”Chuang Tzu said, “No, this is enough. I have found my identity. The water was too cold and you have spoiled my bed too.”Now the story is still fresh, it will never be old. It will always remain fresh, as if it has just happened. You can see the whole thing: Chuang Tzu jumping out of the bed saying, “If you had been here before, you could have saved me from so much sadness.”Creativity is a very rare phenomenon. For example, Kahlil Gibran wrote his first book, The Prophet, when he was only twenty-one years old. Then his whole life he tried to write something better than The Prophet, but he failed. There are at least thirty books written by a more mature, more experienced, more educated man, but even the last book he wrote before he died is nothing compared to The Prophet.If you ask me, only The Prophet is the creative expression of his being. Everything else is just the mind trying to be creative. The Prophet came out of his being without any effort. He was so young, and he didn’t think he was going to produce a masterpiece which would remain significant for centuries. After he produced it, the whole world responded with such great respect. It has been translated into all the languages; people find it holier than any Bible or any Koran or any Bhagavadgita.But he himself got into trouble not knowing that The Prophet came out of no-mind. He was just playing; he had no idea that he could become a great writer. He was not writing for anybody. He was filled with insights and he was putting them on paper. His friends persuaded him, saying, “This is a great work, you should publish it.” He was reluctant, hesitant, thinking, “I was only twenty-one years old when I wrote this. People will laugh.”But finally they succeeded in persuading him, and the book was published. After that he tried thirty other books along the same lines. But they looked like carbon copies, faraway echoes of The Prophet – but not that solidity, not that intuitiveness, not that beauty, not that grandeur.And it is not only with Kahlil Gibran; it is so with many creative people. Not all that they have produced is creative; it is production, composition. It may even be good, but it is not something that is going to be eternally fresh and young. Unless something remains eternally fresh and young, you have not created anything.Michael Naimy has written one book, The Book of Mirdad, which in quality goes even higher than Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. But Mikhail Naimy is again in the same trap. He must have thought that if he could write The Book of Mirdad, which should remain as long as man is on this planet, one of the greatest creations of man… He struggled his whole life, but he could not surpass it. The Book of Mirdad had happened to him.Creativity is not something that you do, you simply allow the universal force to function through you. You become just a medium. You give your hands, your body, your heart, your being to existence and then existence sings a song and it becomes eternal, as eternal as existence itself. Only that is creativity. Other than that, I cannot conceive of anything creative.I have not stolen your creativity, Pankaja; I want you to be creative! You have the possibility, the potentiality, but you are wasting your potential on absolutely meaningless novels. Yes, they were giving you money, they were being sold. But nobody will read your novels twice; once is enough, more than enough. Anybody who reads your novel will read it and then throw it out of the train window. It is of no use after that. It is just ordinary trash – and you know it.But you don’t know one thing: that you have the possibility of becoming a creator. I have taken away your so-called creativity to give you an authentic relationship with existence so something great can be born out of you. And that is the greatest bliss and benediction any man can experience: when existence uses you as a medium. That means existence has loved you enough, accepted you deeply – your worth, your value. Existence needed you.And this is one of the things to be remembered: that the greatest need of man is to be needed. If nobody needs you, you will commit suicide. And if existence itself needs you, you will be raised to such heights that you have never dreamed of. I would like you to be a creator. And it is good that you are finished with your old so-called creativity.You are saying, “…and in my unconsciousness made a secret bargain with you: ‘Okay, take it. And in exchange give me love and meditation and bliss and myself.’” You are asking too much. I am an old Jew. For all your trash you have made a secret bargain with me to give you “love, meditation, bliss, and myself”! There is no need to make a bargain with me. I am not a businessman. Once upon a time I was a Jew, but no more.You can have it all – love, meditation, bliss and yourself – for nothing. You don’t have to pay for them, but you will have to work for them. You will have to work upon yourself. I am showering love, but you are protecting yourself with an open umbrella. Now if I take the umbrella you will say, “You are stealing again.” And I don’t want to interfere in your freedom. It is your umbrella and if you want to open it, it is your decision. But you can close it – it is not raining. Just keep it by your side.You are from England… These two places are strange: England and Bengal in India. No psychoanalyst has ever tried to figure out why these people are umbrella-fixated. They talk about father-fixation, mother-fixation – what about umbrella-fixation?Again you are wrong, “You gave me glimpses…” I have never given you any glimpses. Whenever you closed your umbrella you got them. And this is beautiful – first you think that I gave you glimpses, then naturally I know the second thing is going to happen, “…and then they too disappeared, and I was angry at you.” Now don’t pull me unnecessarily into your mess! Just look at your umbrella. Whenever you close it, you have glimpses; whenever you open it, glimpses disappear. It has nothing to do with me. Just watch your mind.Whenever your mind comes in, the glimpses disappear. You allow the mind in spite of me; whenever your mind is absent in spite of you, you have the glimpses. Don’t throw the responsibility on me in any way. I can neither give you glimpses nor can I take them away. I never interfere in anybody’s freedom. To me it is sacrilegious; your freedom is such a sacred thing to me. I want you to be dignified in your freedom.These words that you write take you in the wrong direction. You start looking for me to give you something. You have everything you need. You just need to discover it within yourself. I can show you the way, I can show you the methods – that’s what I am doing every day. Somehow – from some angle, from some aspect – perhaps you may discover how to find your treasure. It is your treasure; if you have lost it, it is your own blindness.The mind is utterly blind. Put the mind aside and you will regain your insight. The Hindus in this country have called it the third eye. When you move beyond the mind, you have a strange experience – an eye opening inward. You start seeing your own splendor. You are as full of bliss, splendor, glory as any Gautam Buddha. Existence is very communist. It gives you the inner treasures equally. Differences arise because you discover the treasures slowly.But the last thing you are saying is right. You are saying, “Beloved thief – I love calling you ‘beloved thief’ – beloved thief, will you steal me?” Perhaps only in this country! God has been given many names. The Sufis have given God one hundred names: ninety-nine can be pronounced, the hundredth can only be experienced, not pronounced. In India there are thousands of names given to God. The most beautiful is hari. And hari means “the great thief.” The really courageous are the people who call God the great thief because he steals your heart!So you can say it, although I have not stolen anything – I take away only that which does not belong to you, and I give you only that which you have got already. So my work is very simple! But if you love the word thief – it is an ancient name for God – you can use that name, whether I steal anything from you or not.Sometimes I think of stealing your umbrella. What will I do with an umbrella? Thinking about it, I don’t need it. I have never had an umbrella in my whole life. So once in a while I become attracted – why not have Pankaja’s umbrella? That is the only experience I’m missing. But then it is unnecessary because I never go anywhere. If I keep the umbrella open inside my room, you will start thinking, “Now he has really gone crazy.”But it will be great if you can simply make a gift of your umbrella to me. In that way I cannot say no to you – I never say no to anyone. You will enjoy giving a gift, although I know the umbrella is very old. I will not even touch it, my doctors won’t allow me. They go on insisting, “You should not touch old rotten things.” They say, “You are allergic, you should not touch such things.”But still I will accept your umbrella, just so that you can get rid of it. I will throw it away; there is no other way. It cannot enter my house, but as a gift, just to help you to get rid of it… And once you are vulnerable, open, and receptive, all my love is yours. Meditation will grow on its own accord with your trust.And as far as the last thing is concerned, “Will you steal me?” I have done that already; otherwise you would not have been here. The people who are with me are the people I have already stolen. I have to do strange things, steal people from different countries.Every country is angry. The German government is angry that every German who goes to Pune simply disappears, never comes back. Now the Japanese are trying to compete with the Germans. Wives come and they forget all about their husbands. Husbands come and they write to me, “I don’t want to go back home, although I have a wife and children. What do you suggest?” What can I suggest? You have got a good opportunity to escape. Just be here. If your wife really hates you, she will come. It all depends on how much she hates you! She may even become a sannyasin, just to harass you.Pankaja, you need not be worried about that. Pankaja goes back and forth. She goes to England and then within a few days she is back. I can understand her problems, but once you are my people, then you don’t belong to any family, to any race, to any nation, to any religion. You belong to the whole universe.Mrs. Grumblebum is always calling on the doctor for medicine for her aches and pains. One day the cures fail. She dies and is buried in the local cemetery.Two weeks later, the doctor himself dies and is buried in the plot next to Mrs. Grumblebum. The mourners are just leaving the cemetery, when the doctor hears a tapping noise on the side of his coffin.“Well, Mrs. Grumblebum,” he asks, “what is it now?”“Please, doctor,” she says, “can you give me something for worms?”Just old habits, although they have died. Pankaja, it is just old habit that you think you are separate from me and my people. Drop that old habit. That which you used to be is dead; there is now someone absolutely new.Paddy gets a little high at the party and starts to make a play for the luscious babe playing the piano. But in his drunken fog he trips, and the piano cover closes on his fingers.His wife, Maureen, goes over and picks him off the floor. “Remind me to put a piece of ice on your black eye when we get home,” she says soothingly.“But I haven’t got a black eye,” says Paddy.“I know,” replies Maureen, “but you’re not home yet.”You are a long-time, old sannyasin, but you have never been totally here. And it happens to people who have been working with their mind and intellect. They cannot be in this silence, in this presence. They become fidgety, their mind starts dreaming about going here and going there. For years you have been repeating the same cycle. You cannot go away from me, you cannot go away from this silence. Wherever you go I am going to haunt you. So you go on coming back, but this split situation of going and coming disturbs your getting in touch with your being.For a few days you try, and as you come closer to experiencing something, that is the moment when the mind makes trouble and starts dreaming of going somewhere. Always remember: the mind creates trouble only on the boundary line. It is an indication that this is the moment to remain in your meditation. Perhaps only one step more and you will be out of the fog of the drunken mind.Before reaching the boundary line, you go away. So you have been coming and going for years. Many things that would have happened to you, you yourself have managed not to let them happen to you. It is enough time; I am not going to be here forever! I don’t want you to repent when I am gone, because then you will think you have missed an opportunity – perhaps for many lives.It will be easy to find another Gautam Buddha sometime in the future, because he is a traditional saint. It will be possible to find a Jesus Christ. It is almost certain you will find him someday because he was not enlightened; he has to come back to the earth. But you will not find me again, for two reasons. One, I am not going to come back to any body again and the second reason – you will never again find even a similar person. I have been so eccentric, crazy, so different from the traditional saint, that I don’t think anybody else after me is going to dare to copy me. It is impossible.You will repent. There is still time – your spring can come. There is still time for you to achieve your ultimate potential. But don’t waste it in wavering. If you go on taking the plant from one place to another place to another place, it will never grow roots. You have to leave it in one place so that it can grow roots. Without roots there are no flowers. You are longing for the flowers, but you are not taking care of the roots.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 20 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Thank you for letting us taste from your ocean of consciousness. Both Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff were talking about their waves of consciousness.Osho, are they the waves of your ocean?J. Krishnamurti and George Gurdjieff are not just two waves in the ocean of consciousness. They are the very ocean of consciousness itself. The moment you become enlightened you are no longer an individual. You lose your ego, and with the ego you lose all your limits, all your boundaries. They are not waves of my ocean; the ocean belongs to no one. I am the same ocean as they are.You are also the same ocean as I am. You just have to wake up and realize the fact that your imprisonment is your imagination, that your fetters are nothing but your thoughts, that your bondage is nothing but your own unconscious way of living. Otherwise you are as oceanic as any Gautam Buddha, as any Lao Tzu, as any Kabir, as anyone who has ever realized his ultimate, his sat-chit-anand.We are not separate. We belong to one existence without any demarcation lines. All limitations are mind projections. The moment you are beyond the mind and you can see without the mind directly, you will be surprised that the trees and the stars and the oceans… Nowhere is there any demarcation. The flowers of the trees are your flowers, the greatness of the stars is your greatness, and the smallness of the grass leaves is your smallness. The moment you start feeling this universalness, you have come home.But remember always: do not put me above anybody else, just because I am your master. So don’t say that I am the ocean and J. Krishnamurti and Gurdjieff are just waves. That is ugly. You may not be aware where these kinds of ideas continuously come from, and this is not only the case with you. Just today, Hasya was telling me about some Korean master, Su. He is going to come soon. He has disciples.Lani has just come from Korea. In the Korean language, they have published more than thirty-five books of mine. Hundreds of people are interested in coming. They are not even aware where I am, whether I am still alive or some past master. Not only the so-called disciples go on praising their master as the highest. Even the so-called masters… Certainly they are not masters, just so-called.When Master Su’s disciples asked him, “What are the categories between you and Osho?” he said he belongs to the first category of enlightened people and Osho belongs to the third category of enlightened people.Now such a man cannot be enlightened, to say nothing of first, second and third category: there are no categories in enlightenment. How can you be enlightened and still belong to a certain category? The category is a limitation. But the so-called masters will always put themselves higher than anybody else. The ego lingers on, whether you are in the world of matter, money, power, prestige or whether you are pretending to be a seeker, a searcher, a spiritual being. Even when you start declaring yourself as enlightened you are playing the same old game with new names. There is no difference at all.I am waiting for Master Su to come. He is going to be in trouble! He does not know me. In the first-class enlightened category… Why should a master who belongs to the first class come to a third-class enlightened man in the first place? This is strange! So let him come. He will have to stand in line for the first time in his life.Once you are enlightened there are no categories. Enlightenment simply means going beyond all categories, all mind trips, all ego trips. It is simply becoming one with the universe.The reason for people like Master Su is the simple pious ego, now acting in the name of spirituality. The game is old: one has to be at the top. But why do the disciples do this? The reason is the same. If I am the greatest master, then naturally – you are my disciple – you are the disciple of the greatest master. You are no ordinary disciple, you are not a disciple of a third-class enlightened man!I have told you about one religious cult that exists only around the area of the Taj Mahal. They are called Radhaswamis. They were very much disturbed by the presence of the Taj Mahal. Now the Taj Mahal has nothing to do with their spirituality. But the disturbance began when their master died – they were determined to make his memorial better than the Taj Mahal.The Taj Mahal is unique in the whole world, there is no other building that can be compared to it. It was made by a great emperor. It took nearly twenty years to build, and almost twenty thousand stonecutters, sculptors… Master builders were gathered from faraway countries, the best from Iran, from Turkey, from Egypt, from Arabia. The emperor who was making it ruled over the whole empire of India and all the money was pouring into it.Those twenty thousand people worked almost… When they came they were young; by the time the Taj Mahal was completed, either they were old or dead. The second generation was working. Sometimes they had come old – they were famous so they were brought – so the third generation was working.The emperor was making it as a memorial to his wife, Mumtaj, and on the other side of the river Jamuna, was also making his own memorial. When he died, he would be buried there. Emperors took care while they were alive to make their memorial too, because after they were dead nobody was going to bother to put so much money and effort into it.But his whole treasure was finished with the wife’s memorial. His own memorial has only the foundation stone. He could not complete it because he was dethroned by his own son and kept in jail, and the son immediately dropped the plan for the second memorial.The Taj Mahal is made of white marble, all Italian marble. And the other memorial, just on the other side of the river – between them he was going to make a bridge – was going to be exactly the same as the Taj Mahal, but in black marble. He was creating a beautiful symmetry. The architect was going to be exactly the same, the building exactly the same, just the marble was going to be white on the wife’s memorial and black on his own memorial.Now these followers wanted to try to make something better than the Taj Mahal, because thousands of tourists were coming every day to see the Taj Mahal. Naturally they thought it was not only a question of prestige, it was also a question of business. It had been going on for almost one hundred years.They have been able to make only the ground floor. Certainly they have made it far better than the Taj Mahal, but there seems to be no possibility that they will be able to complete it. They wanted to make it a three-story building, so it goes higher than the Taj Mahal, but all the money they could collect from their followers from all over India is finished. For one hundred years continuously, thousands of workers have been involved in making it. I have seen… Their pillars are so beautiful, so creative and on the pillars they have made creepers in marble. The creepers have flowers of green marble, and on top of the creepers, roses made in rubies, emeralds, diamonds. They have certainly made it clear that if they complete it – even incomplete – it has gone beyond the Taj Mahal. They are immensely happy.When I was speaking at Agra University they invited me to see their incomplete memorial. They have done a tremendously great job. They took me inside. Inside they have a map drawn on the marble and on the map there are fourteen divisions. And they have put each enlightened person that they could think of in the division to which he belongs. There are not only three categories; according to them there are fourteen. Mohammed is in the third division, Jesus is in the fifth – so is Moses. In the sixth is Mahavira and Buddha. In the seventh, Kabir, Nanak, and in that way they went on. The names are engraved in the marble.In the fourteenth there is only one man, their own master, who was not known outside Agra. All his following is centered in Agra. A few people have moved to different places, but basically, it is a one-city-oriented religion. They asked me what was my opinion about this map.I said, “Who has made this map?”They said, “It is in our holy scripture. Our master himself has made this.”I said, “Your master is right. He is in the fourteenth.”They looked at me, because before me they had shown that map to many people. Everybody disagreed because their masters were put in the fifth category, somebody’s master in the third category, somebody’s master at the most in the seventh. After the seventh, the other six planes are empty. The fourteenth, the highest reach of consciousness, has been achieved by their master. Naturally no Hindu will agree, no Mohammedan will agree, no Jaina will agree, no Jew, no Christian, no Buddhist. Nobody is going to agree. I was the first man to agree with what they said.They said, “You are the only man who understands.”I said, “Certainly, because I am on the fifteenth and I know your master is trying, making every effort, to enter the fifteenth. I don’t allow him! He tries hard, but I don’t open the door. And as long as I am there on the fifteenth – and there is no sixteenth, so I cannot go anywhere else – your master has no chance.”They said, “Fifteenth? But in our scripture there are only fourteen.”“I think that’s natural. Your master knows about only fourteen because he has never entered the fifteenth.”They were very shocked and angry. Their whole desire is that their master is accepted as the highest, then they are certainly the most significant people on the earth, following the greatest master. And the master was also on the same trip because in his own writing, which nobody reads except his own disciples – and they are not many, but they are very rich people…They showed me their scripture. He has written with his own hand the names of Gautam Buddha and Jesus and Kabir on lower steps, and his own name he has written on the highest. That very stupidity shows that he is not even on the lowest, the first floor. He does not know anything about enlightenment. He may have been a learned scholar. That seems to be a possibility because he writes well. But he is writing everything as a parrot, repeating from old Indian scriptures. There is not a single statement which is original.I asked them, “Show me something that is original. A man who has reached the highest plane of consciousness must say something which nobody has said because nobody else has reached that plane. Show me something. Because all that is written in it has been said by people who are just on the third, the fourth, or the fifth. What is your master’s own statement? What is his testimony?”They could not find a single statement in their whole book which was not stolen. But this thing goes on and on.The man who brought me to Pune for the first time, about thirty years ago, was a follower of Mahavira and he was also a follower of Mahatma Gandhi. He lived with Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram for years. His name was Rishabhdas Ranka. Many people of Pune must know him. Because Mahatma Gandhi was teaching continuously that all religions are the same, essentially the same – no religion is higher than the other, they are all equal – he also learned, like a parrot, to repeat it.Then he wrote a book on Mahavira and Gautam Buddha, and he showed me the manuscript. I simply saw the title and I said to him, “Just look at your title. I don’t have to read your book – your title says everything.” In his title he wrote: Bhagwan Mahavira and Mahatma Gautam Buddha. Bhagwan is used for Mahavira, and for Gautam Buddha, just mahatma. There are so many mahatmas; mahatma is not something very special or unique.I said, “You are writing this book to show that Jainism and Buddhism are equal, and their message essentially is the same. And Gautam Buddha and Mahavira are equally enlightened.”He said, “Yes.”I said, “Then why this difference? Either put mahatma in front of both or put bhagwan.”Now he was in a great dilemma. He could not write Mahatma Mahavira. The Jainas would kill him, they would expel him – he was a Jaina. Nobody, not a single Jaina in twenty-five centuries, has made such an insult – writing about Mahavira as just a mahatma. Mahatmas are available in this country for one rupee a dozen. They are so cheap, every village has its own mahatma. But he was not willing to write bhagwan before Gautam Buddha because no Jaina accepts Gautam Buddha as equal to Mahavira. He is enlightened, but not of the same height. Mahavira’s enlightenment is complete; Buddha’s enlightenment is incomplete – partial enlightenment, not total. And the same is the situation of the Buddhists. I have asked Buddhist monks. They are not ready to call…One Buddhist monk was born an Englishman, but got converted when he was young. I don’t know whether he is still alive or not, but he was a world-famous man, Sangharakshita. He lived in the Himalayas, in Kalimpong. He used to come to the university where I was teaching, and he became interested in me because he was always invited to the Philosophy Department. I used to raise questions and he was in difficulty trying to answer them. But he was a very nice person, he never became angry. On the contrary, if he could not answer me, he used to ask if I had some idea of what the answer could be.I said, “I never ask anything unless I know the answer.”We became friends. He even started staying with me while he was in the city. I asked him, “What do you think about Mahavira?” Mahavira and Buddha were contemporaries.He said, “About Mahavira? He was enlightened, but not so completely as Gautam Buddha.”The same nonsense goes on around the world. But the reason the disciples are concerned or the so-called masters are concerned is the same. It is the ego that needs a certain kind of gratification.As far as J. Krishnamurti and George Gurdjieff are concerned, they are both enlightened. Both have disappeared in the same ocean in which all enlightened people have always disappeared. And beyond enlightenment there is no distinction. There is no question, because the person is no more. When the dewdrop falls into the ocean, do you think there will be differences? When another dewdrop falls into the ocean, will it only partially fall into the ocean? Can a dewdrop partially fall into the ocean? Is it possible for any dewdrop to be different from any other dewdrop? They will all become the ocean.I am a clear-cut, straightforward person. I don’t want any nonsense to grow around me and I want the same to be true about you. When I say that every enlightened being disappears into the same universe – and there is no question of anybody being higher or lower – you have to learn it. It is the first time that anybody is telling his disciples to drop the ego which is hiding behind the idea of “I have got the greatest master.”It has nothing to do with the master, it has something to do with your own ego. Drop it. I am not the greatest master. In the world of masters there is no one who is great, and there is no one who is not great. All these categories are of the mind; they don’t apply when the mind is no more.You are simply an utter silence, a pure presence with no person there. It is the same experience, the same taste, the same sweetness, the same blissfulness, the same truth, the same consciousness, the same ecstasy.Osho,“Living in the here and now, acting spontaneously,” will I find that my actions will still be guided by experience and responsibility?I find it always difficult to answer questions which are only intellectual, which arise out of your fear, out of your reason, but not out of your experience, not out of your meditation. You are saying, “Living in the here and now, acting spontaneously…” and the statement is in inverted commas. You must be quoting me. It is still not your experience. Just because I have been saying “living in the here and now, acting spontaneously” is all that can be said about meditation – and if this is possible, everything else will settle down on its own accord – your mind starts spinning questions.You are asking “…will I find that my actions will still be guided by experience and responsibility?” You don’t know anything about spontaneity, you don’t know anything about living here and now. Not only that, you don’t know anything about responsibility and you don’t know anything about experience. Your whole question is absolutely rootless, but I will try to answer it because I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t yet deserve it. Once you start deserving, then I don’t hesitate. Then I hit you this way and that way and you rejoice in it. But when you are not ready, I try to be as polite as possible.Now, you are saying “…guided by experience…” which means guided by the past. If you are here and now, how can you ask this question? It is a contradiction in terms. Guided by experience? Experience is certainly of the past. In other words you are saying, “Being here and now, will I still be guided by the past?” Then you are not here and now. Then the past is more important than the here and now to guide you. Then you are afraid: perhaps if you act spontaneously, you may lose responsibility.You don’t even understand the meaning of the word responsibility. Society has been so cunning. It has destroyed our most beautiful words, given them distorted meanings. Ordinarily in your dictionaries responsibility means duty, doing things the way you are expected to do them by your parents, by your teachers, by your priests, by your politicians, by somebody else. Your responsibility is to fulfill the demands made upon you by your elders and your society. If you act accordingly, you are a responsible person; if you act on your own – individually – then you are an irresponsible person. And your fear is that in acting spontaneously, here and now, there is a danger you may start acting individually. What will happen to your responsibility?The fact is that responsibility, the very word, has to be broken into two words. It means response ability. And response is possible only if you are spontaneous, here and now. Response means that your attention, your awareness, your consciousness, are totally here and now, in the present. So whatever happens, you respond with your whole being. It is not a question of being in tune with somebody else, some holy scripture, or some holy idiot. It simply means to be in tune with the present moment. This ability to respond is responsibility.But without experience you will not be able to see the contradiction in your question. Yes, I say you will be able to act with absolute response-ability. But it will not be the responsibility that you have been taught and conditioned for. It will be a totally new phenomenon. It will be just like a mirror. If you stand in front of it, it responds, it reflects you. The moment you have gone out of its focus, it is again silent. It is not a photographic film that catches your reflection. It remains always clean and available. Whoever moves in front of it – it will respond with totality and reflect the reality. The consciousness which is in the present is just like a mirror. A situation comes…There are times when you are in the present in spite of yourself. For example, if when walking on the path you suddenly come across a long snake, are you going to be guided by past experience? Are you going to be responsible? You will forget all that you have learned: all teachings, all scriptures, all teachers, parents. Suddenly you will find the here and now because this is not a time to think about what to do, what is right and what is wrong – you will simply jump out of the way. This will be responsibility, spontaneity.Or your house is on fire and you are taking a shower, naked. Are you going to dress before you get out of the house? Put your tie right? Polish your shoes? Have a look in the mirror? See whether all the buttons are in the right holes? No, there is no time. The house is on fire. You have to jump out of your bathroom window. And you will jump even without a towel around you. You will simply jump naked out of the shower, through the window.This is spontaneous. It is not guided because you have not been continuously experiencing your house catching fire. It has never happened before. So there is no past experience to guide you. Nobody – your father or your mother or your teacher – has ever told you that if you are under the shower naked, and the house catches fire, at least put the towel around yourself before you jump out of the window. Nobody has taught you. There is no book. I have looked into all the books about etiquette, not a single book gives any guidance. If you are waiting for guidance you will be stuck in the bathroom. You may search in your mind but you will not find any guidance at all.If you think you cannot do anything without guidance, then you are finished. Then there is no more life for you, no more future. The window was open. You could have jumped. But it has to be a spontaneous action in the moment, here now. And I call it absolutely responsible, responsible to life, responsible to your own being. You are avoiding committing suicide.But you have not lived a single moment here and now. And you have never acted spontaneously. Hence the fear is natural: if you act spontaneously, what about the guidance that you have been given? Do this, don’t do that. What about all those ten commandments? What about all the religious and moral teachings?When you are acting according to past experience and teachings and conditionings, you are not a real person. You are absolutely phony, because you are not looking at the real situation. You are searching for the right answer in the memory. And the memory has never come across such a situation. Every situation is so new that you cannot be guided by experience. If you are guided by experience, it is going to be wrong action and that is the whole misery of the world. Everybody is acting wrongly, trying to be right, trying to be in tune with past experience – this is the trouble. But this situation has never happened before. It is so new.I was driving from Jabalpur to Nagpur. Just outside a small village the car broke down. I was hoping to reach the nearest government rest house, because it was time for my afternoon sleep. So I took out a blanket and went under a tree, and the three persons who were with me simply watched what I was doing. And I went to sleep.They said, “This is strange. We are looking embarrassed and stupid. We are sitting here and he has gone to sleep already. He does not bother that the car has broken down and something has to be done. And he was driving. We don’t know how to drive, we don’t know what has gone wrong.” They all came and shook me.I said, “Don’t disturb me. Wake me at two! Car or no car, I have to have my sleep.”They said, “This is strange, where should we go now?”I said, “Go to hell, but don’t disturb me!”They said, “This is strange, you were driving us.”I said, “Forget all about it. Now the car is not worth driving. Find some car. While I am asleep, do something!”At two o’clock I woke up. All three were sitting by the side of the car, very sad-looking, hungry. I said, “What are you doing?”They said, “What can we do? We are feeling very hungry and…”I said, “The village is near, at least you could have gone there.”They said, “We could not leave the car, all our luggage and everything is in it.”I said, “Then at least one person could have gone, two could have remained here. Or two could have gone, one could have remained here.”They said, “Nobody trusts anybody.”I said, “This is strange. I went to sleep, I trusted you all, though I knew perfectly well with a broken-down car, where could you go?”Then I stopped a car and I asked the man who was driving if he knew anything about cars to have a look at mine, because I have never looked under the hood.I have never… That is the work of Avesh or Anandadas, but I have never opened the hood. I don’t know what is inside it. I don’t know at all whether a ghost runs it or if there is an engine. I simply know how to drive. That too is illegal, because I cannot keep two things in mind. When I am driving, I am driving. Then as fast as the car can go, it goes. I cannot bother that the government thinks it should go only fifty-five miles per hour.I think all these governments are a little unintelligent. If you don’t want a car to go beyond fifty-five, then why are cars allowed to be produced which can go one hundred and forty miles per hour? Strange! It is such an absurd situation. If you allow cars to be produced that go one hundred and forty miles per hour, you are giving me permission. And I trust that if the car says one hundred and forty, it will go a hundred and forty.So I told the driver just to have a look. And there was nothing wrong, just something small, and he fixed it within fifteen minutes.Those three people said, “This is strange. So many cars have passed, but the idea did not arise in our minds to stop a car and ask somebody to look at ours.”I said, “You must be waiting for experience to guide you.”To me this was a new situation, my car had never broken down before. In fact I had never driven alone. Somebody was always driving ahead of me; sometimes two cars were driving, one behind me, one ahead of me, just to take care of my car. This was the first time that I had tried to go on my own.Those two cars prevent me from being illegal. If my front car does not move at more than forty miles per hour, how can I? So they keep me within the limit. I wanted to try the car at its full speed and that was the reason why it broke down. Although they say it should go a hundred and forty nobody tries it. Nobody thinks that the roads are made for only fifty-five miles per hour. And in India, they are not made for even that much.And the traffic is so crazy – many, many centuries all moving along in the traffic. A bullock cart, a camel, an elephant, you name it and you will find it in the traffic. And cows are resting in the middle of the road and because they are mother cows, you cannot disturb them. And father bulls are standing in the middle of the road and, being a nonviolent country, you cannot do anything against them. You cannot take them to the court or…Life brings new situations every day. If you are waiting to be guided by past experience, you will miss the opportunity to act responsibly, to act spontaneously. To me the greatest morality is to act spontaneously. And you will always be right because your full awareness will be involved. More than that you cannot do. More than that existence cannot demand from you. And if you are focused totally in the present, what more can you do? You are bringing your whole energy and consciousness to solve the question, to get out of the situation. More than that is not possible. So whatever happens is right.This whole idea of responsibility and being guided by experience is told to you by people who don’t want you to be here and now. They go on giving you advice on how to act, what to do, but they don’t know that life does not go according to their guidelines. Their guidance becomes misguidance in any real moment.A rich old woman whose husband has just died decides to get married. But this time she wants to have some fun. So she advertises in the world press for a young, strong twenty-year-old virgin. She gets thousands of replies, all accompanied by a photograph, but she is particularly attracted to a huge, bronzed Australian from the outback.She flies him to New York and they are married the next week.On the wedding night, the old bride is fixing herself up in the bathroom when she hears strange noises coming from the bedroom. She opens the door to find the huge Australian moving all the furniture to the sides of the room.“What are you doing?” she cries.“Well,” replies the man, “if it is going to be anything like making love to a kangaroo, we are going to need all the space we can get!”That man is guided by experience. He has known only how to love a kangaroo. If you bring a man from the outback of Australia, you are in for trouble. The poor fellow is simply guided by his past experience that the space seems to be too small. If it is going to be something like making love to a kangaroo, who is going to jump all over the place…Don’t be bothered by the past. What is past is past. You have to be in the present. This is the only way to be response-able; this is the only way to be adequate to the situation you are facing. Otherwise you will find yourself always inadequate.A woman who loves rock and roll music goes to the local tattoo artist and says, “I want a tattoo of Elvis Presley on the inside of my thigh. Can you do it?”“Sure,” says the man.When he has finished, the girl looks down and says in disgust, “That does not look like Elvis. No way! I am not going to pay you for that.”“Okay,” says the artist, “let me try again on your other thigh.” When he has finished, the woman is furious. “That does not look like Elvis either,” she exclaims.“Wait a minute,” says the tattoo artist in desperation, “I will go out and bring back a guy off the street. If he can identify the tattoos, will you pay me?”The girl agrees, so he rushes out and finds a drunk staggering along the road. He drags him into the studio, points at the girl’s spread thighs and asks the drunkard, “Can you recognize these two tattoos?”The drunk says, “I don’t know about the guys on the thighs, but that guy in the middle is definitely Mick Jagger.”So you have to respond to the reality.A wild, Irish wedding reception is brought to a premature end when Paddy grabs the microphone and announces, “The party is over. We have run out of booze, there is no food left, and somebody has fucked the bride.”As everyone is heading toward the doors discussing what had happened, another announcement is made.“It is okay, folks, you can come back. We have found another case of Guinness, Maureen is making some sandwiches, and the guy who fucked the bride has apologized. So everything is okay, come back!”You have to respond to every kind of situation in the world. Past guidance is not of much help. Every moment you will be coming across something new. The world is very inventive. That’s why all so-called religious people who are guided by the past look so sad. They are always missing the train. They go on looking for guidance, but this is not the situation for which the guidance was given. It may have been right in a certain moment, in a certain situation, but it is nothing that can be eternally true.Only one thing is eternally true, and that is your consciousness. If you can bring your consciousness to the present, you cannot go wrong. Whatever you do out of that consciousness is always going to be right, not according to any criterion, but just because it is coming out of a total awareness. Out of total awareness, nobody has ever done anything wrong.According to me, right is what comes out of your spontaneity and out of your consciousness and out of your presence here and now. And what is not out of your spontaneity, consciousness and your being here and now is wrong. There is no other criterion than what I have just told you. All other criteria are dead. They may have been living at one time, but that time is past. Heraclitus is right, you cannot step in the same river twice. And he was stating something about life and existence.Hence there cannot be any guidance. All guidance will create trouble for you. You have to be kept absolutely clean of all guidance, so that you can respond with total awareness to the present situation without any hesitation, without any thinking. Just out of your silent awareness arises the response and it is the most beautiful, the most honest, most authentic answer that could have come to anybody.It is because humanity has always been forced to be guided by the past, that there is so much misery. If what I am saying is listened to by humanity, there will be great joy all over the earth, immense laughter, immense rejoicing, no repentance, no guilt, no confessions.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 21 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Is there laughter in the mysterious silence of sat-chit-anand? There must be, because you are such a laughter. Or is your laughter just for us?The cosmos is full of laughter, but a laughter that is very silent, a laughter that you can feel but cannot hear; a laughter that spreads all over your being. You can feel the lightness and the benediction that it brings to you, but there is no way to hear it, and there is no way to compare it to the laughter we are aware of.It was for this reason that none of the ancient awakened ones have talked about laughter. The danger was that you may think the laughter that you know is the laughter of the ultimate. The difference is very great. Our laughter is simply ripples on the surface of the lake. The cosmic laughter of sat-chit-anand is the whole lake, but without ripples – utterly silent and serene, still, just like a sweetness, joyfulness, very delicate, very subtle. The ancient awakened ones never mentioned it, just as they have never mentioned many other things out of a certain fear of misunderstanding.They have not mentioned that there is an orgasmic joy in the experience of enlightenment. It is sheer fear that the moment they use the word orgasmic you will think about sexual orgasm. It is not sexual, it is nonsexual. But as far as the orgasmic experience of utter relaxedness, of absolute stoppage of time and mind is concerned, it is the same.I have dared to walk on paths untrodden by the ancient awakened ones because my feeling is that the fear of misunderstanding should not prevent one from saying the truth. And if one is too afraid of being misunderstood, then there is nothing to say, because everything is going to be misunderstood. You talk about truth and it will be understood as a fact. You talk about consciousness, and people will think, of course, that they are conscious. Maybe it will be a bigger consciousness, but there is not going to be any qualitative change. There is going to be qualitative change.In fact, at a certain point every quantitative change turns into a qualitative change. You heat water. Up to ninety-nine degrees it is water. The moment it reaches a hundred degrees a transformation happens. Water starts disappearing into vapor. This is a qualitative change. You can quench your thirst with the water, but not with the vapor. Water always goes downward, it moves toward the sea, which is the lowest level. Vapor goes upward: it creates the clouds. Their paths are different, their qualities are different. Water is visible, vapor soon becomes invisible. Or, from the other side, at a certain point water can become ice. The qualities are different. Water is continuously flowing, ice has lost that flow. It is static, it has become almost like a stone.Quantity at a certain point brings a new quality. Out of fear of being misunderstood, many things have not been said to humanity. Not that they were not known to those who have come to the highest peak, but they have chosen to speak only of certain aspects. Even those certain aspects are misunderstood. And many they have left unsaid. They know that when you reach, you will experience.I don’t want to leave anything unsaid. I don’t function out of fear at all. And I trust my people’s intelligence more than any awakened person has ever trusted.Mahavira never allowed his male and female sannyasins to be together, out of fear that they might fall back into their old habits. He arranged that the women sannyasins should remain separate from the men sannyasins. If you go into details you can see the fear. The women sannyasins had to always bow down to the male sannyasins, even if the male sannyasin was just one day old. He might have taken sannyas just one day before, but still a sixty-year-old woman sannyasin had to bow down to this young person although she had been a sannyasin for sixty years. The reason? The reason was that whenever a woman bows down to a man there is protection. She is paying so much respect to you that you cannot behave in any disrespectful way toward her. And according to Mahavira, even to think about sex is disrespectful.But all these details have a hidden psychology of fear. All male sannyasins and women sannyasins had to move in a group of five; nobody was allowed to move alone. Why? Lions move alone because they are unafraid. What was the fear? Why should five men move together? So they could keep an eye on each other, watch that nobody fell below the discipline, that nobody did things which were not allowed.Five women moving together will be alert, watch each other, see that nobody falls in love, nobody becomes very attached to someone. Mahavira put four against one. Their jealousy, their competitiveness, and their very nature of putting the other down kept them alert. But this is functioning out of fear.And I know Mahavira was not afraid as far as he himself was concerned. He was afraid about his disciples. That means he was not as respectful to the disciples and their intelligence as he should have been. My feeling is that, if I am not respectful toward you and I cannot trust you, then no arrangement is going to help. And all these people in the past… Although they thought of every detail, there were always loopholes. Sannyasins have been finding ways for perverted sex.Gautam Buddha was even afraid to initiate women in his commune as sannyasins. He remained very stubborn. But that was out of a certain fear that if women entered the commune… He did not believe in his own sannyasins. He knew that they would start falling back into their biological heritage.Hence many things have not been said, and many disciplines have been created which ultimately turn into fetters – and all these people were trying to help you to attain ultimate freedom. But if you want freedom, then you have to start with freedom. If you start with bondage, you cannot end with freedom. Freedom has to be the first if you want freedom to be the last, because it is a growth. They fettered their people so tightly. In Buddhism there are thirty-three thousand rules of discipline. Now, you have put almost the whole Himalayas on the chests of your sannyasins. They are small things…A sannyasin was going to preach in faraway places where Buddha couldn’t go because he was too old. Before he left, Buddha said, “Remember a few things. Don’t talk to a woman.”The young sannyasin must have been a man of tremendous courage. He said, “Generally, you are right. There is no need for me to talk to any woman. But there is a possibility… At least one percent you should keep open. Ninety-nine percent of the time I will not talk, but there may be a situation in which talking becomes absolutely necessary. If I am standing on a crossroad and I don’t know where to go, where the village is, and a woman comes by, should I ask her or not? Or should I remain stuck on the crossroad? Or a woman falls into a ditch and I am passing by, should I ask her if I can help?”Buddha was silent. Then he said, “Okay, one percent is allowed, but remember this is only in emergency situations. But never touch a woman.”The man again raised the same question. “There may be a situation when I have to touch a woman. A woman falls on the road, maybe sunstroke, maybe epilepsy, maybe some kind of coma… Do you want me not to touch her? There are emergency situations when it will be very uncompassionate not to touch the woman. And I think compassion is the foundation of your philosophy.”Very reluctantly Buddha said, “Okay, in emergency situations you can touch a woman. But remember one thing, whenever you are close to a woman, speaking to her or touching her, be very alert. Don’t get back to your old habits, which are tremendously powerful as they belong to your whole past of millions of years.”But that one percent emergency becomes the loophole. Who is going to decide what is an emergency and what is not? So all the rules, thirty-three thousand in all, have their loopholes. You cannot have a foolproof system. Human beings are human beings.My approach is totally different. My approach is to bring men and women so close together that there is no need to keep arbitrary disciplines. Just their very closeness, slowly, slowly will make them drop their differences. Their closeness and understanding about each other will help them go beyond their biological heritage.The farther away you put them, the stronger is the magnetic force. One is more attracted toward the unknown, the unachievable. If the woman is sitting far away, first she looks immensely beautiful, just a goddess who has descended to the earth. But neither can you smell her perspiration nor do you know that her teeth are false; you know nothing. From far away all grass looks greener.My own understanding and approach are totally different from anyone who has lived before me. I want to bring the male and female sannyasins as close as possible, with no restrictions, with no repressions, with no inhibitions. Sooner or later they are going to be fed up. That is my hope. The whole arrangement here is to make you completely bored.And every day somebody writes “Sex has fallen away.” That’s great if it falls away! Repressed sex is bound to create a psychological sickness within you. But when sex drops on its own accord, just like a dead leaf dropping from a tree, it does not leave any wound on the tree. When sex drops out of understanding, not with your effort but on its own accord and your unconscious is not carrying any repression, your whole being is purified.So I am saying everything that has not been said. Laughter has been completely avoided because it seemed that it destroyed your seriousness. And all the masters of the past wanted you to be serious about your search. They misunderstood one thing: sincerity about the search and seriousness about the search are not the same thing. I want you to be sincere and authentic about your search – not only about your search but about everything, because you cannot be sincere only in one dimension. If you are sincere, then all dimensions of your life are sincere.But seriousness has been misunderstood as sincerity. Seriousness is a sickness. A serious seeker is searching for truth with sadness, with a burden on his head. He is not interested in the pilgrimage. He is only interested in the end, the goal, the paradise, the heaven, or whatever name has been chosen by the master. My own understanding is: there is no heaven, there is no paradise, and there is no goal. Life is an eternal pilgrimage.Making people serious is making them sick for eternity. They will lose all joy, they will shrink, all their juice will be gone. They will not see the beauty of the path, the trees and the mountains they will be passing through. Seriousness does not allow these things; seriousness condemns all this as mundane. To me, there is no division like mundane and sacred. It is one universe. There are not two universes.Yes, you can look at the same universe in a mundane way, you can look at it in a sacred way. The distinction is not between two universes, the distinction is only in two outlooks. And my feeling is that the more joyous you are, the more full of juice, love, laughter, music, and dance, the more your journey will become a tremendously beautiful pilgrimage. And because there is no goal…Life is eternal, hence there cannot be any goal. All ideas of goals are contradictory to the idea of eternal life. And if life is eternal, then you have to enjoy each moment as if you have reached the goal. Each moment is a goal in itself. Don’t wait to rejoice until you have reached the goal. That kind of goal does not exist. Use every moment as if you have arrived. It is always as if you have arrived; you are always arriving.I don’t think existence wants you to be serious. I have not seen a serious tree. I have not seen a serious bird. I have not seen a serious sunrise. I have not seen a serious starry night. It seems they are all laughing in their own ways, dancing in their own ways. We may not understand it, but there is a subtle feeling that the whole of existence is a celebration. I teach you celebration. And laughter has certainly to be one of the major ingredients in this celebration.You are asking, “Is there laughter in the mysterious silence of sat-chit-anand?” Certainly! But a laughter which is very silent. A soundless sound; a ripple-less lake. Full of joy, but it is too great to be expressed. There is no seriousness in the ultimate experience of existence.And the second thing you are asking is also true. “There must be, because you are such a laughter. Or is your laughter just for us?” The laughter of the ultimate experience is silent. You can have a very delicate feeling, but it is not tangible, you cannot hear it. It is more like a whisper. So the second thing is also true, I am absolutely nonserious. I am laughter, but you cannot hear the laughter that I have achieved in my disappearance into the whole. I have to laugh for you the way you can understand it.As far as I am concerned, there is no need for me to remain in the body even a single moment longer. I have done my homework. Whatever I am doing – talking to you, laughing with you, rejoicing with you – my silence, my words, are all dedicated to you, to provoke a certain synchronicity.It is said Buddha never laughed. And you have seen Jesus – it is impossible that that face can laugh. Mahavira cannot laugh. There is only one man… And because of his laughter, all the houses I have stayed in have been called Lao Tzu House. Lao Tzu is the only man who was born laughing. Every child is born crying, so that is absolutely unique about Lao Tzu.There are many things in his life which are unique, but nothing to be compared with the fact that he was born laughing. Everybody was shocked. His mother and father could not believe it. Even a smile would have been too much, but he was laughing. And he remained a laughter all his life.He chose Chuang Tzu as his disciple just because Chuang Tzu was continuously making everybody laugh. He was creating such absurd stories that nobody in the whole of the world’s literature can be compared to him. The stories are so complicated and so absurd, you cannot figure out the meaning. But certainly they tickle you. There are points when you suddenly start laughing. Lao Tzu loved Chuang Tzu for the simple reason that he was an absolutely nonserious man.Except these two enlightened ones, nobody has laughed. But because of their strangeness they have not been able to create a religion like Christianity or Hinduism or Mohammedanism. What they have created has remained an individual approach. They never created any organized church, a pope, a priest, an imam, a shankaracharya. Nobody has succeeded them. Once in a while some individual understands the significance. They have not even named their religion. It is simply called Tao. And Tao only means “the path” – no goal. They understood exactly what I am saying: there is no goal, only the path.Unless you learn to enjoy the journey itself, you will become more and more serious because the goal is not there. The farther you move on the path, the more shrunken and dead you will become. If you want to remain in tune with life, then remain always in celebration. Find in every moment, in every situation, a possibility of festivity– and I don’t know a single situation in which you cannot find some way to celebrate.I have even been teaching you to celebrate death. Somebody has become free of the body and you are crying. Feel ashamed! Somebody is out of jail and you are weeping. You wanted the poor fellow to always remain in jail. Unless you know how to turn the worst into the best, you are not aware of the real essence of sannyas.So certainly I am laughing for you, speaking for you, living for you, but it is not in any way making you obliged to me. It is just my joy. You need not even be thankful toward me. It is out of my own joy that I will continue to rejoice with you as long as existence goes on giving me a little more time to linger on this shore.My time is up, that is certain. It has been up for almost thirty-five years. But existence is very understanding and very intelligent and very compassionate. It knows that I am not living for myself. And to take me away is not just taking me away, it is taking away millions of people’s laughter, their joy, their possibility of flowering. Existence will not do it; it will allow me a longer holiday. Nor am I in a hurry to reach the other shore, because I know both the shores are the same. One is on this side of the river, the other is on the other side of the river. When you reach the other side you know it is the same shore, there is nothing different.Existence certainly understands that my body or my mind are no longer a bondage to me. I am no longer confined to them. I am already free. There is no urgency for death to make me free. I will continue until I penetrate into the deepest core of your being. All that I have experienced I would love you also to experience. Hence I am not keeping anything secret.A psychology professor is teaching a class and tells his students that he is going to conduct a survey about sex. He says to the class, “If you have sex once a day, raise your hand.” About fifteen percent of the students raise their hands.“Okay,” says the professor. “If you have sex three times a week, raise your hand.” About forty percent raise their hands.“Interesting,” says the professor. “If you have sex once a week, raise your hand.” Another twenty percent do.Then the professor asks, “If you have sex once a month, raise your hand.” A few hands go up.“And lastly,” says the professor, with a smile, “does anyone have sex only once a year?”A little guy in the back of the room starts waving his arms wildly, with a huge grin on his face.“And what are you so happy about?” asks the professor.The guy gets up, begins to dance and sing, “Tonight is the night!”The pope decides to visit America. When his plane arrives, a big crowd is there to meet him. As the pope steps off the plane, the crowd chants “Elvis, Elvis, Elvis!”He says to them, “My children, thank you very much, but I am the pope, not Elvis.”He is picked up in a long white limousine that has Elvis written on the side in big sparkling letters. As he steps into the limo he says, “Bless you, but I am the pope, not Elvis!”He is taken to the hotel where there is a huge crowd standing behind police barricades shouting “Elvis! Elvis! Elvis!”The pope says with growing irritation, “Thank you my children, but I am the pope, not Elvis!”At last he gets to his room and as he begins to unpack his bags, the door opens and in walk three beautiful women, all dressed only in their underwear.The pope looks at them for a moment and then says, “Okay girls. It’s one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and go man, go!”Osho,I am sure that no man has ever been loved so much by so many women. How does it feel to have the biggest harem in the world?It feels really great! I can repeat what the pope said: “Okay girls. It is one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and go man, go!”It is true what you are saying. No man has ever been loved so much by so many women. But you don’t know a secret: one woman is dangerous, so many women are not dangerous because they fight amongst themselves. I am completely at ease; they don’t have time to fight with me. That is the beauty of having a great crowd of women. It is certainly the biggest harem.And the second secret you have to understand: it is a love that is not of the ordinary kind. It is a love that has the same fragrance as prayer. It is a love that is the ultimate expression of trust. It does not have hate as its counterpart. It is love totally purified from any impact of its opposite. And moreover, listen to this small joke.The women of the harem are sitting in a circle, casting dice on a thick Persian carpet. Slowly, the dice make their way round the circle to the hands of each excited player. All of a sudden, the cry goes up. “It is Camelia tonight! Poor Camelia!”With a deep sigh Camelia rises, and with dragging footsteps she goes out through the velvet curtains.“I would hate to be that poor kid,” remarks Gloria. “It’s the third time this week she has had to wash the dishes.”The women who love me, they have to wash dishes. They have to clean my clothes, they have to make my bed, they have to cook my food, they have to make my clothes. They have to do all kinds of things, take care of my garden, take care of my body. This is a totally different kind of harem. It is not the harem of the Arabian Nights.Here, love is prayer, and because it is prayer, there is no jealousy. Otherwise, so many women, if they are in love in a biological sense, will create a chaos. They will start killing each other, just out of jealousy. But I know my people, jealousy does not touch them at all.And this harem has a specialty: it is not only the women, it has men too. There has never been any harem where men were also in the same love, in the same trust, with the same heart dancing, rejoicing. But you are right, it is certainly something that has never happened before.Although Mahavira initiated women, all his caretakers were male sannyasins, not a single woman. I see some hidden fear somewhere. Some repressed sexuality seems to be still lurking in the shadows, not very strong, but he has not forgotten his past completely. At least in his mind one thing is certain: women can drag him down.The same was true with Gautam Buddha, although finally he had to concede. His own mother died after his birth, and his mother’s sister never married – just to look after the child. This second mother, Mahamaya, in her old age came to ask for initiation. For almost twenty years he had refused to initiate hundreds of women, but he could not refuse Mahamaya. He was very much obliged to her as she had given him more than any real mother would give. All that he was, Mahamaya had contributed to. It was impossible to say no to her. So reluctantly he had to give her initiation into sannyas. But once one woman had entered, he could not prevent other women; then hundreds of other women entered.But as far as personal staff was concerned, those who were taking care of his body, of his day, of his food, of every small detail, they were all men – not a single woman. Not even Mahamaya was allowed. I think it is something not worth appreciating. I love Gautam Buddha, but what can I do? I can see things which are not right. They are small things, nobody has noticed them. For twenty-five centuries nobody has criticized that women were not allowed. They could have cooked better. They would have looked after him better. They could have taken care of his health better.Every woman is a born mother. Even a small girl has the qualities of a mother. The man can do the same things, but it doesn’t come from his inner being. There are male nurses in hospitals – not yet in India, but in American jails I came across them. In my first jail there were five women nurses and one male nurse. That male nurse looked stupid.In India the word nurse has become feminine. We cannot conceive that a man is a nurse. He can be a doctor, but a nurse? It seems to be cuckoo.I saw that man who was the nurse, because for one day each week he was there to take care of me – and I could see the difference. The women nurses were making me at home even in the jail. They were trying to bring the best clothes, they were changing my bedsheets and my pillow covers every day, which is usually done only once a month. They were changing everything every day.They used to go to the market specially to bring fruit and vegetables, because I would not eat the jail food which was nonvegetarian. They would go to the market themselves and they would bring so much fruit and so many vegetables. I told them that I could not eat that much. But a woman is basically a mother.They cleaned the whole place so that I would not suffer from any smell. They had come to know that I am allergic to smell. They were cleaning every day. And when they were cleaning they would remove me from that place, because while they were cleaning the dust might have disturbed me.But when the male nurse was there, there was no question of making me feel at ease. On the contrary, the male nurse was torturing me. He would come to my cell and as he was interested in philosophy, he would start asking questions.I said to him, “Just don’t harass me.”But he would say, “I may never see you again.”Once it was two o’clock in the night and I said, “It is enough! And now I will not be able to sleep at all, you have tortured me so much. And a nurse is not supposed to torture, you have to help me.”He said, “You don’t think about me. I will never be able to see you again. So I will ask as many questions as have been in my mind.”No female nurse ever asked a single question. It is a totally different world on the inside of a woman.My effort is to create the same quality of love and trust in the men who have by chance joined my caravan. And those qualities are arising. If those qualities don’t arise, you remain stuck in the head. If those qualities arise, then you can enter the heart. The woman is born with those qualities of the heart, the man is born with the qualities of the head.A disciple has to be feminine. Whether he is male or female doesn’t matter, because without reaching the heart there is no way toward being, and no way of disappearing into the universal life source, sat-chit-anand.One day, young Herschel tells Hymie, “Dad, I have these urges all the time.” Hymie tells him to go and visit the rabbi.“Rabbi,” says Herschel, “even in the middle of the night I get an erection.”“Pray harder,” advises the rabbi. Herschel goes home and a few days later approaches Hymie.“Dad,” he says, “I still keep getting these urges.”“Go and see the rabbi again,” Hymie advises. The rabbi is out, so the rabbi’s wife asks Herschel about his problem.“I get these terrible strong urges,” explains Herschel.“Oh, that’s simple,” replies the rabbi’s wife. She takes him into the bedroom and makes love to him.When Herschel gets home, Hymie asks, “What happened?”“It was wonderful,” Herschel replies. “The rabbi’s wife has more sense between her legs than the rabbi has in his head.”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 22 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,During the awareness walk in the Vipassana group today, I observed that my speed was slowing down and had stopped. There seemed to be no need for moving. To where, for what? There was simply no goal anymore.Osho, would you talk about the secret of being in a body and what keeps it moving?It is ambition, it is desire, it is hope in the future that keeps the body moving. The word for this ambition, desire, hope used by Gautam Buddha is tanha. It contains all these things.You are always looking ahead for something to happen in your life; you have not lived yet. The past is empty; you know it has been a desert. The only way to move is to keep your eyes far away on some star. It is just your imagination, but it is enough to keep the body moving. If it has not happened up to now, there is no guarantee that it will not happen in the future. Tomorrow is always open, and it is the tomorrow that keeps the body moving and the mind moving – and not only in one life.The Eastern understanding is far deeper than the Western understanding about the inner secrets. All the mystics born in the East may disagree on every other point, but on one point their agreement is absolute – the point of reincarnation. It is not only in one life that you go on moving because of some desire or many desires. You go on moving from one life to another life, from one womb to another womb, but the reason is the same: movement means you have something in the future to be achieved.Your future is alluring you. You are fascinated by all the possibilities that can be yours. You are not at all finished, because the past was empty. The future can be fuller, richer, better. It is this hope that remains and never dies. Every day you will find it disappointed, every life you will find it disappointed. But still the future is there, always available, open, and giving you as many chances as you want.It can happen in deep meditation that you come to a full stop, to a state of unmoving, just a feeling that there is no need to move, no need to go anywhere – because there is nowhere to go. You have been running after shadows for so many lives, yet everything has proved to be meaningless, and you never arrive at any goal.In deep meditation the realization can come that there is no goal, and all movement is futile. If there is no goal, there is no need to move, since all movement is goal-oriented; they are together. If the goal disappears from your mind, you will find yourself slowing down, in your body, in your mind. A deep relaxation will start settling. It is one of the most beautiful experiences. Meditation is actually meant to bring you to this full stop, where for the first time you are no longer motivated by any desire, by any ambition, by any longing.For the first time, the future has disappeared. It has never been in existence, it was only your imagination. The future is your projection of unfulfilled desires. The more unfulfilled you are, the bigger a future you have. The more unfulfilled your being is, the richer your dreams of the future will be. But it is just in your mind.We divide time into three tenses: the past, the present, the future. But it is a wrong division. Time consists only of the present, and mind consists only of the past and future. You are mixing two things together. Meditation will help to give you the clarity to divide them exactly as they are.The mind is memory of the past and the mind is imagination for the future. But time itself is, undividedly, only present. You never meet yesterdays, and you never meet tomorrows. What you actually encounter, always, is the present moment. The moment you realize this, you start settling within. All movement is outward, all movement is extrovert. No-movement is introvert, no-movement is going inward, just settling at the very center of your being – not even a ripple, no thought, no dream, no desire.This is actually the state of meditation. The mind has gone with the movement; it was another name of movement. It kept you busy and occupied with the future, with the past, with everything except the present. It was very reluctant to come to the present. That’s why people find it difficult to meditate.The mind pulls them either toward the past or toward the future, where it is perfectly happy because only in the past or in the future can it live. The present is nothing but death for the mind. But death for the mind is the beginning of your authentic life. The mind keeps you living an unauthentic life. All your despair, all your agony, all your misery are the children of your mind. As movement stops, the mind stops. Suddenly you are here and now. For the first time you touch existence. For the first time you are awake. The dream of the mind, the sleep of the mind is no longer there.In this awakening moment you find yourself – not the ego that you used to think is you, not the old personality that you always believed in and had remained identified with. That personality, that ego, were all part of the mind; with the mind, they have all disappeared. All that fog is no longer there – just a crystal clear clarity, a transparency, a silence, alive, full of peace and a subtle joy so deep that you have never known such a depth before. You could not have even conceived or dreamed of it.This is not only your self, this is the universal self too. Because it is also the universal self, Gautam Buddha decided to call this experience no-self, simply to emphasize that you are no more. Existence is; you are gone. Now the whole has taken over. You are conscious, conscious for the first time in totality.And new things start happening to you. They are just the opposite of what the mind was creating. Instead of agony, you have ecstasy; instead of misery, you have tremendous blissfulness; instead of despair, you are utterly at ease. Instead of feeling a meaninglessness, for the first time you see the significance and the beauty and the glory that has been bestowed upon you by existence. And without any effort on your part a tremendous urge arises to thank the whole, to be grateful, to dance in gratitude, to sing in gratitude.To me, the only true prayer is that which comes out of gratitude, not addressed to any god, not addressed to get anything, but addressed to the whole of existence for all that it has already given you. It is so much; you suddenly see that you don’t deserve all this. You have never earned anything of it: all this beauty, all these blessings, all this ecstasy. You cannot conceive that it is your earning. It is simply a gift from the beyond. You can only bow down to it – not to anybody in particular, just to the whole that surrounds you. As a fish is surrounded by the ocean, you are surrounded by the whole.You are saying, “During the awareness walk in the Vipassana group today, I observed that my speed was slowing down and had stopped. There seemed no need for moving. To where, for what? There was simply no goal anymore.” There is certainly no goal.Existence is enough unto itself; only for those who are feeling empty is a goal needed. Once you know your fullness, you don’t have space for any goal left within you. You are not only full, you are overflowing. So the question of going anywhere does not arise because wherever you are, you are in the whole; wherever you are, you are in the same ocean. Hence a tremendous transformation arises in you.All your past lives… Continuous movement, from one body to another body, from one life to another life, but the same desires, the same greed, the same anger, the same violence, the same competition, the same jealousy. The Eastern word for the world is samsara – samsara means the wheel. You go on moving on a wheel, the same wheel, which goes nowhere. You are just clinging to some spoke of the wheel. The wheel goes on moving and you think you are reaching somewhere. You are not reaching anywhere, but because you continuously think that you are reaching somewhere, you never look inward to find you are already there where you want to be.The home that you are searching for is within you; the god that you have been seeking is within you. You are the greatest treasure of consciousness in this whole existence. The moment you realize your glory and splendor, you see yourself as an Everest high in the sky. You cannot conceive that anything more can be added to you. Your fulfillment is so complete that an absolute stop comes. This stop becomes the explosion of enlightenment, of awakening, of your buddha nature.What has been happening to you is tremendously beautiful. Allow it to happen more and more; go deeper into this stopping; go further away from movement and you will be closer to yourself. Don’t be again caught up in the net of the mind; it does not leave so soon. You may have a few glimpses, but it does not allow you to have more than small glimpses. Immediately it grabs you back, again a desire arises, again tomorrow becomes real, again the future becomes significant and the movement and the thought process – and the whole mind is back.On an extended business trip overseas, the Englishman is asked whether he misses his wife.“I don’t miss her all that much,” he replies. “One day a week I hire a local woman to come in and nag.”The mind is your wife. Whether you are man or woman, it does not matter. The mind is your wife and a constant nag. It goes on nagging you, and you have become so accustomed to it that sometimes you even have to hire a woman to nag you; life seems to be so empty without somebody nagging you. The mind is continuously giving you new illusions, new hallucinations, new delusions; it is very inventive. It goes on creating new goals for you. If old goals are finished, if you have realized that there are no such goals, it will invent new goals.That’s how religious people have come to invent paradise, heaven, God – these are new goals. Old goals have been dropped, but the mind is very clever. It immediately comes from the back door with a new goal. It says: “It is very good. Money is not the goal of life. And power is not the goal. Neither is respectability nor anything of this world. The real goal is God.”God is a mind invention, just as money is a mind invention. Heaven is as much a mind invention as is respectability, name, fame – they are all mind projections. I emphasize again and again to you that there is no God. I have nothing against God; I cannot have because he does not exist. My emphasis is for a different reason – I am not an atheist. My emphasis is so that when in your meditation mind starts stopping, it cannot give you goals like God, paradise, heaven.Those are the last tricks in its bag. I am removing them, for the simple reason that it is very easy to get rid of greed, but it is very difficult to see that heaven is nothing but your greed. It has come in with such a beautiful name, with such a great religious aroma around it, with such spirituality. Nobody thinks that God is your greed. Nobody has exactly said in the whole history of mankind that God is your greed, that God is nothing but the last effort of the mind to nag you again to move.All that the mind wants is to go on moving. Don’t stop, because when stopping, the mind starts trembling. To stop means digging a grave for the mind and, of course, nobody wants to die. Your mind has been with you so long, it wants to remain with you – an old friendship, a long companionship. In misery, in happiness, it has been with you. It has done everything that you wanted. It has played all kinds of roles. It has lied for you; it has always been a support for you. When life was continuously dark, it gave you glimpses of a faraway star: “Don’t be worried. If today it is dark, tomorrow it is not going to be dark. It is not going to be dark forever. One day, the sunrise is certain.”This long, long friendship – and suddenly you stop. The mind tries in every way to push you, to nag you into some new project. Old projects are no longer working; it is a great salesman.I have heard…A man was complaining to a real estate agency: “Where is that old fellow who sold me land?”The owner of the agency asked, “What is the problem?”He said, “What is the problem? I am going to shoot him. He has sold me land which is at least twelve feet below the road. In the rainy season it will become a lake. And I have purchased it to build a house for myself. My house will be drowned. Just tell me where that old fellow is!”The owner said, “Right now, he is not in the office. But when he comes back I will talk to him and if something has gone wrong, we will settle it. I will send him to your house.”When the salesman came, the owner was very angry. “This is too much. What have you done?”He said, “I told him everything. I told him that he will have the most magnificent house within the lake. Build the house and wait for the rains. And it is surrounded by such beautiful hills.”The owner asked, “Beautiful hills?”He said, “Yes, but they are thousands of miles away. They are very difficult to see. Only once in a while, when the sky is very clear, you can see them. And I have shown him.”But the owner said, “Something has to be done. He is very angry. He wants to shoot you.”He said, “Don’t be worried. Just give me those two boats that we have been stuck with for many years and we have not been able to sell to anybody. They are getting completely rotten. Just give me those two boats.”The owner said, “What are you intending to do?”He said, “I am going to sell those two boats to that man who wants to shoot me.”The owner said, “If you want to try, good luck to you! Take those boats, but be careful. That man is really angry. I am not joking.”After an hour the man came back and said, “I have sold those two boats. I again described the beauty of the lake and then I said ‘How secure your house will be. Nobody can reach it. And these beautiful boats… You can just go in the boat to your house. And unless you want somebody else to come, nobody can come in. No beggars to torture you, no guests, no neighbors – just think of it. And on a beautiful lake, surrounded by hills and the hills reflected in a full-moon night.’ Then the man said, ‘Done. Give me the boats.’”The salesman said to the owner, “Now, remember: don’t give my address to that man, because this illusion that I have given to him is not going to last long. Soon he will come to his senses, because that place is really not worth anything. First to build a house there, and then the house will be half drowned. No electricity, no telephone, no neighbors, and the mountains are thousands of miles away; they don’t reflect in the lake.“That man is going to be angry and now he is stuck with those two boats. He does not know that they are not going to work, and he will not know until the rains come. He will be drowned in those boats; he will not reach his house. You know those boats perfectly well.”But a salesman can manage to create an illusion. Just the description, and the mind is a great salesman. It goes on selling you new goals and you never think that all that it has ever sold you has failed. Nothing has ever succeeded. It is really a con man. It goes on creating, inventing new ideas, and because you are empty you are ready to be filled by any kind of rubbish. Your present is not a rejoicing; your past has just been tears; you get caught in future dreams very quickly.Deepen your experiences. Let them happen more often. This is the whole purpose of all the meditations that are happening here – to bring you to a full stop. Then suddenly, the energy that was moving outward, starts settling inward.When all your life forces have centered at the very roots of your being, you will start growing in a new direction. Now it will not be a movement, it will be a growth. Movement is always horizontal; growth is vertical. The tree grows vertically; you move horizontally. The world is horizontal; spirituality is vertical. Once your energies are all concentrated in the roots, there will be new sprouts, new foliage, new branches, and you have started moving upward, toward the stars.This is not an old movement, it is a totally different phenomenon. The horizontal movement we know, when we say somebody is growing old. The vertical movement is when we say somebody is growing up. Just becoming old is not going to lead you anywhere except to death and a new life with the old desires again – the same circle. Once your life starts growing instead of moving, it takes a totally different dimension upward, against the gravitation of this world, toward the open sky. And only in this growth, one day your potentiality blossoms.The day you see your flowers opening up and releasing their fragrance, you have come to know for the first time something that can be called spiritual. And it is not a goal. The trees are not growing toward some goal, they are growing toward their potential, which is intrinsic, which is hidden in them. They want to come to a point where what is hidden becomes available to the whole of existence. What is in the seed comes into the flower.Enlightenment is your flowering.Meditation will bring you to the point from where your existence takes a new dimension – the dimension of enlightenment. You can call it sat-chit-anand.Osho,Sitting close to you these last few mornings and looking into your eyes, I felt so much like a small child, full of innocence and excitement. Many times I wanted to wave my hand in the air wildly and shout, “Hello, hello, hello, my most beloved.”Osho, can you talk about this blissful innocence that I am feeling and how it relates to meditation?The innocence of a child has a similarity to the innocence of a sage. But it is not exactly the same. Because of the similarity, many mystics have used childhood as an example. You don’t know anything about what happens in the innermost world of a sage. You need some examples of something you know about. So one thing has to be remembered: all those examples are not exactly what will happen in your ultimate state of realization, but they are certainly some indication.The child is innocent, but his innocence is more ignorance than wisdom. You cannot call a child wise. His innocence is natural, but his ignorance is side by side with his innocence; they are almost together. The child’s innocence is overshadowed by his ignorance.The sage also has the same innocence, but there is no longer any overshadowing ignorance. His innocence is absolutely pure, unpolluted, and because his innocence is no longer associated with ignorance, it brings a transformation to the very quality of his innocence – it becomes wisdom.The child is ignorant, the sage is wise, but the innocence has the same quality: just the association has changed. The child has the same innocence, but associated with ignorance; hence it has no value. The sage has the same innocence, but as it is no longer associated with ignorance, it has immense value; wisdom has blossomed. The child does not know, but he does not know that he does not know. The sage also does not know, but he knows it – and that makes a great difference.Because the child does not know he is ignorant, he is bound to accumulate knowledgeability to cover up his ignorance. He wants to be knowledgeable like anybody else – as quickly as possible. The wise man is no longer ignorant, hence he does not need any knowledge. With ignorance, knowledge has also gone. It is just like when you are sick, you need medicine; when you are healthy again, the medicine is thrown away. Knowledge is a medicine for ignorance. But when there is no ignorance, what are you going to do with all your medicines? Give them to the Lions Club. These people go on accumulating all kinds of medicines.The wise man is not knowledgeable. His wisdom has a totally different quality. He sees. He is a seer. He is not informed, he is transformed. He has come to a new stage of consciousness from where he can see far away.P. D. Ouspensky uses this as an example. His master Gurdjieff also used to use the same example.You are sitting under a tree. You can see the road on both sides to a certain extent and then it goes beyond your vision. You cannot see more than that. Somebody is sitting in the tree. His vision of the road will be far greater than yours. He will see miles on one side, miles on the other side. If, from the left side, a bullock cart comes along the road, he will see it. For you it is still in the future; for him it is in the present. For you it is in the future because you can’t see it.Soon the time will come when you see it – then it will become present for you. And the time will come when it will move away on the road toward the right and soon you will not see it anymore. It will become past. But to the man sitting in the tree, when it was future for you, for him it was present. When it was present for you, it was also present for him. When it became past to you, it was still present to him because he was seeing it from a higher viewpoint.The man of wisdom is innocent, but on a far higher level. He is not childish. His innocence is out of maturity; his innocence is out of tremendous experience. The child is without any experience; the sage has passed through all kinds of experiences, good and bad, and he has transcended them. He has again become a child, but his childhood, the second childhood, is based on a very solid ground which cannot be taken away.So what you have been feeling is beautiful, but remember: it is not the place to stop. It is the place to begin. It is beautiful to have a childlike innocence, but it is still far away from the authentic innocence of maturity.Paddy climbs up a flag pole and begins shouting as loudly as he can. The cops arrest him and he is charged with disturbing the peace. Later he is sent to a psychiatric hospital for examination.“How do you explain your behavior?” asks the head shrink.“It is like this, doctor,” replies Paddy. “If I didn’t do something crazy once in a while I would go nuts.”An innocent man is saying something immensely wise. He is saying, “If I didn’t go crazy once in a while I would go nuts.” It is a well-known, well-established fact that women go crazy once in a while – any excuse. And if there is no excuse, at least nature has provided them with the period. Then whatever they do is acceptable. Their craziness cannot be condemned; they have a rationalization. But even without the period they can go crazy at any moment; that saves them from going nuts. It is only men who go nuts, because they don’t go crazy once in a while; they go on accumulating. Rather than going crazy in installments, they go wholesale.Just look in the madhouses of the world. There are four times more men than women – it is not a small difference. Four times more men go mad. And what is the strategy of the woman so she avoids that much madness? She often goes crazy. So in installments – just a little bit of craziness today and a little bit tomorrow – she divides it up. All the time she remains sane, so there is no need for her to be in a madhouse.Man has been told from his very childhood: “You are not supposed to go crazy like women. You are not even supposed to weep and cry. Tears are not allowed to men. Even if somebody dies, you have to keep yourself together; you are not to behave like a woman.” Because of this nonsense teaching, four times more men than women are in madhouses.I have made it absolutely compulsory that every morning you do Dynamic Meditation. That is nothing but giving you a chance every day of installment craziness, so the whole day you remain sane. It is enough for twenty-four hours. Then again comes another morning and you go crazy. None of my people are ever going to be mad. [A loud laugh causes general laughter.] You look! Sardarji is going crazy. But as he goes crazy once in a while, he is going to remain the sanest man.After five days locked away in their hotel room, the honeymoon couple finally decides to go out for the evening. The husband calls the front desk to find out what is playing at the movies.“Darling,” he calls out to his wife, “do you want to see Oliver Twist?”“Honey,” she calls back, “if you show me one more trick with that thing, I’ll scream.”Two old cows are standing together in the pasture chewing the cud, when one of them looks up and says, “Look, here comes that cross-eyed bull. We had better separate or he will miss us both.”Different women have different reactions when their husbands kiss them in bed.The French woman says, “Ooh-la-la, Pierre, ooh-la-la, your kisses are ooh-la-la.”The English woman says, “Jolly well done! I say, Winston, your kisses are jolly well done.”The Jewish woman says, “You know, Sam, the ceiling needs painting.”This is a crazy world. From your innocence, if it is childlike innocence, the ways depart in two directions. Either you will end up in this big madhouse that you call the world. Or if you move in a different direction and the path is available, you can end up with great wisdom. You can be a sage.You just have to remember what is the difference between these two paths. The path that goes to the madhouse, the big madhouse you call the world, is very crowded. Avoid crowds. Be certain that where everybody is going is the wrong path. The ordinary logic says: “That is the right path because everybody is on it; how can it be wrong?”But I say unto you: find the path where nobody is going and there is every chance you will end up being wise. Your very first step alone is the right step toward ultimate realization. It is the cowards who go with the crowd – and I have never heard of cowards becoming enlightened. They can become Christian sheep, but they cannot become lions. And I would like my people to be lions.Choose a path which leads you more and more deeply into aloneness. Choose a path which is not traditional, which is not orthodox. Choose a path which is basically revolutionary. Each step is a revolt against all that is past and old. That rotten crap is driving the whole world mad.On this path you are no longer a Christian. You cannot be, because to be a Christian means to be part of a crowd. You are no longer a Hindu, because you are no longer part of a crowd, you are an individual. Only individuals have ever become awakened. Crowds never become enlightened. Only individuals, only people who have guts and courage to be alone are capable of stopping the movement of the mind and can settle into their inner innocence.The deeper you go within yourself, the purer the sources of consciousness that you will find. When you reach the very center of your being, you have reached the center of the universe. Then wisdom blossoms; you become a sage. This is a rebirth, a resurrection. You die as the world wanted you to be and you find exactly what existence has been longing for you to be. Existence gives you all that you are asking, longing for.The so-called mad world will only give you promises, but the goods are never delivered. People die in this world after a whole life of simple despair and anguish. If you want to live ecstatically and die ecstatically, you will have to choose the path of aloneness. And that is the path of meditation too, because your absolute aloneness is always inward.Outside you will always meet with a crowd – on any path. You may have chosen a path that seems to be silent, no traffic, but ahead you don’t know. On every path you will find some crowd. Somewhere a bigger crowd – Catholics; somewhere smaller crowds. But you will find them.There is only one path that goes inward, where you will not find a single human being, where you will find only silence, peace. Then you will find yourself, and after that even you will not be there.The aloneness becomes so thick and dense that you cannot be there, you cannot have an I, an ego, a sense of separation from existence. Your I is nothing but a sense of separation. When you find yourself one with existence, no knowledge is needed. In your innocence, you will know all that is great, all that is beautiful, all that is true. But it will not be a repetition from any scripture and it will not be anything borrowed. It will be truly yours, it will have your signature on it.And this is one of the greatest blessings in life, to have some experience which is absolutely yours and not a carbon copy. Only that which is absolutely new – original, arising from the very source of your being – can give you satisfaction, fulfillment, contentment and a deep understanding of all the mysteries of life and existence.It is good to start with innocence, but remember there are two kinds of innocence: one is of the child and the other is of the meditator. The meditator also becomes a child, but that is on such a different level, at such a great height – as if the child is in the valley and the enlightened man who has again become a child is on the sunlit peak. The distance is tremendous. But there is a certain similarity, a thread running from the child to the heart of the sage. The child cannot understand the sage, but the sage can understand the child. Always remember it as a fundamental rule: the lower cannot understand the higher, but the higher can always understand the lower.If anything in your life can be compared with that high peak, it is your childhood. Try to rediscover it. Don’t cover it with knowledge so that you can forget it. Remove all knowledge, so that you can rediscover your innocence. As you remove your knowledge, you will be removing your mind itself, because your mind is a collective name for your knowledge. It is not any entity – just as we call these trees around here “the garden,” but the garden is only a collective name. If you go looking for the garden, you are not going to find it. You will always find individual trees, rosebushes, seasonal flowers, but you will not find the garden as such anywhere.Remember, we get lost with collective names many times. We start thinking that those collective names are realities; they are not. Society does not exist. Organized religion does not exist; it only pretends. Christianity, Islam, Buddhism don’t exist – all pretensions. What exists is the individual.The mind does not exist, it is only a collective name for all your knowledge. Take out, by and by, all that you know and when all that you know has been taken away, you will not find any mind there, not even a container in which all that knowledge was contained. There is no container. Being purely innocent, centered in yourself, knowing that life is a mystery and there is nothing to know, that knowledge is by its very nature impossible, we are surrounded by the miraculous.It is beautiful that we are surrounded by the miraculous because that makes life a continuous excitement, an ecstasy. You never tire of discovering new spaces within you. You are never bored because the deeper you move within yourself, there is always something new. The deeper you move within yourself, you are moving toward existence itself, because deep down you are rooted in existence. If a tree moves deep into its roots, it will find the earth, it will find the ocean. It is rooted in the earth, deriving water from the ocean.If we move into our center… You will be surprised to know that our center also has its roots in existence, though they are not visible roots. Our consciousness is just like air. It is not visible, but you can feel it. You can feel when the air is cool and you can feel when the air is hot. You can feel your consciousness in many ways: when it is pure, it is cool; when it is impure, it is hot. Impure with anger, impure with greed, impure with desires, impure with goals – then it is hot, then it is not at ease, then there is no peace inside. But when all these desires have left you, there is a tremendous coolness which goes on growing.As you come closer to yourself, you are coming closer to the universe – and the greatest moment in your life is when you accept the mystery of existence as it is, without asking any question. Then you have understood one thing: existence is mysterious and is going to remain mysterious. There is no need of any knowledge. That means you have settled with the universe as mysterious and you have settled with yourself as innocent.This is the second birth. In India we have called this state dwij, the second birth. And this is our search here.Now, here is something to make your silence deeper.Herman is an eternal optimist, and whatever happens to him, he always says, “Well, it could have been worse.”One day his neighbor, Amos, comes home and finds his wife in bed with a strange man. In a fit of rage, Amos shoots them dead, and is later arrested for murder.While everyone is discussing the tragedy, Herman says, “Well, it could have been worse.”“How could it be worse?” says an angry neighbor. “Two people are dead and a nice guy like Amos is going to prison for the rest of his life.”“Well,” insists Herman, “if Amos had come home on Thursday afternoon, I’d be dead!”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 23 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I love to cry and to feel this sweet pain of longing in my heart that has been visiting me for a while. It seems to be a treasure that is bringing me back after having been lost in the mind. I have experienced a stillness beyond this pain and tears; yet, sometimes it feels as if I would love to cry my way to God.Osho, is it possible to indulge too much in this sensation in my heart?There are a thousand and one ways to reach to the ultimate. If your crying is out of joy, then your tears are more valuable than any laughter can be. It all depends on the quality. Tears can be of pain, tears can be of blissfulness, tears can be of silence, tears can be of gratitude. And when tears are of gratitude it is not suffering, it is rejoicing – just in your own style.I don’t deny any possibility of reaching to the divine. All possibilities are available – just choose the one that suits you best. Don’t be concerned and don’t compare with others; that brings complexity. Just watch yourself. If your tears are helping your growth, making you richer, making you more loving, making you more lively, if you feel tears are bringing your spring closer, these same tears will turn into flowers. So you have to be careful.The criterion is simple: anything that gives you a feeling of fullness, overflowing; anything that gives you a sensation of your interiority, your subjectivity; anything that makes you aware of the immense mystery that you are and that the whole existence is, means you are on the right path. And everybody has to move on his own path.There are no highways to the divine. Everybody has to move, not on ready-made pathways, but on the contrary, as you move you make your own path. And it is going to be only for you, especially for you. Nobody else will be able to walk on the same path. No two individuals are the same. Their uniqueness is such that their paths cannot be the same either. No two enlightened persons in the world have reached to the ultimate explosion in the same way.This has created a great difficulty. You follow someone. Naturally he knows the way – he has reached – and he teaches you the way, forgetting completely that you are not him. Your path is going to be different. So the only authentic masters are those who don’t give you details of the path, who don’t give you a map to follow, a guidebook to carry with you. That guidebook may have been exactly the right thing for the master himself, but it is not going to be the right thing for you.Although you would like the consolation of being definite, certain, guaranteed, these are wrong desires. These are the desires which create hindrances. The master can only give you a guarantee if you move on his path. He knows it, he has traveled on it. He knows the pitfalls; he can make you aware of mistakes which he committed. But this is going to be too cheap, and existence is not cheap at all. It is the costliest.The problem for the authentic master is to give you not guidance, but only a longing, such a tremendous longing that it can make its own path. The master cannot give you the path, he can only create in you such a tremendous thirst that the thirst will create the path for you.It is going to be different for everyone. Existence loves variety, and it is good that variety is acceptable to existence, otherwise life would have been utterly boring. Not only the ordinary life, but the extraordinary life of a seeker would also be boring. You would be like railway trains moving on fixed rails from one station to another, shunting from here and there.No, you are not railway trains. You are far more like wild mountain rivers which go on changing their paths, which go on moving toward the ocean on their own intuitive indications. There is no guidebook, there is no map, there was never anything like that. But every river has reached the ocean, from all directions, from wherever it arises – it does not matter. In the deepest being of the river, one thing is certain: it is a river. It belongs to the ocean. However long the journey may be, however tedious the path, nobody can prevent it from reaching the ocean. It does not need any support, it simply starts moving on its own. It makes its way.The same is true about enlightenment, the experience that brings you to your absolute flowering. You have to trust in yourself. The master can create the trust. The master can create the great love affair with the universe. The master can create a sweet pain of longing in your heart.But the so-called ordinary teachers belonging to different religions don’t create these things. They take them for granted, as if everybody is longing for God. The churches are full, the temples are full, the synagogues are full. There is a deception all around the earth that everybody is religious. But these same people who go to the churches, to the synagogues, to the temples, to the mosques, are the people who commit all kinds of crimes against humanity, against themselves. These are the same people who create wars and massacres and rapes. It is a very strange world. And every Sunday they are in the church.So, on the one hand you can see everybody is religious and on the other hand, if you have a little deeper insight, you can see nobody is religious. Who has created this kind of situation? – the priests, the missionaries, the teachers who are more interested in putting you on a certain path, with a certain dogma and a certain discipline. You are not important to them. What is important to them is Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism. But you should remember: thousands of years have passed and we have not been able to produce another Gautam Buddha, or another Jesus, or another Lao Tzu.It is not that millions of people have not tried the same path, but the path that led Gautam Buddha to his highest consciousness does not lead anybody else anywhere, except to a certain phoniness, hypocrisy. I don’t want any of you to be hypocrites. That is the ugliest thing that can happen to anyone. But how to protect you from being a hypocrite?There is only one way: I should not give you any direct instructions about the path. On the contrary, I should give you so much thirst, so much longing, so much sweet pain in your heart, that the very longing starts finding its own path, making its own path. All of you will reach one day to the same height of consciousness, but from different directions, from different territories. It is beautiful that the whole of existence, wherever you are, has a way toward the highest consciousness.Nothing is wrong about your tears. You are asking, “Is it possible to indulge too much in this sensation in my heart?” No! You cannot indulge too much. There is no such thing as too much indulgence in love, too much indulgence in trust, too much indulgence in the search, too much indulgence in longing – there is no such thing.You are always less than your potential. Your potential is tremendous. But remember: these tears, this sweet pain in itself are not the goal. It is just the beginning of a long journey, a beautiful journey. So don’t stop at it. That is the only possibility of missing. Indulge as much as you can manage. And the more you can manage, the more you will be able to see that much more is still possible. There is no end to it. But don’t make it your whole lifestyle, it is just a beginning. The seed is dissolving, and there is pain, and the new sprouts will be coming. But nowhere is there a stop. Just go on growing. You will pass through many different climates. Just keep the thread of longing alive and you cannot go astray.The only fear is, I remind you again, that you may start enjoying this suffering. If it is not becoming a search, it will become a suffering. That’s how masochists are created in the world. They start loving their suffering. Tears are beautiful, but just remaining at tears is dangerous. Who is going to reach the ocean? Your tears have to become oceans, you have to move onward. Your longing has to become deeper and deeper every day. Tears are a good beginning – and these same tears will bring you to greater joys than you have ever dreamed of.Mendel Kravitz saves up for many years to buy a really fine tailor-made suit, his very first. But after he’s been out in it for an hour, he notices that there are things wrong with it. He goes back to the tailor.“The arms are too long,” says Mendel.“No problem,” replies the tailor. “Just hold your arms out further and bend at the elbows.”“But the trouser legs are too long,” says Mendel.“Right,” replies the tailor. “No problem, just walk with your knees bent.”“But the collar is too high, it’s halfway up the back of my head!” says Mendel.“Okay, just poke your head out further,” says the tailor.So Mendel goes out into the world with his first tailor-made suit. As he’s passing a couple in the street, the woman says, “Look at that poor man! He must have had polio.”“Yes,” her husband replies. “But he must have a great tailor. His suit fits him perfectly.”There are thousands of teachers like that tailor. They are not concerned with you, they are concerned with their suits. They will make you crippled. They will pull your hands this way and that, your legs this way and that, they will pull your neck. They will almost put you on a traction machine so you fit the suit. You are made for the suit, not the suit for you. That’s what all the religions of the world are doing. They are not made for you, you are made for them. So you have to behave according to their principles, their criteria, their path. Otherwise you are wrong.I say to you, you are not made for any creed, any dogma, any philosophy, any religion. You are just made for yourself. And you have to find your own way of living, your own way of seeing, your own way of silence, your own way to bliss.Religion is absolutely an individual phenomenon. The greatest calamity that has happened is that all religions have become collective. And the moment a religion becomes organized, it is no longer a religion, it is just a kind of politics in the name of religion. It has no concern with people.Joseph Stalin killed thirty million Russians after the revolution. Do you think Russia had thirty million capitalists? Even to find thirty capitalists in the pre-revolution Russia would have been very difficult. It was a poor country, one of the poorest. The revolution was made for the proletariat and then thirty million proletarians were massacred because they did not fit with Stalin’s idea of revolution. You have to fit with somebody’s idea, otherwise they immediately declare you a misfit. They condemn you.As far as I am concerned, to be a misfit in your society is a great compliment. You are all misfits. I have been gathering all kinds of misfits. They fit with me perfectly well. The more far-out misfits they are, the closer they come to me, because I can see they are individuals. They have risked everything for their individuality, for their uniqueness. They have not allowed anybody to enslave them, any society, any religion, any political ideology. These are the real people, the very salt of the earth.I want you all to be just yourself – not followers of anybody, including me, but only fellow travelers. You can exchange your experiences with each other, but you don’t have to exchange your paths, because your path is just your path, exclusively yours. Nobody will ever pass on that path again, and nobody has ever passed on that path before – only you.This is the beauty of existence: it gives space to everyone, each unique individual.Osho,Sometimes, while feeling inferior and lonely because of my handicapped body and wheelchair, I suddenly become aware that as long as I can feel this pain, I am very alive. In these moments, there is absolute joy inside me, so much gratitude for each and every thing.Osho, is it really possible to grow even through suffering?Prem Amido, I understand your situation and the problem, but you are facing your situation with great courage. I am happy with you. You are suffering because of a crippled body, but you are not the body. Nor are you crippled. Your consciousness is as free as anybody else’s. Of course your path is going to be a little difficult. Your body is going to create continuous suffering for you.But perhaps, if you are alert enough – and I can see you are – you can change suffering itself into a blessing in disguise. It is one of the most significant things to understand. Why have all religions insisted that their saints and sages should be very austere, ascetic, almost torturing themselves? They were not crippled like you, but they made themselves crippled in many ways.In Alexandria, twelve hundred years ago, a Christian saint sat on an old pillar some thirty feet high. It was part of a ruin of a beautiful temple. He remained sitting on that pillar; he never came down. He never moved from that pillar until he was dead. You can understand his suffering. It was self-created. He had to sleep on that pillar, sitting – very dangerous, any moment he could have fallen. People used to bring food and he used to pull the food up with a rope. And he was defecating from the top of the pillar, pissing from the top of the pillar. He had no shelter from the sun, the rain, the cold – but he became very famous.And this is not a unique case. Millions of saints of different religions have created a situation of suffering for themselves, either by fasting… One Hindu mystic even took out his eyes, and eyes are the most sensitive part of your body. Eighty percent of your connection with existence is through the eyes. The other four senses between them have only twenty percent. To pull out your eyes with your own hands is to destroy eighty percent of your life. But he was very much respected.What has happened to all these people? I have seen saints in India, standing for twelve years, fifteen years, not for a single moment sitting down or sleeping, just standing. They have a certain device on which they keep their hands, and by and by the upper part of their body shrinks and their legs become like elephants’. Now even if they want to bend them they cannot.I have seen saints who have been living only on tea, no other food. Now, tea is not food, it is not nourishment. All these people were under the illusion that when you are living comfortably, without any pain, without any suffering, you may forget yourself, you may lose your awareness. They are using suffering as a means to awareness. I am not in support of it.As far as you are concerned you are not creating the suffering. The suffering is there. You can use it to remain alert. And you are rightly observing that the pain keeps you feeling that you are still alive. I have seen you laughing. You cannot dance, but I have seen by the effort in your whole being that you want to dance. The body is preventing it; the body is not in the right position. You cannot do anything about it, but you can use this natural suffering to create a clearer awareness, more consciousness. And then suddenly you will feel even grateful to the suffering.I am not saying that people have to create suffering, that is stupid. I am saying that if you find yourself in suffering, use that suffering for your inner growth. That is intelligence. And, in you I see immense intelligence, and a consciousness which wants to celebrate. Even if your body is not cooperating with you, don’t be worried. The body is going to die one day – everyone’s body dies – but you are going to be eternally here. It is your consciousness that really matters.It is perfectly good: you can grow even through suffering. One can grow from any place where one finds oneself. Growth is possible from infinite sources. Just go on enjoying even the pain because it keeps you alert to your being alive. Most of the people whose bodies are not crippled like your body, may, at the last count, be losers, not winners. They are so comfortable with their bodies that they remain identified with the body. You cannot identify with your body, it is too painful. You have to separate yourself from the body and this very separation will bring you witnessing, watching, alertness.There may be many problems for you, but you can change every problem into a device – you have to. I have many sannyasins who are in the same position as you, in a wheelchair. But strangely enough – and I have watched all of them – they become immensely joyful, laughing, loving.The other day I had another question from you which I did not answer. I felt your pain myself. You were saying that you would also like to love someone. I can understand – a natural instinct, and the instinct does not know that your body is crippled. And the people have become so body-oriented that they don’t see inside the body a beautiful human being. They just look at the body. Naturally, no woman will feel attracted toward you; it hurts. It hurts me too, that’s why I did not answer the question. I was waiting for you to ask some other question. Then I would talk about your first question too.Take that too as part of your whole suffering. You are alone. Don’t feel lonely. Just feel a deep aloneness and let that aloneness grow with your consciousness of suffering and pain. Accept that perhaps nobody is going to love you, but you yourself can love. You can love the trees, they are not so fussy. You can love the stars in the night. They will not object saying “Amido, you don’t have the right body.” You can love the whole universe. And perhaps in this place there may be some woman compassionate enough, meditative enough, who may be able to see your consciousness and will not bother about your body.Anyway, women don’t care much about the bodies of men. They are very conscious about their own bodies, but no woman is interested in the body of the man. In fact, when the man is making love to them, they close their eyes. They don’t want to see all the gymnastics that the poor fellow is doing on top of them. They are praying to God, “Finish it soon!” because a man making love does not have the same face, it becomes distorted. He is perspiring, huffing and puffing; love seems to be such an arduous thing, like going uphill. He himself knows it is stupid, but still the man wants the light to be on. He is interested in the woman’s body.Most men don’t feel satisfied with a wife for the simple reason that she lies down almost dead, with closed eyes. She is just a victim, somehow waiting for this guy to finish. These people start going to the prostitutes. Prostitutes are phony, because they don’t love those people, they love only their money. They moan and groan and they scream as if the man is doing great, making the woman so satisfied. This is all phony, this is all acting; this is the attraction of the prostitutes around the world for as long as man has been in existence. The prostitute is satisfying the customer. And the greatest satisfaction of the customer is to feel that he is man enough to satisfy a woman. And when he sees the woman moving from side to side, groaning, moaning, shouting “Ooh-la-la” – all phony – he feels great!But the wife does not behave in the same way because, in the first place, he is not her customer. It is not a business. Secondly, it is an everyday affair. In fact, every time a husband tries to make love to the woman, she makes excuses. Sometimes it is a period and sometimes it is a headache and sometimes she is too tired, and sometimes the cook has left. There are a thousand-and-one excuses. She simply wants to avoid the encounter. The woman is not interested in the man’s body.Now, because of the women’s liberation movement, a few new things have come into existence for which history has no precedent: male prostitutes, and Playgirl, a pornographic magazine just to compete with all kinds of Playboy-type magazines. But I don’t think it is natural to women: it is simply a reaction against men. Women are more interested in your loving qualities, more interested in your being, in your consciousness, in your friendliness.Amido, it is possible – perhaps it is possible only in my place – that some compassionate woman may give you some experience of love. One has to transcend it, but I can understand your difficulty. You have not experienced it, so transcendence becomes absolutely impossible. But as far as you are concerned, don’t hanker for it. Perhaps nature and existence do not want you to be in the same foolish game as all other human beings.But biology is biology. A woman is needed to complete the man, otherwise both are incomplete. So you just wait in your wheelchair. And I know there are women of tremendous compassion who may come and take your wheelchair and you with it. Then don’t make a fuss, because you don’t have much choice. You can keep your eyes closed. Just a woman is enough; don’t be romantic. Leave that for other fools.Ronald Reagan has always had a complex about his small prick. One day he is taking a piss next to Ed Meese when he notices that Meese’s prick is enormous.“My God, Ed!” exclaims Reagan. “That is a fair-sized organ!”“Well,” says Meese, “it wasn’t always this big. But every night I gave it three whacks against the bedpost and before I knew it, it started to grow.”Reagan thinks this over very carefully and then decides to give it a try. When he goes up to bed that night, Nancy is already asleep. So he tiptoes over to the bed and whacks his prick against the bedpost three times. Nancy wakes up and murmurs, “Ed, is that you?”Osho,For three days I have felt such a little space inside, such a little flame. And the only feeling I have is to protect this little flame. I feel she is so fragile, I just want to keep her, to caress her, and when I touch her, so many tears come.Osho, is it okay just to take care of her, to enjoy her presence just by myself, because it is hard to share her now. I am afraid to lose this space.It happens to everybody when he discovers his inner life. It is a flame. In the beginning it is small, and the natural tendency of the mind is to protect it, not to share it. But whatever the natural tendency of the mind is, it not necessarily the logic of existence. If you don’t share it, you will kill it. Only by sharing will it grow. You have to understand a totally different economics. One is the economics that if you share, your money will be less and less and less.One day a man was stopped in his car by a beggar. He was in good spirits because he had won a huge amount of money in a lottery, just a few minutes before. He took a ten-dollar bill and gave it to the beggar. When he was giving it to the beggar he saw that the beggar’s clothes, although old and rotten, must have been very costly in the beginning. His face also looked that of a cultured, sophisticated… The way he spoke also gave the hint that he did not come from a poor family.Naturally, the man in the car asked him, “What happened? You don’t seem to belong to the world of beggars, neither your clothes, nor your voice, nor your accent, nor your language, nor your face. Everything denies that you have been related to a poor beggar family. You seem to come from a very high-class one.”The beggar laughed. He said, “You are right. Once I used to be in better cars than the one you have. But I committed the same mistake that you are committing. I went on giving to people. Now you are giving ten dollars. I have not even asked for one dollar. Before I could ask, you handed me ten dollars. If you go on in this way, soon you will be standing by my side.”Ordinary economics wants you to be miserly because it is concerned with the quantitative world. If you give some quantity to somebody, you have that much less. But the world of consciousness is not the world of quantity: it is the world of quality. The more you give, the more you have. It follows just the opposite rule of ordinary economics.But your mind knows only ordinary economics, so it is afraid that if you start sharing this small flame that has arisen in you – that is giving you so much peace and bliss and joy – because it is so small if shared, it will be gone, and you will be again in darkness. But it is not true. What is true: if you don’t share it, it will be gone; if you share it, it will grow. Sharing is the principle tool of higher consciousness for growth. If you want this flame to become your whole life, a fire, a flame, then share. Don’t be bothered about its smallness.The seed is always small. But if the seed is afraid to dissolve into the soil, neither will a huge tree come into existence nor will thousands of flowers and fruit and millions of seeds – just out of one small seed. The scientists say just a single small seed can make the whole planet green. But it has to dissolve into the soil. If it protects itself, becomes defensive, remains closed, soon it will be a rotten seed. Then nothing will grow out of it.Let your inner flame be a constant sharing so it is always fresh. And it will become more and more as you become less and less miserly. The more your compassion, the more your love, the more you give without any thought of getting anything in return, the more this flame will come to its full height. So don’t get into this trap of the mind. The mind knows nothing about higher economics, higher mathematics, it knows only the much lower world of money, of things, and naturally its experience prevents it from sharing.You are asking, “Is it okay just to take care of it, to enjoy its presence just by myself?” No. It is not okay. It is exactly the wrong thing to do. Your fear is that it’s hard to share it now. No, it is not hard. Howsoever small it is, it can be shared.I have told you an ancient Sufi parable…A dark night and it was raining hard; it must have been twelve o’clock. Some stranger knocked on the door of a poor man’s hut. The hut was so small that only the husband and wife could sleep there, but the husband said to the wife, who was closer to the door, “Open the door.”The wife was reluctant. She said, “But where are we going to arrange for him to sleep? We don’t have any space here.”But her husband, who was a Sufi mystic, said, “Don’t be worried. If there is enough for two to sleep, there is enough for three to sit and gossip. And the night is not very long, half is already past. But a man lost in the forest, in the darkness, and in so much rain… Don’t be ugly and don’t listen to your small mind, just open the door.”The door was opened, the man came in completely soaked by the rain. The Sufi gives him his only other robe and tells him, “Forgive us; we only have a small hut. We are poor people, but our hearts are not poor. We cannot arrange for you to sleep, but we will all sit together. And I don’t know much about the world because I live in this forest. For years I have not gone out. And you seem to be a man of the world, so you can tell us many things about what is going on in the world that we may not have heard. So let us enjoy the night.”The stranger was very happy that at least he could get shelter. Otherwise he would have been lost in the forest where there were wild animals. And the rain was so heavy, he was shivering. But with closed doors, in changed clothes and a small space, he soon started feeling better and began to talk to the mystic. And the mystic was a great listener; he listened to his experiences in the world, what was happening in the world. And just then, another knock…Now the stranger was sitting close to the door. The Sufi said to him, “Please open the door.” The stranger was reluctant.This is how the mind functions. Just half an hour before, he was in the same situation outside. He had forgotten all about it.He said, “What do you mean? Open the door? There is no space.”The Sufi said, “That’s what my wife was saying when you were knocking. I know there is no space for sitting as we are sitting, but we will be sitting a little closer and the night is getting colder. Our being close will give us warmth. We don’t have anything else to keep you warm. It is a good chance, don’t miss it. Open the door.”Naturally the stranger understood the point. He himself had been in the same position. So he opened the door. Another stranger who had lost his way, soaked by the rain… The Sufi said to his wife, “Give him your other dress, and ask forgiveness of the stranger because he will have to put on a woman’s dress, but we don’t have anything else. It doesn’t matter, dresses are not male or female. They don’t have sexual differences. Dresses are just dresses. And we will sit closer to each other.”The man was feeling so cold that he was willing to put on the woman’s dress. And now they were sitting very close together, touching each other, but they all felt better because now they were feeling much warmer. The Sufi told the second stranger, “We were talking about the world, what is happening. If you have something to say – perhaps you have passed through different experiences than the first stranger – tell us. A very small part of the night remains. Soon the sun will rise, the rain will stop, and then you can find your way. And if you cannot find your way, I will come with you to the nearest village. From there you can move wherever you want.”So the other man started telling his experiences. It was a beautiful night: the music of the rain, the silence of the forest, the closeness and the warmth, and strange stories. And just then came another knock, but a very strange knock. It did not seem to be that some man was knocking. But the Sufi said, “Open the door. It is not a man, don’t be worried; it is a donkey, a wild donkey. But he is very friendly to me and the rain is so heavy that he cannot tolerate it. So he has come.”But now the new stranger, who was near the door, said, “This is crazy. There is no space. We are already sitting so tightly, close to each other. Where is the donkey going to stand?”The Sufi said, “You are a man, you could have found some other place, but that poor donkey does not have that much intelligence. But he knows my love, he recognizes me. Don’t be worried, we are sitting, now we will be standing. And we will keep the donkey in the middle so he also becomes warm. And the poor fellow, where can he go? Open the door!” The door had to be opened and the donkey walked in and now they were all standing around the donkey.The stranger who came just before the donkey said, “You seem to be a very strange fellow. You disturbed your wife’s and your sleep, then you disturbed your sitting at ease when you allowed me in. Now you have disturbed even sitting. We have to stand the whole remaining part of the night.”He said, “No, I am not a strange man. I am just a human being who knows how to share. And this is a poor man’s place. It may look small, but it has enough space.”The question is not of the outer space, the question is of the inner space. There is no emperor’s palace where there seems to be enough space – although it has so much space. The reality is that the palace has enough space, but the heart of the emperor has no space at all. And if you understand rightly, then what the Sufi is saying is that the real emperor is one who has the inner space and the capacity to share with others. A man may be a great emperor, but have almost nothing, no space inside him. He cannot share.Don’t fall into this trap. Something tremendously beautiful is happening to you. If you can learn the higher economics of sharing – and I say it with an absolute guarantee – the flame will grow bigger. It will soon be bigger than you. But if you want it to disappear, then protect it. It is almost like a candle. If you cover it with something to protect the flame because it is windy, the flame may disappear. If for protection you cover it with anything, you have killed the flame already. But if you keep it open, the flame is capable enough to move with the wind. It won’t disappear so easily.Your inner flame is eternal. It cannot die. But if you don’t share, that means you don’t deserve it. It will become smaller and smaller. And this is the trouble with the mind: you will become more and more afraid that it is becoming smaller, “Now I have to protect more.” The more you protect, the more you are killing it. Sharing is the rule to protect it; not only to protect, but to help it grow.Ronald Reagan goes into a bar in Washington looking for some action. He sees three women sitting together, a blonde, a brunette and a redhead.To the blonde, he says, “I’m the President; how much would it cost me to spend the night with you?”“Two hundred bucks,” she says.He asks the brunette the same question and she says, “Three hundred bucks.”Then he asks the redhead, and she says, “Mr. President, if you can raise my skirt as high as my taxes, then get my panties as low as my wages, then get that thing of yours as hard as the times, and screw me the way you screw the public, believe me, Mr. President, it won’t cost you a penny.”

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 24 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,The other day in discourse, your being, your beauty, struck me like a huge wave. I was again a child, looking with big eyes. It was like a window opening to something unknown, yet known.Osho, would you like to speak on this experience? What is this amazement?This amazement is pure love, a love unfettered by biological conditions. It is trust: a trust that has not been asked for, a trust that does not make you a slave, but gives you absolute freedom. This amazement is the whole secret that happens between the master and the disciple. Perhaps there is no other miracle in the world that can be compared to this. It is invisible, particularly to those who are unacquainted with anything like a master-disciple communion. It is something from being to being.It will be good to have this comparison. Sex is from body to body; ordinary so-called love is from heart to heart; trust is the highest form of love from being to being. As you go deeper, things go on becoming more and more amazing, more and more unbelievable, but more and more an experience so definitive that you cannot doubt it. It is a transfer, a transmission between the being of the master and the disciple.Your description about it is very accurate: as if a window has opened. Suddenly where there was just darkness, a cool breeze comes and a window opens and the whole sky with all its stars becomes available to you. Certainly one is stunned. The mind stops, and because the mind stops, one feels as if one has become a child again.You are also right in saying that it is something unknown, yet seems to be very much known. It is both. You have known it; it was your first experience when you were born and opened your eyes – your senses were immensely sensitive. Each day that has passed has been making them more and more insensitive. What people think of as the growth of a child is simply the death of the child.The child knew something which even the old people don’t know. But his knowing was so simple that he could not formulate it into words. He could not say anything about it. He saw the roseflower in the garden and he saw the lush green trees, but he had no idea what green was and what a tree was and what a rose was, what a flower. He was seeing everything with better eyes than you have because your eyes are too much covered with dust.Life is a continuous traveling in which your senses become tired, dust-covered, your mirror no longer reflects but distorts. And sometimes it stops even distorting, it is no longer a mirror. A thick layer of experiences covers it so totally that it becomes impossible for it to reflect anything.The child’s eyes are pure, clean; so are his ears and other senses. The first moment he opens to the world, he is filled with amazement and wonder. But there is no way for him to convey it. He has lived for nine months in a dark tunnel. No light penetrated there, no roses bloomed there. He was almost a part of his mother’s body. He was not an individual. He was not even breathing by himself. It was the mother’s breath that he was getting his oxygen from. He was being nourished by the mother. He had not even dreamed. He was not yet a separate entity. He was just like the hand of the mother or the leg of the mother, just part and parcel. His life was dependent on the mother’s life, he was sharing it.The moment of birth is a great trauma because the child naturally feels afraid, worried. He cannot think that it is going to be a birth into a bigger world, into a vast universe, that miracles are waiting for him. He can only conceive birth as a death. Just think about the child coming out of the mother’s womb. He cannot conceive that he is going into authentic, individual existence, that he is moving into a vaster universe. For nine months he has known a certain life and he is being taken away from it. He cannot conceive life as something that is going to happen. He can conceive it only as a death compared to what has been happening for nine months. He is freaking completely. He does not want to come out.That’s why there is such a struggle and it takes the mother so much time. The child does not want to come out of the womb. He clings with absolute force. His life is being destroyed. He does not know what is happening, who is throwing him out of his home. It is the child who is creating all the pain for the mother because he is resisting coming out. But he has to come out. He cannot live forever in his mother’s womb.Except for one exceptional story, in the whole of history there is no incidence where somebody has lived longer than ten months, at the most, in the mother’s womb. Just one man lived there for eighty-four years. His name was Lao Tzu. He is a strange man. You cannot predict what a man like Lao Tzu will do. For eighty-four years he lived in his mother’s womb. When he was born he was already so old, his hair white, a long beard… And the strangest thing was: he came out laughing. From the very start he behaved in a way that nobody has ever done, nobody has even tried. This story about Lao Tzu cannot be historical. You have to think about the mother carrying a child for eighty-four years. She would have been dead long before the child was born.The scientific fact is that every human child is born incomplete. Many other animals are born complete. That’s why they become immediately independent from the mother, from the father, and soon they have moved on their own way. They don’t create a family. A family is the need of the helpless child. A family is not created by man and woman, the family is created by the helplessness of the child. The child is not complete.In fact a child needs at least four years in the mother’s womb. But the mother cannot manage that long, a four-year-old child in the womb when even nine months is too much. It is just the infinite compassion and love of a woman that there are children in the world. If it were the other way round, that the man was going to become pregnant, you can take it for granted that no child would be born in the world. The man is so impatient. Nine months! Carrying such a load which goes on growing inside you. You cannot eat, you cannot drink, you are throwing up because there is no space inside you: the child is growing and taking all the space. It is only because of the patience of a woman that humanity exists.But even the woman is not capable of more than nine months. Scientific understanding is that the child, every child, is a kind of abortion, even the natural birth. The child is born incomplete. That’s why for four years at least he will need absolute support – and that is the minimum I am talking about. The actual fact is that a child often needs the support of the family for up to twenty-five years. Until he comes down from the university with a PhD he is dependent. He is still somehow part of the womb.But the first moment of every child’s birth is a tremendous experience for him. He is expecting to die. He is almost certain that it is going to happen. His life is being destroyed by unknown forces. Why is he being thrown out of his house? He has not known any other kind of life. The only life he knows is in the womb. He thinks he is going to die, but suddenly finds that instead of death, birth has happened. Instead of dying, for the first time he has become alive. The womb was only a preparation. It was not his life. It was just preparing him so that he could move into life.The womb is just like a nursery where plants are prepared and then they move into gardens the moment they are strong enough to face the sun, the wind, the rain, and all kinds of problems and responsibilities of existence. The moment the experience of death turns into its opposite, the experience of life, the child feels his first amazement, which is never transcended unless he is born again in a spiritual sense.The mother’s womb was one preparation. The master’s womb is another preparation. The energy field of the master is the womb. And you are being prepared to die to the past, to die to your personality that you have known as yourself and to enter into a new quality of life which you have not even dreamed of. So when you enter this new life, it brings great amazement. You cannot believe it. But you are right: in a way you know it, in a way you don’t know it. You know it because your first birth had something similar in it. This is the same phenomenon on a higher level.The master is your death and he is also your resurrection. Passing through the master you are going to enter a life which is eternal. No mother can give you an eternal life. She can give you only a mortal life, the life of the body which is going to die sooner or later. In fact it starts dying from the very first moment. It takes the body seventy, eighty or a hundred years to reach the grave, but it goes on moving toward the grave. Do you think that each birthday you are celebrating life? You are wrong. Each birthday you are celebrating death. Each birthday means one year has slipped by. You are more dead than you have been, and you are coming closer to the grave. The queue is becoming shorter and shorter.The day my father died, I counted how many people are still in the queue in which I am standing. Two of my father’s sisters had died, two of his brothers were alive, so they were the only two persons between me and the window. Just a few days ago one uncle died. Now there is only one uncle between me and the window. So I know how one gets closer and closer to the grave. Each moment you are moving without your knowing toward death.The mother cannot give you a birth which is eternal. The mother herself knows nothing about the eternal. The master is another womb, another energy field, another preparation for a new life. The old is going to be ending any moment and if you don’t get acquainted with the new, you have wasted your whole life in utter futility.Once in a while you will be very close to the master but this is going to be a zigzag way. Sometimes you will be very close and then you will have that amazement of a new life dancing very close by. You can hear the music. You go on coming closer but then you go farther away. Your coming to the master is not a straight line without looking back.There are a few people who have the guts not to look back, who never waver for a single moment, who don’t go astray here and there, who go on coming closer and closer. Every step is toward the master’s being. But not all are so fortunate, not all are so courageous. They come close and they see that it is going to be death – like the child who, in a certain unconscious way, would like to be free of this small space he has been imprisoned in for nine months, but is not conscious of it. He is coming closer to getting out of the womb, but then he steps back. Who knows? To go into the unknown may be worse than the known. It may be the very end of your existence.But what happens to the child is very unconscious, dark. What happens to the disciple is not that unconscious because by becoming a disciple he is making every effort to become more and more alert. Once in a while he comes very close – when suddenly he sees through the master a glimpse of the new life. That is the amazement. That is the wonder. And that is going to be your guarantee that passing through the master is not going to be just a death. It is going to be the beginning of a new eternal life. Hence the joy. Hence the ecstasy.It has been a beautiful experience. Now, don’t move even a single inch backward. Much more is ahead. Just go on coming closer, be ready for a merger, for a melting, for disappearing as you are. Only then can you appear as you should be. That life knows no end. You have transcended death, you have reached the eternal source of life. This is the search.And the master is certainly a window. You have to pass through him. Any master who tries to stop you somewhere, who wants you to cling to him, not to pass through him and go ahead is not authentic, is pseudo. Take a jump from the window into the infinite, the eternal, the ultimate. If he is not a window to jump into sat-chit-anand – into truth, into consciousness, into bliss – then he is not an authentic master. If he wants you to remain loyal to him, if he wants you only to believe in him, if he insists that you remain always a shadow of him, then he is your enemy, he is not your friend.Most of the so-called masters in the past have been your enemies. That’s why you are still shadows, you are still not authentic beings. They did not allow you to be. They enjoyed the game “I have so many disciples,” which is a very pious game of ego. The ego is so subtle, it can catch hold of you in any place. It does not matter that you are trying to be spiritual, the ego can still manage to live within you.I have heard about a master who used to live alone deep in the forest. One day a seeker came who was searching for a master. He had been to many masters, but had found nothing but ego trips in the name of spirituality. He had just left another master who was continuously bragging about how many disciples he had. He never forgot to tell any stranger who came to him how many disciples he had. The seeker, watching the whole scene that seemed to be a circus, felt it was not a place for spiritual growth because the man in the center was himself still not out of the games of children, the ego games.So he went into the forest in search. Perhaps somewhere in the deeper forest he might find a master. And he found an old master, very silent, very serene and he felt that perhaps this was the right man. He told him, “I have been searching. I have been to many masters, but I was not satisfied.”The old man asked, “What was the trouble? Why were you not satisfied?”He said, “They were all playing a political game, the politics of numbers. They were all comparing with each other who had more disciples, who had the king as a disciple, who had the prime minister as a disciple, who had the richest man as a disciple. It seemed they were more influenced by the king, by the prime minister, by the richest man than they were influencing those people.”The old man said, “Then you have found the right man. I don’t have a single disciple. Now you need not go anywhere. I am the only one who has no disciples.”Such are the ways, so subtle and so cunning… Now he is enjoying the idea that he has no disciples, he is the only one.But that young seeker said, “Once you accept me as a disciple, you will not be able to claim what you are claiming now. I will not disturb your ego, I am going in search of an authentic master.”The man said, “But what more do you want? I am the only one who doesn’t have any disciples!”He said, “That is the problem, they are all trying to prove this: that they are the only one – the only one who has ten thousand disciples, the only one who has twenty thousand disciples. You are the only one who has no disciples. But the idea that ‘I am the only one, unique,’ continues to haunt you. And that is preventing your own spiritual explosion.”Such masters are bound to have a mutual conspiracy. They will pretend that they are the saviors, and they will enjoy the idea that they are not only saviors but the only savior. And the disciples who follow them will enjoy the ego that they are the disciples of the only real savior. All others are following fools, idiots, all kinds of stupid people. “We are following the right person.” This is a mutual conspiracy. They are both fulfilling each other’s egos.I don’t want you to be a shadow, I don’t want you to believe in me; I don’t want you in any way to be in a certain bondage or commitment. I want you simply to use me as a window so that you can go beyond. Beyond the window is the real, is the true, is the beautiful. You have used a very beautiful word, window. I am certainly nothing but a window. And if you can pass through me I will be, more than you can conceive, grateful to you because my only concern is that I should not become a bondage to you, I should not become an imprisonment, a slavery to anyone.My love cannot allow any kind of bondage forced upon you, any belief, any discipline. I want you to be individuals in your own right, unique, growing to your own potential. At the most I can only be a window to the beyond, to the starry night. And it is something that you have known before on a small scale when you were born. Now you have to know it on a bigger scale, on a higher scale, so that you can be reborn.These were exactly the words Jesus used to the professor who had come to see him in the middle of the night.When everybody was asleep he came, very silently, and woke up Jesus. In the dark Jesus said, “What do you want?”He said, “I have heard so much about you and once in a while in the crowd, standing behind the crowd, I have listened to you. I am a professor and I have been afraid to come to you because people think I know already. What is the need for me to go to a carpenter’s son who is uneducated, who knows nothing? So I could not come in the daytime. But your words have such authority. They haunt me day and night. I have come in the night so nobody knows. I have a few questions to ask.”Jesus said, “Such a coward who doesn’t even have the courage to meet me in front of others will not be able to understand what my answers are going to be. So first be reborn, and then come to me.”What does he mean by “be reborn”? He is saying, “Drop all this rubbish knowledge, this personality, this respectability, this prestige of being a professor. Be reborn. Be a child again and then come to me, because only innocence can understand another innocence. Only a heart can understand another heart. Only a silent being can understand another silent being.”Remember this experience, and much more is going to happen. But don’t expect it, just let it happen on its own. Even your expectation can become a block. This happened spontaneously. Remember it: everything that is going to happen is only going to happen spontaneously and not according to your expectations. So just be here, enjoy this relaxed communion of seekers, this silence that is resounding in so many hearts, this music that joins everybody who is here with invisible threads.Out of this rejoicing and singing and dancing, you will become more and more spontaneous and more and more available to me. You will be coming closer and closer to the window; the unknown will start becoming more and more familiar and cozy. The coldness of the unknown will disappear. And remember that the unknown is not enough. You have to move still further, you have to reach to the unknowable. Only then will you have entered into the mystery of existence. But it is going to happen. Just get ready.I am not asking much for you to be ready. Every religion has been asking too much. In India there have been three religions who have asked so much from the disciples that one life was not enough. Many, many lives were needed for preparation. After many, many lives you may become enlightened. But I say unto you, you can become enlightened this very moment because my preparation is a totally new dimension. It is about being spontaneous, having a rejoicing heart, being in tune with love. It is more musical, harmonious; it is more relaxed.My whole approach can be condensed into two words – let go.Osho,When Jesus ascended to heaven he went alone. When Mohammed ascended, he rode his horse. Will you drive?The question you have asked is very complicated. It is not an easy question. First, I am not going the way Jesus and Mohammed went. My way is just the opposite. They have all been going to heaven. To be frank with you I am not interested in heaven! My whole interest is in hell because all the beautiful people are there: musicians, dancers, poets, painters, great creators in all dimensions. All the people who had some color to their being, people who had some juice are in hell, not in heaven.In heaven you will find only dry bones. I cannot tolerate their company for a single moment. Just think of yourself surrounded by saints. It will be so suffocating. Heaven is no longer the place to go. If you want to meet Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, if you want to meet Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, if you want to meet Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Turgenev, if you want to meet Van Gogh and Picasso, then hell is the place.So the first thing, I am not going where Jesus went or where Mohammed ascended with his horse. I am not going that way. Whatever I have heard about that place does not appeal to me at all. For example, water is not available because the rivers are of milk and honey. I cannot take a bath in honey or milk. And it is such ancient milk that by this time it must have turned into curd, turned into butter, butter into ghee! It will be stinking. You cannot even get a coca-cola there. No cold drink, just that rotten honey and milk.Just think! So ancient… And all kinds of dirty saints are swimming in those rivers and doing all kinds of nasty things. India has produced more saints than any other country and you know what Indian saints will be doing, defecating around those rivers. An Indian is an Indian, he cannot change his habits, his civilization, his culture. Indians think that people who go to a toilet are dirty people. Why not go under the open sky, in the open air? Why go into small cabins? In my childhood I used to hear this. Most of the houses – almost ninety percent of the houses – in India don’t have any attached bathroom or toilet. It is thought to be something against Indian culture.Saints in particular: even if there is an attached bathroom and a modern toilet where they are staying, they cannot go in it because their religious scriptures don’t allow them to defecate in water. The modern toilet has water in it, so they cannot use it. They have to find very dry land, only then can they defecate. With millions of saints in heaven for centuries, it must have become the dirtiest place possible. I am not interested at all.You will be surprised that it is not only true about India. Just a hundred years ago there was a case in the Supreme Court of America. The Christian church brought a case against a man because he had brought all that was needed to make an attached bathroom with toilet from Europe. The Christians who brought the case to the Supreme Court said that God never created any house with an attached bathroom. That’s true. God himself goes in the open! No scripture of any religion mentions that he has an attached bathroom. It was so obvious so the Christian church said: “This man is going to spoil the whole morality of the country, the whole culture of the country. He should be prevented. You can have outhouses far away from your house but you cannot be allowed to have a toilet, a bathroom, inside the house. Are you mad or something?” And it is not a very old story, just a hundred years ago.It was because of the intelligence of the Supreme Court of America that they gave the man permission. They said: “There is nothing wrong in it. There is nothing against religion in it. God may not have created it, but we can see that this is perfectly clean.” But I don’t think any modern technology has reached heaven.All saints are against anything new, but everything that you are enjoying on the earth is new. It was not created in those six days when God created the world. I don’t see any mention of shampoo or hair conditioner or soap. No mention of anything. It is all man-made. Whatever comforts you have, whatever luxuries you have, all are man-made. God left this world almost in chaos. In six days you cannot hope for much more.My own tailor…I was going on a journey for two to three months. I was not coming back, and I told him, “I need my clothes ready by Saturday evening.”He said, “But that’s only six days.”He was a Christian, so I said, “In six days God created the whole world and you cannot create two or three robes for me?”But he was a very beautiful old man. That’s how we had become friends and he had become my tailor. He said, “Okay, I will, but have another look at the world! That will be the situation of your clothes too.”I said, “Then you take your time, because I don’t want my clothes to be in the same situation as the world is, even today.”He said, “You are a sane man. I will try my best. But I am a poor tailor; even God could not manage.”In the heaven of all religions there are beautiful women available for the saints as a reward. Strange reward! Their whole life they were told not to look at women: don’t touch them, don’t think of them. All the religions say woman is the cause of all your misery, all your sins. And then in the end, you end up with them as a reward! But those call girls in heaven have remained stuck at the age of sixteen. They have always been sixteen.Here also women get stuck in many places. Sixteen, then for two, three years they are sixteen, but not more than that. Then at about twenty-six they will again get stuck. They hop. The age of thirty-five is the longest gap, because now it is more dangerous to go ahead. It has been calculated that at the age of thirty-five all intelligent women stop growing, at least for six years. In six years’ time they will be thirty-six. This way it is very difficult to find out the actual age of a woman. But in heaven they are stuck at sixteen for millennia.Now what kind of girls are these saints being given? They are not only secondhand or thirdhand… How many saints have used the same girls? Most probably they are made of plastic, so that once in a while after dry cleaning the girl is again ready. Pump in the air and the girl is ready. I suspect it’s plastic not without any reason – I never suspect anything without a reason – but because the scriptures say they don’t perspire. Skin is bound to perspire. It is impossible for skin not to perspire, because it is the perspiration that keeps your temperature constant.If you don’t perspire when it is hot, your temperature will rise too high – and the span as far as temperature is concerned is not much. In years, your life span may be seventy or eighty, but as far as temperature is concerned, from ninety-eight to one hundred and ten – that is only twelve degrees – is the span. If on a hot summer day you don’t perspire, the heat will push your temperature up to one hundred and five, and at one hundred and five you start becoming delirious. At one hundred and six or seven you start hallucinating. By a hundred and ten you are finished.Perspiration keeps you constantly at ninety-eight degrees because the body goes on releasing water and the heat goes on evaporating the water. It is deceiving the heat. The heat gets involved in evaporating the perspiration and forgets to heat you up. The perspiration does not allow the heat to enter the body, it keeps it out.You don’t perspire when it is cold. Even if you try you cannot. When you are cold, you shiver. That is another way to keep the inner temperature again at ninety-eight degrees. By shivering you keep yourself hot, otherwise the cold will bring you down. On both ends there is a limit. Above, there is a possible range of at least twelve degrees. Below ninety-eight there is not even that much possibility – just two or three degrees and you shiver. You think that because you are shivering it is not good; you don’t know it is saving your life. Your teeth will start chattering. That is keeping you warm.But those girls in heaven… If they are dead, either the saints just don’t know exactly what they are doing, or perhaps after lifelong repression even corpses are enough.I have heard about one drunkard. He was caught by the police in France because he was making love to a dead woman who had drowned and been brought by the waves to the shore. In the night the drunkard had staggered there and found a beautiful woman, so he made love to her.He was caught, and in the morning was asked in the court, “Why were you making love to that dead woman?”He replied “I had no idea that she was dead. I thought she was English! You cannot punish me because of a misunderstanding.”What are those saints doing there? I have never heard of any intelligent man going to heaven. Now, Mohammed going on his horse… You think this looks intelligent? The poor horse will unnecessarily suffer with the saints. What does he know about saintliness? He will miss his girlfriend, and Mohammed will have no idea that the poor horse… In heaven there is no provision for horses.I am not going that way, that much is certain – and neither are you. From my window you will jump directly to hell! I have already fixed my window in the right direction. I want you to be in the best company. Every genius is there. As far as saints are concerned, most of them are retarded. At least in thirty-five years continuously roaming around this country, which produces nothing but poverty and saints, I have not come across a single saint who can be called intelligent.I met one saint who even Mahatma Gandhi declared a great saint of modern India. Once he was a professor. His name was Professor Bhansali. Then he became a follower of Mahatma Gandhi and entered his ashram. It was not much of an ashram, just a miniature heaven. You could get some idea from Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram of what is going to happen in heaven. Bhansali became a great saint because for six months continuously he was eating only cow dung and drinking only cow urine. And he became a great saint! Even Gandhi declared: “I have seen saints, but Bhansali is superb.”Now do you call this intelligence? When I saw Bhansali I told him, “You are an absolute idiot!” He was very angry.He said, “Mahatma Gandhi used to call me a saint!”I said, “He was in the same category as you, but you surpassed him.”If you want beautiful company, people of intelligence, genius, creativity, you will find them all in hell – all great scientists, all great technologists and they have already transformed hell completely. No new scripture is written, so nobody knows how things have changed. Hell is no longer the same. It has become the most beautiful place in existence because all the great people are there.You are asking me if I am going to drive. From earth to hell the road is exactly as it was from Antelope to Rajneeshpuram. It is an American county road. I don’t want to drive on it. Avesh and Anandadas are going to take my limousine and I am going to rest on the way. Avesh is needed because that road is long and no car has ever traveled on that road, so it’s good to have a mechanic. And a perfect driver, Anandadas, is needed. Nobody knows how long the road is because there are neither milestones nor traffic. So they can take turns driving. And I always travel asleep. In trains and airplanes and cars, I always travel sleeping, because why bother unnecessarily? This is the right time to have a good sleep.So I will be sleeping and it will be the first time anybody has gone to hell sleeping beautifully, restfully. People go toward hell in such fear, tension, paranoia. I am going there; many of my sannyasins are already there. Many I will send even before I go, just to prepare everybody that I am coming. We are going to create a real commune there. I think with God it will be very difficult. With the Devil I can manage. I can initiate him very easily into sannyas!Nivedana, if you are thinking of going to heaven, drop that idea. You are coming with me. I never go alone: one car ahead, one car behind. In one of the cars, Nivedana will have a seat. He asked the question because, listening to me talking about Jesus and Mohammed and others, he must have thought that I am going to take the same route. No, Jesus and Mohammed are both repenting, but there is no exit from heaven. Once you enter, you enter for eternity. You cannot get out. That is one more difficulty. You cannot go as a tourist, just a three-week tour to see whether this is the place where you would like to stay for eternity.I think he got into a misunderstanding because I have been using these names with deep love and respect, and with deep compassion because these poor fellows did not realize that where they were going was the wrong place. But once we are all in hell, we will try to create some back door in heaven from where we can pick up the right people who are in the wrong place. There are not many. Only very few people who are worth taking out have got into the wrong place.Nancy and Ronald Reagan go out to a restaurant for dinner. The waiter approaches them and asks Nancy what she would like to eat.“I would like to have a steak,” says Nancy.“And would you like to have some wine with your meal?” asks the waiter.“Yes,” she replies. “A bottle of your finest.”The waiter then asks, “How about the vegetable?”“Ah,” says Nancy, “he will have the same as me.”Identical twin brothers Hamish and Gordon lived in the same town. Hamish was married but Gordon was single and used to have an old rowboat. It happens that Hamish’s wife dies on the same day as Gordon’s boat sinks.The minister’s wife meets Gordon in the street and, mistaking him for Hamish, says, “I am very sorry to hear about your great loss.”“Ah,” says Gordon, “I’m not sorry a bit. She was a rotten old thing from the start. Her bottom was all chewed up. The first time I got into her she made water faster than anything I have ever seen. She had a big crack and a big hole at the front which just got bigger every time I used her. Then the other day, four guys came around looking for a good time and they asked if they could rent her. Well, the crazy fools all tried to get into her at the same time, and she cracked right up the middle.”The minister’s wife collapsed.Just misunderstanding, Nivedana. A few people have entered heaven without understanding the whole situation, and now they are repenting, but nobody has ever done anything to save them from heaven. These people used to think that they were going to save you. Now they are caught themselves in this situation, and nobody comes to their help.I have plans. First let us settle down in hell, then we will try to take out a few really juicy people who are suffering, surrounded by saints. Saints are absolutely dead people who learned in their whole life only one thing: how not to live, how to be almost dead in this so alive existence. Their whole life’s training will follow them in heaven too. They will continue with their long, sad faces, they will go on torturing themselves.I can see Jesus feeling more pain and agony than he would ever have felt on the cross. Heaven is not the right place. Only wrong people, people who deny life, people who are against love, people who are against every celebration end up there.People who love life, rejoice in life, love to dance and sing, for them hell is the right place. And you will find there all kinds of giants, all kinds of revolutionaries, all kinds of rebellious people. All those who did not agree with the world the way God has made it, who wanted to improve it, they all have gathered there in hell; these are not the people to sit silently. They have improved hell. They have changed the whole face. Beautiful restaurants, discotheques, and no discrimination between nations or religions or races or colors – sheer joy! And all those stories about hell fire are no longer true. They have used that fire for running railway trains, factories. Whatever you have heard about hell is no longer true at all. Everything has changed.So you keep your suitcases ready. Only in hell are suitcases allowed, not in heaven. In heaven any kind of stupidity is allowed: Mohammed’s going, sitting on his horse is allowed. But if you take a suitcase with you and toothpaste, you won’t be allowed in.In India, Jaina saints never use any mouthwash; they never clean their teeth; they never take a shower. That is part of their discipline. They stink so badly that when they used to come to see me, I had to tell them, although it looked very unmannerly, to sit as far away as possible. I am allergic to smells and this saintly smell was so bad, so foul, because they had not taken a bath for twenty or thirty years, they had never washed their mouths, they had never cleaned their teeth. You will have to meet some Jaina saint: it is an experience. Then you will never think of heaven because you will meet these people there.These are smaller saints, but centuries ago even greater ones arrived. They ate standing on their heads and because they were allowed to eat only once a day, they would eat too much, so their bodies were thin. Only their bellies were big. They looked so ugly that I have thought many times that there should be an international competition for ugliness, just as there is a beauty competition. Then Jaina saints would come first, without any doubt.They live naked. So there is no need for them to remove clothes, et cetera. They have removed them already. And just seeing them, one feels such pity that this calamity has happened to these people. Their faces show no life. All that is alive is their belly. Just looking at their belly rising up and down, you can see that they are still here. Otherwise nothing shows any sign of life. Everything is dead.Nobody has given you the right description of heaven and hell. I am giving it to you. From now onward never think of heaven, always think of hell. And when we reach there we can change the signboard. It is so easy for us. We will have the craftsmen to do all kinds of things. Change the board to: “The Real Heaven.” If the word hell hurts you, it is only a question of changing the board. And once the Devil becomes Swami Anand Devil… I will tell Dhyan Yogi to keep his name and his mala ready.The poor Devil has suffered badly at the hands of God. He has never done anything wrong. There is no description anywhere that he has done anything wrong. And still he has been appointed to take care of hell. But once we are there we will relieve him of his duty. We will take care. He has done enough; he needs retirement.Nivedana, your question is really significant because it completes my theology.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 25 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,I always hear you saying nice things about the women. Could you not stick up for the men once in a while?It is a very difficult question. I could not sleep the whole night. I tried and tried hard to find something nice about men, but I have to admit to you there is nothing that can be said. You can see for yourself.An interviewer for a ladies’ magazine is questioning a famous British general about his sex life. “Excuse me, sir,” she begins, “but can you recall the last time you had relations with your wife?”His upper lip stiffens for a moment and then he says, “Yes, of course I can, it was nineteen forty-five.”After a moment’s silence the woman says, “That was a long time ago.”The general glances at his watch and says, “Not so long really. It is only twenty-one forty now.”Hymie Goldberg sends his eldest son to India on a cultural exchange, but is very upset when he comes back as a sannyasin. Not knowing what else to do, he phones his old friend, Moishe Finkelstein, and tells him the sad news.“Funny you should say that,” exclaims Moishe. “My son went to Pune and he too came back a sannyasin.” The two old friends decide to go to the rabbi for help.When they have told the rabbi their unhappy tale, the rabbi scratches his head and replies, “Funny you should say that. My son also went to Pune and he came back a sannyasin. We had better go to the synagogue and pray to God for advice.”So the three old Jews go down to the synagogue and pray fervently for guidance. Suddenly there is a clap of thunder and a voice from above says, “Funny you should say that. My son also went to Pune and became a sannyasin: Swami Jesus Christ.”A man is a funny thing. If any of you find anything nice about men, please inform me. I accept my failure absolutely.Osho,Can one live without planning? Not counting the dreams about a hazy future, I see that a lot of my mind activity goes into planning – for next week, for next month.And when I try to act spontaneously I look like a weather vane that does not know which way the wind is blowing.The problem of planning for the future is one thing; to start living in the future is another. The planning about the future is in the present and the more you are in the present, the better you can plan. The activity of planning is in the present. The problem with the mind is, it starts living in the future. It starts thinking of beautiful golden days that are coming. That is not planning; it is daydreaming.I can understand planning, but remember, planning for the future is not equivalent to living in the future. Planning is a present-moment activity. And the more you are present, the more you have clarity and transparency so you can plan without any haziness or dreams lurking around you.You are saying, “…I see that a lot of my mind activity goes into planning – for next week, for next month.” This is not being in the present. Being in the present there is no mind. The mind cannot exist in the present but when there is no mind there is clarity, absolute clarity. With this clarity you can see into the future; then something of immense importance will happen to you. But mind activity is simply living in the future: next week, next month, next year, next life.In the name of planning, you are postponing living. You should live, not postpone. You should live the moment, and while you are living the moment – with the clarity that it gives to you – you can visualize. It is not mental activity. You can visualize a better moment that is coming to you. You have lived this moment, you know you can go even deeper, you know you can rejoice more; there is no limit to it. And when the next moment is coming you immediately go deeper into it, rejoicing more, more playful, more humorous.You have only one moment at a time. So if you know how to live one moment, you can plan your whole life in that very living. You have tasted something of reality; next moment you can have a bigger chunk. But there is no need to plan for it because in planning you will forget to live.Two things happen to the man who lives spontaneously: one, he never postpones; second, his future is lived through his present, through his experience of the present. Then planning is not a mind activity but an expansion of consciousness, an understanding of life that goes on deepening more and more every day. And the deeper you are, the more beautiful, more human, more fulfilled will be your actions.You are also saying, “And when I try to act spontaneously I look like a weather vane that does not know which way the wind is blowing.” There is no need to know. The man who is spontaneous just like the weather vane… The weather vane never worries whether the wind is blowing south or north, east or west; wherever the wind is blowing the weather vane simply turns toward that side. It shows in what direction the wind is blowing. It has no resistance. It is absolutely free to move in any direction. It does not fight with the wind. It is absolutely spontaneous and neither lives in the past nor in the future. It simply represents the present.You have chosen a very beautiful word, weather vane, for a spontaneous life. But what is the point of a weather vane knowing from where the wind is blowing? Your mind wants to know from where the wind is blowing because your mind has its own plans against existence. It wants the winds to blow toward the west and they are blowing toward the east. Then the mind is frustrated, angry and somehow, reluctantly, it manages to go toward the east. But by the time it does that – the wind has no idea of your mind or of fulfilling your expectations – the wind starts blowing toward the west and the mind again feels frustrated saying, “This is a strange situation: when I want to go east, the wind blows west. When I agree ‘Okay, let us go to the west,’ the wind changes.”These are the people who have made the proverb “Man proposes and God disposes.” There is no God and nobody disposes. Your very proposition is wrong. Proposing anything from your side means you are not trusting existence. Just be a weather vane which slowly moves without any reluctance, without any resistance, wherever the wind is blowing. It enjoys all directions. The whole of life has to be enjoyed; existence in all its colors has to be enjoyed.But the mind is one of the most stupid things that you are carrying within you. When it is morning, it is longing for the evening, when it is evening, it is longing for the morning. It is the root cause of all your misery and frustrations.What is the need? I cannot understand why the weather vane should want to know which way the wind is blowing. Can you figure it out? Is there any need? Do these trees know from where the wind is blowing? Do the stars know? Except man nothing in this whole existence is reluctant to go with existence. That’s why everything is happy, blissful. They don’t have riches; what do these poor trees have? But they have spontaneity. When the wind blows they dance, when it does not blow they rest. Both are equally acceptable.A tremendous trust exists between the earth, the sky, the wind, the sun. When the sun starts rising in the morning, the trees wake up – they don’t need any alarm clock – and when the sun sets, they all start going to sleep. As the sun sets, the birds start coming back to their nests – it is time to rest. Nobody teaches them to go to bed early. Nobody teaches them… In the morning as the sun is rising they all wake up, start singing, making sounds of joy, rejoicing, welcoming another day.Life is so abundantly giving – again the sky, again the sun, the beauty of the morning, and the birds are so happy they cannot contain themselves. Their singing is not planned. When they had gone in the evening to their nests to rest, they had not planned “Next morning, whatever happens, I am going to sing.” There is no need. When the morning comes, the singing will come on its own accord. It is a synchronicity, a deep communion with existence.The flowers don’t decide, they don’t have a committee, they don’t have files, they don’t make any decision, any planning for the future. When the spring comes they will blossom, and when the fall comes, the trees will become naked, all their leaves will fall. There is no sadness anywhere; the trees are not full of tears because all their foliage is gone. No, they enjoy this too. Standing against the sky without any leaves, a tree has a beauty of its own. It has a beauty when the foliage comes, but that is a beauty of a different dimension.Existence has all the colors and nobody is planning, except man. And nobody is in such a mess as man, because by your planning you are really trying to postpone living. There is no need to know which way the wind is blowing. Just go with it. It will never mislead you, because this whole existence is ours. Wherever we end up, it is our home. The wind cannot take you out of existence, but your mind takes you out of existence. Only your mind is capable of taking you into dreams which don’t exist, which are unreal, illusory, and you get so caught in them that you forget that existence never misleads you – it cannot!Only the spontaneous person is in tune with existence. And only the spontaneous person is always blissful because whatever happens, he immediately finds himself in tune with it. He has no desires of his own, no projections, no propositions of his own. He has simply accepted himself as part of the cosmos. Wherever the whole is going, he is also going, joyously, because the whole is certainly wiser than the part – and we are such small parts that all our planning makes us look stupid.In this whole universe there is no planning at all. Everything is moving without any plan, every moment going deeper. Only man remains superficial: without living he goes on and on thinking to live sometime, but that time never comes.Mrs. Rachel Saperstein has just sent the kids to school when the phone rings. “Is your husband’s name Amos Saperstein?” asks a voice.“Yes it is,” she replies.“This is the police,” says the voice. “There has been an accident and we would like you to come and identify the body.”Mrs. Saperstein arrives at the morgue, and an attendant shows her a body covered in a white sheet. He lifts the sheet. “Was this your husband?” he asks.Mrs. Saperstein’s eyes widen. “Oy, oy, oy!” she cries. “How did you – yes, that’s my husband – how did you ever get your sheets so white?”Just a woman’s mind! The husband is dead and she is worried about how you get your sheets so white!The mind takes you away from reality every moment. Except the mind you don’t have any other problem: neither sin nor past lives’ evil acts, nor has God written your destiny on your forehead or in the lines of your hand or in the constellation of the stars. Your whole problem is very simple, if you understand that it is your mind constantly taking you away from existence. When I tell you to be spontaneous, I simply mean one thing, always one thing: don’t be a mind because the mind can never be spontaneous. The mind is a mechanism of postponing. It will never allow you to live.I have heard about a man who realized that he was alive only when he was dead. Then suddenly he realized, “My God, seventy years I was alive, but I never lived.” And what can you do in your grave? You cannot even turn this side or that, they don’t leave much space in the grave. You lie down flat for eternity.My suggestion is: you can plan in your grave! You will have enough time and you can plan dreams as weird as you want. Right now while you are alive, live. When you are dead there is no problem – you can allow the mind to plan. In fact it will be a good companion in the grave: being so alone, the mind chattering will keep you entertained.But while you are alive the mind has to be stopped from functioning on its own accord, stopped unless you want to use it. It has to be reduced to a servant. It has become the master. Spontaneity will bring it to its reality. It is just a mechanism. It was not meant to be your master. Your consciousness is your master.Although people learning yoga stand on their heads, existence never meant you to stand on your head, otherwise it would have given you legs on your head like two horns. Or it might have made you a tripod – three legs, perfectly balanced – or legs with wheels, so you can go on moving on your head… Existence certainly means you to be on your legs, not on your head.But man is strange. The mind was given to you to be used as a servant, and as a servant it is beautiful and great. It is a biocomputer and nothing else. But you have made it your master and the master has been reduced to a dormant state. When the servants become masters, the most dangerous thing is that first they destroy the master.It happened in a Mohammedan king’s life…He used to love his cook’s food very much; he had one of the best cooks. One day the cook – because they had become very friendly – was serving him food and chit-chatting. He said, “Sometimes I wonder how it must feel to be a king.”The king just jokingly said, “Do you want to become a king? I can make you one for twenty-four hours.”He said, “It will be a great joy. I have always wondered how it feels to be the king of a great kingdom.”So the king made the cook a king for twenty-four hours. And the first thing the cook did was to order the crucifixion of the king. For twenty-four hours he was the king, so the king was crucified. And the cook proved to be a real crook: he then remained forever the master.Once a servant is in the position of a master, his first act will be to somehow repress the master to such a state that he cannot assert himself. That is his only fear. If the master comes back, he will have to descend from the throne. Your consciousness has been reduced into darkness, your light has been turned into darkness, your treasures have been hidden, your being has been disconnected. The mind has to do all these things just to remain in power.A meditator tries to put things in their right place. The mind should be the servant and consciousness has to be brought back to the throne. And immediately you will have a spontaneous life. There is no other kind of life at all.Osho,Is it possible to become enlightened in a really easy and relaxed way, with not too much effort and lots of naps?You are asking me, a man who has never done anything. Just through relaxation, without any effort and lots of naps… Mostly I am asleep. I just get up to talk to you in the morning, then I go back to sleep; then I get up again in the evening to talk to you and go back to sleep. My total hours of sleep must be eighteen. Six hours I am awake, two hours with you, one hour for my bath, for my food and the remaining time I am in absolute samadhi. And I don’t even dream – so lazy. And you are asking me the question! This is my whole philosophy – you should not make any effort, you should relax and enlightenment comes. It comes when it finds you are really relaxed, no tension, no effort and immediately it showers on you like thousands of flowers.But all the religions have been teaching just the opposite, that enlightenment is very arduous, it takes lifelong effort, perhaps many lives, and then too there is no certainty, no guarantee. You can lose the way even when you are only one step away from enlightenment. You don’t know the way toward enlightenment, so there is every possibility of losing the way, of going astray. By chance a few people have stumbled upon enlightenment. It was just by accident.Millions of people have been trying and finding nothing and they are not aware that their very search is making them too tense; their very effort is creating a state in which enlightenment cannot happen. Enlightenment can only happen when you are so silent, so relaxed, that you are almost not. Just a pure silence and immediately the explosion, the explosion of your luminous soul.The people who have been very arduous simply destroyed their intelligence, or their body, and I don’t think they attained enlightenment. The very few people who have attained enlightenment have attained in a relaxed state. Relaxation is the very soil in which the roses of enlightenment grow. So it is very good that you want to be relaxed, at ease, with no effort and lots of naps. This is the recipe. You will get enlightened. You can get enlightened today! Enlightenment is your innermost being.But just because you are so engaged in effort – in seeking, in searching, doing this, doing that – you never reach your own self. In relaxation you are not going anywhere, you are not doing anything and the grass starts growing by itself. All that is needed is alertness, intelligence, consciousness, which are not efforts; witnessing, watching, which are not tensions. They are very joyful experiences. You don’t get tired of them. You get very calm and quiet. Intelligence has not been known to be a part of your so-called saints. They destroyed it completely by their stupid efforts. And I say unto you, all efforts for enlightenment are stupid.Enlightenment is your nature. It is just that you don’t know it, otherwise you are enlightened already. As far as I am concerned you are all enlightened because I can see your luminous flame within. When I see you, I don’t see your figure, I see your being, which is just a beautiful flame.It is said that Gautam Buddha was surprised that the moment he became enlightened the whole of existence became enlightened. His own eyes changed, his own vision changed. He could look as deep into himself as he could into everyone, even animals and trees. He could see that they are all moving toward enlightenment. Everything needs to realize its own nature; without that life is not a joy, not a festivity.Just be a little intelligent and enlightenment will happen on its own accord; you don’t even have to think about it.A woman walks into a bank and goes to the bank president’s office. She walks straight up to his desk and says, “I would like to make a ten thousand dollar bet.”“I am sorry, madam,” replies the president, “but this bank does not take bets.”“I don’t want to bet with the bank,” she says, “I want to bet with you. I bet that by ten o’clock tomorrow your testicles will be square.”“I think you are a fool,” says the president, “but I will take the bet. Be here at ten tomorrow, and bring ten thousand dollars.”At nine fifty-five, the woman walks in with a tall, stately looking gentleman. “Who is this guy?” asks the president.“He is my attorney,” replies the woman. “He has come to see that everything is done right.”“Okay,” says the president, and laughing he pulls down his pants.The woman reaches over and feels if they are square. At that moment, the attorney collapses in a dead faint. “What is up with him?” asks the president.“Well,” replies the woman, “I bet him fifty thousand dollars that by ten this morning I would have a bank president by the balls.”Just be a little intelligent!The manager, looking angry, strides over to Paddy’s desk and taps him on the shoulder.“Listen,” he says, “do me and everyone a favor and stop whistling while you work.”“Hey, man,” says Paddy, “who is working?”A cannibal chief treats himself to a Mediterranean cruise, and on the first night he sits down for dinner and asks for the wine list. He orders a bottle of French wine and consumes it immediately. Then the waiter approaches him and asks if he would like to see the menu.“No thanks,” the chief replies. “Just bring me the passenger list.”A Catholic missionary is captured by cannibals and is surprised to find out that the chief has been to school in England and speaks perfect English.“I can’t understand it,” says the indignant priest. “How could you have spent so much time in civilization and still eat people?”“A-ha!” says the chief. “Now I use a knife and fork.”Just be a little intelligent. The world is not intelligent. It is functioning in a very unintelligent way and is creating all kinds of miseries for everyone, rather than helping them to be happier. Everybody is pulling on each other’s legs, dragging them into deeper darkness, into deeper mud, into deeper trouble. It seems in this world everybody enjoys only one thing: creating misery for others. That’s why such a cloud of darkness surrounds the earth. Otherwise there would have been a continuous festival of lights – and not ordinary lights, but the lights of your very being.Why have the priests succeeded in convincing man that enlightenment is a very difficult, almost impossible, task? The reason is in your mind. Your mind is always interested in the difficult, in the impossible because that gives it a challenge, and the ego needs challenge to become bigger and bigger and bigger. The priests were successful in convincing you that enlightenment is very difficult, almost impossible.In millions of people, only once in a while does a man become enlightened. Their idea was that you should not become enlightened. To prevent you from enlightenment they used a very clever device. They challenged your ego and you became interested in all kinds of rituals, in all kinds of austerities, self-torture. You made your own life as deep an anguish as possible. But people who have made their life a torture – masochists – cannot become enlightened. They go on becoming more and more endarkened. And people living in darkness start crawling like slaves very easily because they have lost all their intelligence, all their consciousness in their strange effort.Have you seen a dog in winter just resting in the sun in the early morning? He sees his tail and immediately becomes interested. What is it? He jumps to catch the tail. But then he becomes crazy, because this seems very strange. As he jumps, the tail also jumps. Yet the distance between the dog and the tail remains the same. He goes round and round. I have watched: the more the tail jumps, the more determined he becomes; he uses all his willpower, tries this way and that way to catch hold of it. But the poor dog does not know that it is not possible to catch hold of it. It is already part of him. So when he jumps, it jumps.Enlightenment is not difficult, not impossible. You don’t have to do anything to get it. It is just your intrinsic nature, it is your very subjectivity. All that you have to do is for a moment relax totally, forget all doing, all effort, so that you are no longer occupied anywhere. This unoccupied consciousness suddenly becomes aware: “I am it.”Enlightenment is the easiest thing in the world, but the priests never wanted the whole world to become enlightened. Otherwise people would not be Christians, they would not be Catholics, they would not be Hindus, they would not be Mohammedans. They have to be kept unenlightened. They have to be kept blind to their own nature, and they have found a very clever way. They are not to do anything, they have just to give you the idea that it is a very difficult, impossible task.Your ego became immediately interested. The ego is never interested in the obvious. It is never interested in that which you are. It is only interested in a faraway goal – the farther the goal, the greater the interest. But enlightenment is not a goal and it is not even an inch away from you – it is you!The seeker is the sought. The observer is the observed. The knower is the known.Once you understand that your very nature is enlightenment… In fact, the Sanskrit word for religion is dharma which means nature, your very nature. It does not mean a church, it does not mean a theology, it simply means your nature. For example, what is the dharma of fire? – to be hot. And what is the dharma of water? – to flow downward. What is the nature of man? What is the dharma of man? – to become enlightened: to know one’s godliness.If you can understand the effortless achievement of your nature… I’ll call you intelligent only if you can understand this. If you cannot understand this, you are not intelligent, you are simply an egoist who is trying… Just as some egoists are trying to be the richest man, a few other egoists are trying to be the most powerful, a few egoists are trying to become enlightened. But enlightenment is not possible for the ego: riches are possible, power is possible, prestige is possible, and they are difficult things, very difficult.Henry Ford, one of the richest men of his time though he was born poor, was asked, “What is your desire in the next life?”He said, “I don’t want to be the richest man again. It has been a continuous self-torture my whole life. I have not been able to live. I used to arrive at the factory early in the morning at seven o’clock, and the manual workers would arrive at eight o’clock, the clerks would arrive at nine o’clock and the manager would come at ten o’clock and leave at two o’clock. Everybody else would leave at five o’clock and I had to work late into the night, sometimes up to ten, sometimes up to twelve.“I worked hard to become the richest man and I became the richest man. But what is the point? I could not enjoy anything. I worked harder than my laborers. They enjoyed life more. I had no holidays. Even on holidays I used to go to the factory to work out plans for the future.”It is difficult, but you can become the richest man if you make enough effort. It is difficult, but you can reach the top of Everest if you make enough effort. But if you make any effort at all, enlightenment becomes impossible for you. If you bring your mind with all its tensions and worries to work out your enlightenment, you are moving in the wrong direction, away from enlightenment.You need a total let-go, an utterly peaceful, tensionless, silent state of being. And suddenly: the explosion. You are all born enlightened whether you realize it or not.Society does not want you to realize it. Religions don’t want you to realize it. Politicians don’t want you to realize it because it goes against every vested interest. They are living and sucking your blood because you are unenlightened. They are able to reduce the whole of humanity into stupid labels: Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan, as if you are things, commodities. They have labeled on your forehead who you are.In India you will actually find brahmins with symbols on their foreheads. You can see the symbol and you can recognize to which class of brahmin this man belongs. These are means or commodities. They have their symbols marked on their foreheads. You may not have your symbol marked, but you know deep down it is engraved within your being that you are a Christian, that you are a Buddhist, that you are a Hindu.If you all become enlightened, you will be simply light, a joy to yourself and to others, a blessing to yourself and to the whole of existence. You will be the ultimate freedom; nobody can exploit you, nobody can in any way enslave you. That is the problem: nobody wants you to become enlightened. Unless you see the point, you will go on playing into the hands of the vested interests, which are all parasites. Their only function is how to suck blood out of you.If you want freedom, enlightenment is the only freedom. If you want individuality, enlightenment is the only individuality. If you want a life full of blessings, enlightenment is the only experience. And it is very easy, utterly easy; it’s the one thing you don’t have to do anything to get, because it is already there. You just have to relax and see it. Hence in India we have nothing parallel to Western philosophy. Philosophy means thinking about truth, love of knowledge. In India what we have is a totally different thing. We call it darshan. Darshan does not mean thinking, it means seeing.Your truth has not to be thought about, it has to be seen. It is already there. You don’t have to go anywhere to find it. You don’t have to think about it, you have to stop thinking so that it can surface in your being. Unoccupied space is needed within you so that the light that is hidden can expand and fill your being. It not only fills your being, it starts radiating from your being. Your whole life becomes a beauty, a beauty that is not of the body, but a beauty that radiates from within – the beauty of your consciousness.

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Sat Chit Anand 01-30Category: THE MANTRA SERIES

Sat Chit Anand 26 (Read, Listen & Download)

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Osho,Enjoying life seems to be the only thing I do, and I forget that I am a seeker. But when I think about it, a question arises: What am I seeking for?Enjoying life is in itself a beautiful experience, but it is not enough. All the religions of the world have condemned it. Their condemnation has created a guilt feeling. So even though people are enjoying life, deep down they are feeling that they are doing something wrong, something they should not do. So their enjoyment remains halfhearted. They are in a deep split, a kind of schizophrenia. Part of them is pulling them away from the enjoyment and part of them is pulling them toward it. It becomes a very subtle tension.But according to me, enjoying life in its totality and intensity is the very foundation of finding the higher and the ultimate significance of life. Enjoyment is blind, hence even if you are enjoying life, deep down a question remains: What is the significance of all this enjoyment? That’s from where seeking arises: a desire to find the meaning. Is “Eat, drink and be merry” all there is?There have been two traditions in the world. One consists of those who are life-negative, life condemners, life poisoners. They have been in the majority, because most people love the negative. To condemn anything is very easy. To criticize anything is very easy. But to appreciate anything needs intelligence.There is a beautiful story by Turgenev, The Fool.A sage came to a village where the village idiot was condemned by everybody; the moment he opened his mouth people would start laughing, expecting him to say something stupid. The poor man came to the sage and told him about his misery, that he was the laughingstock of the whole village. As far as possible he kept completely quiet, but even his quietness was condemned: “Look at that idiot. He thinks that we are all fools who are talking and he is something spiritual; being silent, meditative!”“If I talk, I am condemned; if I don’t talk, I am condemned. Show me the way to get out of this miserable state.”The sage said, “I will tell you the secret. And after one month I will be coming back; then you can tell me what happened in this month.”The secret was very simple. The secret was: “Do not say anything on your own account, but whenever somebody says something, immediately criticize. If somebody says “Look, how beautiful is the full moon,” don’t miss the opportunity. Immediately say “What is beautiful in it? Prove what is beautiful in it. Do you know what beauty is?”“It is very difficult to define it. Everybody knows that the full moon is beautiful. But perhaps you have never asked yourself ‘Do you know what beauty is?’ And if you don’t know what beauty is, how can you say anything is beautiful? The statement that something is beautiful implies that you know the definition of beauty. So immediately jump in and ask ‘What is the definition of beauty?’”Not even the greatest philosophers who have been thinking all their lives about beauty and nothing else, like Croce who has written volumes upon beauty, end up with anything definable. The whole effort, hundreds of pages, and the conclusion is that it is indefinable.“Just go on this way. If somebody says ‘That man is very virtuous,’ immediately ask ‘What is virtue? How do you know, on what grounds, what authority?’“Never make any statement of your own, so nobody can criticize you. And you go on criticizing everybody, don’t miss a single opportunity, and ask for a definition.”After one month the sage came back and the idiot fell at his feet and said, “Your secret has done miracles. Now I am supposed to be the wisest man in my village. In just one month!”To negate needs not much intelligence. To affirm needs tremendous intelligence. So there has been a majority tradition of condemners. That is the easiest way to prove yourself superior. They condemn everything, they condemn the whole world. There has been a small stream of affirmers also, but they are looked upon in a very derogatory way. These are the materialists. The majority thinks itself spiritualist. Yet there is a small stream which says: “Eat, drink and be merry. This is all. There is nothing else to seek and search for.”My situation is a little complex. I accept the materialist as far as he is saying eat, drink and be merry. But I deny that this is all there is. I accept the spiritualist’s search for something higher, but I refute the spiritualist for his condemnation of life, enjoyment, the small joys of life. I am a materialist-spiritualist. Begin with this very earth and rise up to the sky, to the highest stars. This is one single universe. There are not two universes, one materialist and one spiritualist. Matter and spirit are continuously meeting with each other, dancing hand in hand.You have to be a materialist to begin with. But don’t stop there. That is only a beginning. The second thing that will make your journey complete is the search for significance. Otherwise every enjoyment is going to become boredom sooner or later. If you don’t know the significance, if you don’t know the eternal meaning of life, if you simply live superficially… I am not saying it is evil, I am saying it is incomplete. It is getting lost in the very beginning; it is very superficial.Life has depths beyond depths, and unless you reach to the very bottom and touch something eternal, you will not know the significance of existence, the splendor and the glory and the abundance of blessings. Your enjoyment will pay well for a long time. But then you will know that eat, drink and be merry was not enough. It was good enough, but not enough.So I affirm materialism, I affirm spiritualism, because to me your body and your soul are not two separate existences. Matter and spirit are just two aspects of one energy. I accept the whole of life, body and soul, matter and spirit, this world and the beyond all together as one single organic whole.To me the really holy man is one who accepts the whole without denying anything. The materialist denies the spirit. The spiritualist denies matter – both are in some way denying. Neither is a holy man. The holy man is one who accepts the whole without any denial. The whole orchestra of existence – different instruments, but they are all playing the same music, the same significance, the same glory.You are saying, “Enjoying life seems to be the only thing I do.” Nothing is wrong in it, it is a good beginning. But soon you will get fed up with it. How long can you enjoy the mundane things of existence? Just try to enjoy anything, then repeat it.I have told you the story of Mulla Nasruddin. It is a Sufi story.Mulla was appointed the adviser of the emperor. The first day he was sitting with the emperor at his dining table and the cook had made stuffed bhindis. The king liked them very much and Mulla Nasruddin said, “Your liking is supported by all the wise people of the past. Those who know about vegetables say that bhindi is the ultimate in vegetables; it cures all diseases; it keeps you healthy, young; it gives you a longer life. It is very good that you like it.”The cook heard everything. He thought, “My God, I never thought that bhindi was such a miraculous thing.”So, next day he prepared bhindi again, and Mulla Nasruddin praised it again. On the third day he again prepared bhindi. On the sixth day the king threw the plate away and shouted at the cook, “Have you gone mad? I am bored with this bhindi. Can’t you find any other vegetable? Have I to live my whole life eating bhindi?”Mulla Nasruddin immediately said, “There are many critics who say that bhindi is very dangerous to life, to youth. It brings all kinds of diseases. Old age comes sooner and death is a tremendously painful thing.”The king said, “Up to now you have been praising it. It is because of your praise that the poor cook has been cooking it every day. And now suddenly you have changed.”Mulla said, “Listen, I am your servant. I am not the servant of bhindis. I don’t know anything about bhindi. But if you like bhindi, I will appreciate it. You pay me, I am your servant. If you throw the plate of bhindis away, I will condemn them.”Just look at your enjoyments. You fall in love with a woman or a man. How long does it remain? Before the honeymoon is over it is finished. Now you are wondering how to get out of it. Your enjoyments cannot give you a meaningful life, they are very superficial. I am not against them; that you have to remember. Once in a while bhindi is okay, but to think that it is everything is dangerous.You are saying, “…and I forget that I am a seeker.” You will miss the opportunity. Enjoy life, but remain watchful. All that a seeker needs is a certain awareness that follows him like a shadow. Whatever you are doing, just remain alert.The English word sin is very significant. Not in the way Christians interpret it, not according to the dictionaries – because they have been influenced by the religions – but according to its original roots. The word sin simply means forgetfulness. And that gives a totally new dimension to the word – a beauty. It is nothing for which you can be thrown into hell. It is something that you can influence. It is not concerned with any action in particular; it is concerned with your awareness.To be aware is to be virtuous; to remain in unawareness is the only sin. You may be doing good things without awareness. But those good things are no longer good because they come out of darkness, unconsciousness, blindness. And as far as awareness is concerned, a man who is full of awareness, alert, cannot do anything wrong. It is intrinsically impossible.Awareness brings so much clarity, so much perception, so much understanding that it is impossible to do anything that can be harmful to anyone. It is impossible to interfere with somebody’s freedom or somebody’s life. You can only be a blessing to existence, nothing else. So to forget that you are a seeker is dangerous. It is falling into sin. This is the only sin I accept as sin.You are also saying, “But when I think about it, a question arises: What am I seeking for?” The seeking is not for anything, the seeking is to know the seeker, who you are. There are two kinds of seeking: one is for money, for power, for prestige, for name, for fame, for anything outside you. That is not our seeking. That is not the seeking which can take you to higher states of consciousness and being. It is a totally different kind of seeking.The first seeking goes forward, outward. It is objective. You are a seeker of the inner, of the subjective. Your search is for yourself. You don’t know who you are. And not to know oneself is such an ignorance, such an indignity, such a self-insult, that no man who has a little understanding can forget about it.Just a little intelligence and you will agree with Socrates and all those great people who have been telling you “Know thyself, be thyself,” because without knowing yourself, you cannot be yourself. You will never come to a flowering. Your roses will remain unexpressed. Your fragrance will not be released to existence. Do you want to remain just a seed? Or do you want to grow with great green foliage and beautiful roses? Unless your roses dance in the sun, in the wind, in the rain, you have not known how much of life was hidden. It is almost like an iceberg. Only one part you see, nine times more is hidden underneath in the water. You know yourself only in a small way.Because you know yourself only in a small way, you remain small. You can know yourself in a greater way. And the way that opens all the doors of your being, all the mysteries, all the secrets, will make you part of this vast universe. You will be as big as the ocean. There is no need to remain a dewdrop.Rachel had lived a good life, marrying four times, and now she is standing before the Pearly Gates.Father Abraham checks her file and says, “I notice that you first married a banker, then an actor, then a rabbi and lastly an undertaker. What kind of system is that for a respectable Jewish woman?”“A very good system,” replies Rachel. “One for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go!”If this is going to be your only way of living, your style of life, your system, your philosophy, then enjoyment is enough. But not to know oneself is to deprive oneself of tremendous significance. Not to know oneself is to keep oneself away from the godliness of this cosmos. Not to know oneself is the ugliest thing that can happen to anyone.Please remember, you are a seeker not for something, but for yourself.Osho,What is it that divides me?Prem Pankaja… Just a day ago I had answered her, “Don’t keep your umbrella open, because I go on showering on you and you go on protecting yourself.” So poor Pankaja has sent her umbrella to me. But this is not the umbrella I meant. What am I supposed to do with this umbrella? It was only a symbol, I never meant your real umbrella. This you can take back. You may need it.When I say umbrella I mean all your defense measures. You are defending yourself. That’s what keeps you divided. On the one hand you want to go whole-heartedly into the search for your own being, on the other hand you are afraid to go totally. You have other interests, other investments, and if you go totally into the search for your own being, you wonder what will happen to your other investments.For example, she is a novelist. She is always afraid that if she goes deeper into meditation, her so-called creativity for writing third-class novels will disappear. That is certain. It will disappear because as your meditations deepen, you will not be able to write those trashy novels. That does not mean your creativity will disappear. Your creativity will be refined. Perhaps you will write something really great, something that becomes part of the great literature of the world.Whatever you have written up to now is just like the daily newspaper. After one reading you just have to throw it away. You wait for it every morning so eagerly and after ten minutes it is useless. Not so is the case with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels or Leo Tolstoy’s or Maxim Gorky’s. They will remain as long as man is on this planet. They will remain super-creations of human consciousness. Their beauty, their peaks, are such that you cannot finish them in one reading. You will have to read them again and again. And each time you read them, you will find new meanings, new depths, new significances. What keeps you divided is that you don’t understand there are higher categories of creativity.I am reminded of one of the great Indian painters, Avanendranath Tagore. He was a nephew of Rabindranath Tagore. Rabindranath became world famous because of the Nobel Prize. Avanendranath is not known so much because he was a painter, but India has never known such a painter. Each painting is unique. He had a student who became an even greater painter than Avanendranath. This disciple’s name was Nandlal Bose.And one day it happened… Avanendranath and Rabindranath were of the same age, although Avanendranath was a nephew to Rabindranath. They were very friendly and they were discussing something, when just then Nandlal came to show his master something he had painted.In Bengal, where these people happened to be, there is a certain class of painter. They are very poor people, but traditionally they paint only one thing and that is pictures of Krishna. In Bengal people love Krishna, and from generation to generation a certain class has been doing only one thing: painting beautiful paintings of Krishna. But they are poor people, and their paintings are sold very cheaply.On this occasion, Nandlal had also made a picture of Krishna. Krishna’s birthday was coming close and he wanted to show it to his master. Rabindranath, who was present, could not believe his eyes: Nandlal had done such a superb painting. He had seen thousands of paintings of Krishna, but he could not remember any painting that could be compared to it. Even Avanendranath had painted Krishna and his painting of Krishna was hanging on the wall of his sitting room. Rabindranath looked at both the paintings: Avanendranath’s painting was not comparable to Nandlal Bose’s. The disciple had defeated the master.This was the first surprise. And the second thing that happened was even more surprising and shocking. Avanendranath took the painting, looked at it, threw it out of the door and told Nandlal, “You idiot, you don’t know how to paint. You should go and learn from those poor people.” The caste of the people who paint Krishna’s pictures is called patia and in those days their pictures were sold at the most for four annas, which is one fourth of a rupee. To tell to Nandlal to go to the patias and learn how to paint Krishna was very humiliating.Rabindranath had never seen Avanendranath so angry. Deep in his mind he thought that perhaps he was feeling jealous because Nandlal’s painting was far superior to his own painting. Rabindranath himself was a great painter in his own right; he could judge perfectly well.Nandlal touched the feet of Avanendranath and disappeared. For two years nothing was heard of him. Rabindranath told Avanendranath many times, “What you have done is absolutely absurd. You know perfectly well that he has defeated you.”Avanendranath said, “I know it. The moment I saw his painting, I immediately could see that one of my disciples is going to carry my tradition far ahead of me. But if I had accepted his painting, he would have stopped. I can see much more potential in him. I had to reject that great painting.”After Nandlal had left, Avanendranath took the painting inside, cleaned it, removed his own painting from his sitting room wall and put Nandlal’s painting there. There were tears in his eyes.Rabindranath said, “It is a strange drama. What is the need of all this?”He said, “You don’t understand. I love Nandlal. I cannot accept that this is his whole potential. He has much more potential and I have to hit him hard to bring all his resources into flowering.”After two years Nandlal came back. He looked just like those beggar painters of Bengal. He had lived amongst them, painted like them, learned their art; whatever the master said, he did. And finally he painted another painting of Krishna and he could see the difference. The first painting was great, but this was far greater. It was almost three-dimensional. It was as if Krishna was going to come out of the painting at any moment, it was so alive. He was full of gratitude toward his master who had insulted him.This can happen only in the East. It is not possible in the West. The West does not know many dimensions of love. It is unaware. Avanendranath’s behavior was out of love, out of great trust, and Nandlal understood it. He touched the feet of the master before he disappeared. For two years he moved all over Bengal, searching for any painter with whom he could sit and learn his art. And when he came back after two years, he brought this second painting. People could not believe he was the same man, he had become so thin. He could not earn much because he was living with poor people. And he was also selling his paintings at the same cost.When Avanendranath looked at his painting, he ran to Rabindranath’s house. They both lived in the same university that Rabindranath had founded in Shanti Niketan, the House of Peace. It is a university on its own, unique in the whole world, where beauty is God, where painting and music and dance are rated far higher than physics, chemistry or mathematics. These sciences are taught, but they are not thought to be the highest creations of man. They are lower, mundane. They can produce things, but they cannot create.I am telling you this story, Pankaja, because you need not be afraid of losing your creativity. This is not the place where you are going to lose anything that is significant. Yes, you will lose many things which are false in you: your personality, your ego. But you will not lose anything that has any sincerity, that has any authenticity behind it. That is part of your real being. That will grow.In this garden, your reality, your truth, your consciousness, your bliss are going to grow. Yes, many things will disappear which need to disappear and you are clinging to those things. That is creating a division. You are becoming more schizophrenic, more a split personality. You are half here and half not here, and I need you to be totally here.A man was very embarrassed about his small prick. So one day he decided to go to the doctor for a new one.“We have three sizes for you to choose from,” began the doctor. “We have the regular six-inch model, then we have the super eight-inch classic, and last we have the ten-inch super deluxe.”“Wow,” says the man. “I will go for the ten-inch super deluxe.” So the doctor went into the next room and brought out the ten inches for the man to look at.“Well, doc,” says the man, “I love it. It is really great. But do you have it in white?”People have artificial personalities. Everything seems to be artificial, synthetic. You cannot tell even whether the man sitting by your side is real or synthetic.Just a few days ago in Japan… Japan is the only country right now which is using robots instead of men in their factories. A robot can work for twenty-four hours without getting tired; it can work seven days a week without creating any trouble – no strikes or labor unions. Hundreds of robots, mechanical men, are working. And their work is more efficient than men’s. Their productivity is immense. Where a hundred people were working, just one robot is enough. So they are very cheap.A few weeks ago a strange thing happened which scientists have not been able to explain. If it goes on happening again and again, perhaps they will have to remove all the robots. In one factory, for no reason at all… And it is not expected of robots because they are completely planned from the very beginning. They cannot do other than what they are built for. They have an inbuilt program that directs them. But without any inbuilt program, a few robots in one factory simply killed six men. All they have to do is to give a man a good hug and he is gone, because these are steel people. They look like human beings, but they are made of steel. As they were not programmed for it, how did they come to figure out that hugging was needed?One of my sannyasins in New York runs a hugging therapy, where the whole work is to hug each other, and go on hugging till you get tired and fed up. Then you will never think of hugging anybody again in your life. He is a little crazy, but he finds crazy clients who pay him just to do this stupid act of hugging each other until they are tired and finished, and many feel that they have been helped immensely; they have been cured of their desire to hug. In New York everything is possible. But suddenly these robots learned the hugging therapy and they picked up poor human beings who were just passing by, hugged them and finished them.The scientists who created those robots are simply shocked. It is a very difficult problem. If these people start doing things on their own, they can do anything. They can create havoc in society, they can run in the streets, they can stop cars. They can do anything. If they can hug, everything is possible. It is good they did not kiss. But they could do.And the people who write science fiction have already written that in the twenty-first century men will be slowly, slowly replaced by mechanical men, by robots – because they will never die. There is no way for them to die for the simple reason that all their parts are replaceable. If a hand goes wrong, it can be replaced; if their heart no longer functions, it can be replaced. They can be plugged into the electricity or they can be fitted with a battery, and they will look just like you. They can be taught to speak any language. Everything can be inbuilt in their heads, in their computers.What science fiction says has every possibility of happening. Then you will not know whether you are falling in love with a real man or a robot. You will know only when the robot suddenly runs out of battery power. Only then you will know: “My God, this is a robot!” But call the technician and he will fix the battery and he will again be saying all sweet things to you, sweet nothings, “I love you.”He just has to be programmed. He can be programmed with good dialogues from all the films, and songs to sing; he can dance, he can sing. Just stay aware that his battery is intact. It is no longer science fiction. In Japan it is already happening. There is so much false in you that if you become aware of it, you will come to a great revelation.Pankaja, this revelation is still missing in you. You are too much of a head and you have trained yourself as an intellectual. Your whole life structure is based on intellect. Here you have to come down from the head to the heart. Nor is the heart the full stop of the journey. From the heart you have to come even deeper to the being, and from the being to the universal, cosmic, eternal life. The head is the farthest point from your real life. But your whole training goes against your real life. That is dividing you.You will have to choose. If you choose your head, you choose a miserable life, superficial, meaningless, anxiety-ridden. But if you choose to get out of the head, then be more meditative, be more feelingful, be more of the heart, be more sensitive.Whenever I look at Pankaja, I feel a deep sympathy for her. She is completely enclosed in the head. She has forgotten the way to the heart. She is a woman, hence it is not very difficult to find the heart again; for a man it is a little more difficult. He is naturally head-oriented. The woman is heart-oriented. So what Pankaja is suffering from is headache; she has to come down to the heartache, which is another name for love. It has been the same situation for many years. It is time for you, Pankaja, to decide. Either forget me completely and be at ease with your head and your superficial life, or take the risk. Sannyas is nothing but risking the known for the unknown, risking the false for the real. But you don’t know the real; you know only the false. And the trouble is, unless you drop the false you will not be able to see the real.Hence a strange thing has been happening in the East of which the West is unaware, and that is a totally new dimension to love which we call trust, shraddha. If you can look into my eyes, trust me when I say you have a real self. Don’t be worried about risking the false. Of course, it has to be only on the grounds of trust. I cannot do anything to make you see the real, unless you drop the false.You can drop the false only if you trust my word or you trust my eyes or you trust my presence. It is not belief. Belief is always in a certain doctrine, philosophy. Trust is personal, intimate, the highest quality of love, what the Zen people call the great love affair.If you feel that what I am saying is not just borrowed knowledge but my own experience, then take a jump. It is not a big jump. If you can manage to take a jump from the real to the false, just think: from the false to the real is a very small jump. You are only losing that which you don’t have, and you are going to get that which is your reality.Osho,This morning I suddenly realized that there is nothing interesting in women. Is it true?I was expecting at least a dozen Germans to get angry at me – just the Germans. I love Germans. The majority of my sannyasins are Germans. And even the German government is afraid of me, knowing perfectly well that I have a certain grip on the German youth. It is not without reason that they have passed a law in their parliament that I cannot enter Germany, though I have never asked to enter. Not only that, I cannot land my jet on any German airport for refueling. Such great fear and such a brave race!But I was waiting, and I was absolutely right. Not a single person from any other country – and people from almost every country of the world are present here – but only Germans were very angry. I had said, “I don’t see anything nice in man.” This was certainly said to provoke the Germans, and they got caught. They are simple fellows in a way; they could not see the device.Veet Prayas is a German. I have chosen two representatives from twelve letters. Prayas is asking, “This morning I suddenly realized that there is nothing interesting in women.” This is his reaction.Now I would like all the women in the ashram to boycott Prayas completely for seven days. Wherever any woman sees him, say to him, “Ooh-la-la,” not more than that. And within seven days he will start seeing everyone as beautiful, even in the ugliest woman. It will take seven days; for other people it would not take that much time.Seeing the situation, one of my doctors, Swami Devageet, did a great research, finding out what is nice in man. He became so influenced that finally he decided he wants to change his name from Swami Devageet to Ma Devageet. This is his research – now I don’t know how to say it, whether to say he or she. At least in the beginning, I shall start with he, unless he declares that he has changed to Ma.He is saying, “I have researched deeply into the knotty problem of men’s good points. It was not easy, but certain attributes have come to light. Men, it seems, are the best at:putting out the garbage,frightening small children,piddling on the toilet seat,carrying suitcases,putting hair in the bathroom sink,making babies,making spaghetti,shouting at rickshaw drivers,leaving dirty underwear in the bedroom,snoring in bed,fancying everybody’s woman except their own,grossing out people at breakfast time,putting dirty footprints on the clean sheets,falling asleep in the middle of lovemaking,being unresponsive to any emotional situation,providing the main topic for gossip,giving women someone to henpeck,paying the rent,fixing things which are always worse afterward,emptying the fridge at midnight,breaking the best china,leaving the bed unmade,leaving the kitchen sink clogged with food.But, most of all, men are the biggest pricks in the whole of humanity.”The other sample that I have chosen, says:Osho,I want to defend my male race. Existence gave man the capacity to fight against existence, to swim against the stream, to be a doer, to say no. Hearing you and your therapists, I tried to drop this and this effort to drop only gave me misery. I don't believe existence made me a man in order to become female without ever blossoming into the full potential of my maleness, of my mind. Please comment.Swami Antar Mario, Germany is the only land in the whole world which is called the fatherland. Every other land is called the motherland. I said I love the German people, except for a small inheritance that they have been carrying for centuries – a male chauvinist idea of themselves. It has created two world wars and it may create the third. It is not new that Mario is saying, “I have to defend my male race.” This very idea of defending and the idea that he has to fight existence, he has to be a doer, he has to say no. Here, trying to drop effort, he has not been able to. He only became more miserable.What kind of man are you, if you cannot drop effort? How are you going to defend the male race? Many women are dropping effort, and you cannot drop effort. You are defeated already. And why this fear of let-go, of going with the current? Why this fear of saying yes to existence? – just an ego trip.It is one of the ugliest things in anyone, because it is the wall that prevents you from seeing beyond yourself. You are surrounded by a prison of your own and you cannot see beyond the walls, you don’t know the sky, you don’t know the stars, you don’t know that this whole existence is in a tremendous let-go. Everything is effortlessly moving. The trees are growing. Do you think they are making any effort to grow? The stars are moving with tremendous speed. Do you think they are making any effort? You are breathing. Do you think it is something to do with your effort? Your heart is beating. Is it something to do with you and your doing? If it was dependent on your doing, in sleep you would forget to breathe, you would forget the heart, whether it is beating or not. And then no chance… In the morning you would not even be able to remember that in the middle of the night you forgot to breathe. Once finished, finished. The whole of existence is in a tremendous let-go.Adolf Hitler exploited the German race only because of this male chauvinistic mind. He himself was not a giant intellectual. He was a retarded schizophrenic, a psychologically sick person, but he impressed the whole German race with all kinds of stupid ideas. For example: Germany was not ruling over all the world because of the Jews. It is as absurd as to say that Germany is not ruling over all the world because of the bicycles. Unless we destroy bicycles, there is no chance for Germany to rule over the world. What have the poor Jews done? But he was convincing because he shouted loudly.He organized big rallies which proved to people that they must be wrong, he must be right; he killed more people than anybody else in the whole history of man. But he is not responsible alone: every German is responsible. You supported him; you supported the very idea that you have to fight with existence to prove your manliness. You have to say no. But remember: a person who cannot say yes will always remain insane.No belongs to death, yes belongs to life. Life is yes-saying. The deeper your yes, the deeper your surrender to existence, the greater is your bliss. Otherwise you become absolutely mechanical, like robots. And the very idea that you are special above any other race is simply nonsense. If Germany can drop this male chauvinistic attitude, can accept women as equal to men, not only will Germany be at ease and in peace, it will help the whole world to remain in peace. War can be dropped. Instead of war, more love, more friendliness, more joy can become our daily experience.Helmut’s new car has just been delivered. So he offers to give a lift to some of his friends who are going to a wedding. Unfortunately he has not even been told how to start the car, so after he has finished bluffing for a while, he confesses his ignorance.The others are also German, not too smart either, but luckily at least Herman can read. He reads out from a button near the steering wheel: “Push to start.” So they all get out to push.A German traveling salesman has been on the road for weeks, when he sees a sign which reads: “Mother Murphy’s House of Pleasure, straight ahead.” He drives on a mile and the sign is repeated. This goes on every mile, until he reaches the last sign, which says: “You are here! This is it! Mother Murphy’s House of Pleasure!”He is feeling pretty horny, so he pulls into the drive, where all he finds is a little wooden shack, but he decides to try it out.He walks in and finds a little old lady sitting in a rocking chair. He apologizes and is beginning to leave, when she says, “You are in the right place, sonny. This is Mother Murphy’s. Just give me fifty bucks and go through that door over there.”So he goes through the door and finds himself in the backyard, and the door locks behind him, so he can’t get back in. He is really angry, and looking around, he sees a small sign in the next field, so he goes over to read it. It says: “You have just been screwed by Mother Murphy.”At least here, drop your German-ness; that is your disease. And it is not only about you. The Indians have to drop their Indian-ness; that is their disease. And the Italians have to drop their Italian-ness; that is their disease.Nations are just man-made boundaries; races are stupid discriminations; religions are man-manufactured – and they are all dividing man against man. Sannyas is an effort to bring a new world into existence, where nobody is a German and nobody is an Indian and nobody is a Japanese; where nobody thinks that he is superior, where nobody thinks that women are inferior and slaves, where equality and equal opportunity to grow is simply accepted as natural.I did not say that man has nothing to offer. He has much to offer. In fact all science, all technology is going to be man’s offering to existence, but man has to remember that the works of the intellect and reason are not his highest creations. The higher creations come from the heart, in songs, in music, in poetry, in dances. Unless you can celebrate, what use is all scientific progress? And without a woman there is no celebration.You put a hundred men together and they will all be serious. Just bring one woman in and immediately all their eyes start sparkling, they become interested. Life starts being juicy; something is going to happen. Man without woman is half, and woman without man is half. They are part of one whole.I did not say anything in favor of men because men have done so much wrong to women that now it is better not to say anything about men’s talents and genius. It is better to bring out the women’s genius and talents. It is simply a compensation. I know there are a few things which only men can do, and there are a few things which only women can do. That makes life more beautiful and more attractive. Between these two polarities, life becomes a magnetic pull. Between these two polarities of man and woman, many mysteries happen. The whole romance of life, the whole poetry of life, is because of the polarity of man and woman.But man has ruled over women for millennia. He has been given every opportunity and chance and woman has been repressed continuously, has been crippled. She has not been allowed to compete shoulder to shoulder with man in life. That’s why we don’t know how many Gautam Buddhas on the women’s side did not get the opportunity to blossom. We don’t know how many Albert Einsteins have simply been denied any possibility for growth.It is a very strange thing that even dimensions like poetry, music, dance are dominated by men. The greatest dancers in the world have been men, not women. In fact, women should have been ahead of any male dancer. But one needs opportunity. One needs education, one needs training. If you bar the whole of womankind from education, training, discipline, you are making the whole society and the whole world poor, unnecessarily poor. My emphasis is to give respect to women – and equality is not against men. It is a world which belongs to you both and you both have to be together to make it as beautiful and as divine as possible.Man alone – look at your question, Mario – has been creating only wars. In three thousand years, five thousand wars. Is life just to fight? Is life just to kill, massacre, rape? Your whole history is full of murder and you call those murderers your great men. Alexander the Great… And you don’t see that small murderers are being jailed, sentenced to death, but big murderers become your heroes. It is because the woman has been completely cut off from contributing anything to life; otherwise there would not have been so many wars.No woman is interested in war, it is simply against the feminine nature. She is interested in love, she is interested in a beautiful house, she is interested in a beautiful garden around the house. She is interested in small things, but those small things make life worth living. She is not interested in creating atomic weapons, nuclear missiles. She cannot understand what man goes on doing. Is he insane or something?Half of humanity is dying of starvation and the politicians who are all men and the generals who are all men go on piling up nuclear weapons. They have already more than they need – seven hundred times more than they need to destroy this whole world. All that is living on the earth – trees, birds, animals, human beings, anything that is living – we have already seven hundred times more than enough material to destroy it. And still they go on piling it up. Do you think this is sanity when half the human race is dying of starvation?This is happening because man alone has been contributing to existence. He has not the compassion of a woman; he has only the hardness of a man. He does not allow the softness of woman to influence world affairs. We need a very balanced life, in which the man and the woman contribute equally. Life will be more peaceful, more lovable, more joyous. It will become a tremendous celebration. And in that celebration, my hope is we will be able to go beyond the ordinary, mundane enjoyment into the cosmic bliss, into sat-chit-anand – into truth, into consciousness, into bliss.